Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain

LIBERT Y AND AUTHORIT Y IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN This page intentionally left blank Liberty and Authority in Victorian ...

Author: Peter Mandler

40 downloads 1139 Views 931KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

LIBERT Y AND AUTHORIT Y IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

This page intentionally left blank

Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain Edited by

PETER MANDLER

1

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © The Several Contributors 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–927133–X

978–0–19–927133–7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of Colin Matthew

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements The origins of this book lie in the conference, ‘Locating the Victorians’, organized by the Science Museum and held 12–15 July 2001 as part of the South Kensington extravaganza marking the 150th anniversary of the Great Exhibition and the 100th of the death of Queen Victoria. The purpose of that conference was to assess the ‘state of play’ in our understanding of the Victorians after the interval of a century. Revealingly, a call for proposals to organize the conference into thematic ‘strands’ was met with a rush of creative proposals on matters roughly ‘cultural’, while politics and the economy elicited few or no proposals. Accordingly members of the conference steering group were drafted to organize strands in these under-served areas, and one result was mine on ‘Liberty and authority’. Although I didn’t respond so warmly at the time, I am now happy to thank Robert Bud (impresario of the whole enterprise) and the other members of the steering group for steering me in that direction. Like the other strands, ‘Liberty and authority’ aspired to be summative and interdisciplinary, to link disciplines and methodologies in order to show as clearly and as broadly as we could where academic thinking had got on our subject matter. I like to think that the sessions and the resulting chapters displayed that spirit of open-minded goodwill, and even (or do I imagine this?) a little yearning for better communication across some well-established disciplinary and methodological divides. I am grateful to Susan Pedersen, Peter Stansky, the late Josef Altholz, and Pat Thane for acting as chairs and commentators for the 2001 sessions. Astonishingly, all of the paper-givers in those sessions agreed to contribute to a book version and have generally produced their ﬁnal products in a timely and collegial fashion; editors who complain about the difﬁculties of engineering jointly-authored volumes evidently don’t have access to the calibre of contributor that I have had. Two new chapters were commissioned to ﬁll gaps that became apparent when the original papers were discussed during and after the conference, and their authors were just as responsive. Thanks to Ruth Parr and Anne Gelling at Oxford University Press for eliciting some very constructive readers’ reports—particularly helpful to me in identifying some further gaps for ﬁlling, and incompatibilities for reconciling, in the

viii

Acknowledgements

introduction—and then in keeping faith with the project. Dorothy McCarthy did a splendidly tactful editing job in the best traditions of Oxford University Press. A ﬁnal thanks is rendered in the dedication, to one who has been much in evidence in spirit throughout, but still sorely missed.

Contents Notes on Contributors

x

1. Introduction: State and Society in Victorian Britain Peter Mandler

1

THE STATE 2. The Powers of the Victorian State Philip Harling 3. The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective Peter Baldwin

25 51

LIBERTIES 4. Liberalism and Liberty J. P. Parry 5. Radicalism and Liberty E. F. Biagini 6. Women and Liberty Helen Rogers

71 101 125

AUTHORITIES 7. The Authority of the Law Margot C. Finn 8. The Authority of the Church Arthur Burns

159 179

DISCIPLINES 9. Market Disciplines Paul Johnson 10. Moral Disciplines Boyd Hilton

203

Index

247

224

Notes on Contributors Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (1990), Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (1999), and Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (2005). He is currently working on a comparative study of privacy. Eugenio Biagini is Reader in Modern British and European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College. He is the author of Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (1992) and Gladstone (2000), and editor (with A. J. Reid) of Currents of Radicalism (1991) and Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (1996). He is currently completing a book on Ireland and the British Nation: Populism, Democracy and the Home Rule Crisis, 1868–1914. Arthur Burns is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at King’s College London. He is the author of The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c. 1800–1870 (1999) and has published both articles and critical editions concerned with the history of the nineteenth-century Church of England. He co-edited Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (2003) and St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (2004). He is currently one of the directors of The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835. Margot C. Finn is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. She is the author of After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (1993, paperback 2002) and The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (2003). Editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1997–2001, she is co-editor, with Keith Wrightson and Colin Jones, of the monograph series ‘Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories’. Philip Harling is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (1996), The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (2001), and articles on modern British State formation and nineteenth-century political journalism, romanticism and radicalism. Boyd Hilton is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is author of Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (1977), The Age of Atonement: The Social and Economic Impact of Evangelicalism ca. 1795–1865

Notes on Contributors

xi

(1988), and A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846, New Oxford History of England (2006). Paul Johnson is Professor of Economic History and Deputy Director of the London School of Economics. He is the author of Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (1985), editor of Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (1994), and co-editor with Roderick Floud of The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, 3 vols. (2004). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between law and the market in Victorian England. Peter Mandler is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is the author of Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (1990), The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), History and National Life (2002), and The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (2006). J. P. Parry is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is the author of Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (1986) and The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (1993). His third book, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886, should appear in 2006. Helen Rogers is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (2000) and co-editor with Trev Broughton of Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (2007). Her current research is on domestic ideology and the lives and writings of working-class women.

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction: State and Society in Victorian Britain Peter Mandler

‘No industrial economy can have existed in which the State played a smaller role than that of the United Kingdom in the 1860s.’¹ This often quoted dictum by the great biographer of Gladstone, Colin Matthew, represents one popular conception of the Victorian period, as the great age of laissez-faire, an age of undiluted sink-or-swim individualism, the highpoint or possibly the only point of ‘pure’ capitalism in the modern West. Behind even Matthew’s deceptively straightforward dictum lies a much more complicated picture. In Matthew’s and Gladstone’s view, the freedom of the economy was underpinned by an extensive network of disciplines, of centres of authority, and indeed of explicit State interventions in society.² In this book, we survey and evaluate that full range of disciplines, authorities, and interventions that made a ‘laissez-faire’ State possible in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. To do this, we need to consider the very complex relationship that even a self-avowedly liberal, ‘hands-off ’ State bears to civil society, that network of associations and institutions by which society is organized outside the State. On one level, addressed in the chapter by Philip Harling, we can measure the size, scope, and reach of the State, at both central and local levels, by calculating its income and expenditure, counting its employees, assessing the ambitions of its legislation, and noting what it purports to do and not to do. As Peter Baldwin argues in his comparative chapter, however, the ‘strength’ of a State cannot be measured simply by viewing either its nominal size—how many ‘battalions’ it has—or its stated ¹ H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 169. ² Cf. ibid. 114–20.

2

Peter Mandler

aspirations. Some States erect big apparatuses with bold ambitions because they have low conﬁdence in their ability actually to effect their programmes. The effectiveness of the State has therefore to be considered additionally. How efﬁcient are its agencies? How much can it rely on its citizenry? Do the citizens ‘trust’ the State, do they respond easily and readily to its diktats, or do they resist and subvert, requiring constant surveillance, policing, and coercion? A State may appear highly interventionist, even authoritarian, precisely because it has to huff and puff to get its people to pay attention to its simplest demands, or indeed because it is afraid of its people: the State may need to do a lot just to make its people into citizens. Conversely, some States may appear ‘weak’ in personnel, funds, or programme—possibly like the liberal Victorian State—because their civil societies are stable, compliant, and well aligned with their goals. This might be more likely in a democracy, where consent is well organized, but it might be possible in a pre-democratic State—as Britain was effectively for the whole of the nineteenth century—if the State (and the political classes) and civil society (the whole of society) are spontaneously or by design travelling along convergent paths. As Boyd Hilton argues in his chapter on ‘moral disciplines’, there was a widespread feeling across the classes in 1850s Britain that something like this convergence had taken place; the resulting optimism about the ‘natural order’ of society made it easier for the privileged classes to adopt an ofﬁcial ideology of liberalism, whereby the State was no longer expected to play so much of a disciplinary or improving role. This convergence may have been temporary; it may have been artiﬁcial; but it was real. As Jonathan Parry suggests in his survey of the liberalism of the governing classes, from ‘above’ it rested on a qualiﬁed or measured conﬁdence that deep-seated national characteristics and widespread public adherence to religious canons and political traditions of right behaviour meant that social discipline and even improvement could be fostered in libertarian conditions. Many working men came to the same conclusion, Eugenio Biagini concludes in his chapter on radicalism, based on their profound political and religious conﬁdence in their own powers of selfcontrol. This sense of equilibrium may have been short-lived. Parry argues that even in the 1850s it relied on a propagandistic sleight-ofhand, a carefully cultivated perception of British superiority to the clumsy interventionist and authoritarian regimes of the Continent. As Britain became more democratic after the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, the State actually became more the focus of a set of competing demands,

Introduction

3

and the boundary between State and civil society was once again more problematic. This was particularly so in Ireland, where the legitimacy of the Union had long been contested by a growing proportion of the politically active population. One radical response, championed by the Gladstonians (especially after 1886), was to re-form the State by devolving power. The alternative, championed by Chamberlain, was to upgrade the role and purposes of the central government to address the social problems raised by the ‘Irish Question’ (and, arguably, elsewhere in the United Kingdom). Baldwin points out also that States can be ‘lumpy’: they can adopt sweeping powers in one area, very limited powers in another, or, most clearly of all, they can adopt very different stances towards different agents. For reasons that may have nothing to do with the broader political culture, but emanate from the speciﬁc demands of the task at hand, a State may be interventionist where otherwise it might be inclined to stand aloof. As Baldwin has argued elsewhere, for example, States’ propensity to erect universal welfare systems or to infringe citizens’ liberties to control infectious disease may bear little relationship to their general ‘political culture’, but derive more directly from the particular requirements of those two very different problems: in the ﬁrst instance, how best to pool risk (which in part depends on the occupational structure of the economy), in the second, how best to stamp out disease (which in part depends on the nature of the exposure).³ A traditional way of recognizing this lumpiness in the British case is to assert the greater degree of interventionism possible in local than in central government. At all levels, however, a liberal State like Britain’s may trumpet liberty for its citizens while adopting a crushingly paternal or repressive attitude to those excluded from the citizenry for one reason or another. Helen Rogers’s chapter addresses the largest category of such excluded citizens—women. As Biagini points out, less frequently recognized categories include paupers, young men, and the mobile, all of whom were excluded from the franchise and to some extent also subject to more irksome regulation. (Biagini also considers the equivocal Liberal and Radical relationship to other groups of non-citizens or people who ³ Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990); id., Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999); and, for an overview of the theoretical and methodological implications, id., ‘Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy Perspective’, Journal of Policy History, 17 (2005), 12–33; see also S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting, eds., The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), for perspectives on the ‘lumpiness’ of the British State in the twentieth century.

4

Peter Mandler

did not behave like ‘free-born Englishmen’—‘foreigners’, resident aliens, imperial dependants, or ‘irrational’ citizens like the Land Leaguers in Ireland.) The great test case of the right of the State to regulate the most intimate details of the lives of non-citizens was the Contagious Diseases Acts, draconian measures aimed against venereal disease which subjected their female targets to highly authoritarian control, which were both enacted and repealed in the high Victorian decades. As Rogers shows, the intervention represented by the enactment alerted women to the limits of their liberty, leading to new levels of attention amongst women to the State and, paradoxically, both to repeal of the Acts and a new tranche of interventions as women’s voluntary associations meshed more closely with the State. Nor does simply tracing the boundary between State and society— how ‘big’ is the State, how effective is it, who is and is not deemed ‘free’ by it—exhaust the interdependence between them. ‘Freedom’ in civil society is itself constructed through a set of relationships and deﬁnitions of what individual actions are tolerable or even conceivable. These relationships and deﬁnitions are indirectly determined by the State through a number of ‘para-statal’ organizations that have no ofﬁcial or only quasi-ofﬁcial standing. In Victorian Britain, political institutions exercised authority not only through their direct application but also through the cultural prestige attaching (including among non-citizens) to the ill-deﬁned ‘English Constitution’. The arm of the law was longer still. Since at least the early modern period, the common law in particular had engaged the participation and structured the lives of the great majority of the population who were then formally excluded from ‘higher’ organs of the State.⁴ As Margot Finn’s chapter shows, the authority of the law was enhanced in the Victorian period by a new range of civil and criminal institutions which supported the limited State in its efforts to keep pace with a rapidly diversifying society, but which were also drawn upon by citizens in order to make sense of the brave new world of ‘individualistic’ contract. In this sphere, too, who counted as a citizen both mattered and needed clariﬁcation; women both suffered and beneﬁted, subjects of the Empire likewise. Another traditional para-statal authority, the State Church, surveyed in Arthur Burns’s chapter, was less well placed, its position challenged in our period by social changes that threatened the comprehensiveness of its parochial system and by political changes that weakened its ties to the State (and, in the case of Ireland, broke those ties). ⁴ Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000).

Introduction

5

Yet in England, at least, the Church retained extensive resources and considerable cultural authority which worked to the State’s advantage without always appearing to emanate from it. As Biagini demonstrates in his chapter on radicalism, even those Churches which rejected outright the authority of the State Church— Nonconformist Churches in England, for example, or the increasingly ﬁssiparous splinters from the ofﬁcial Church of Scotland—helped to structure civil society in a way that harmonized with the stance of the liberal State. This reminds us, ﬁnally, that less tangible ‘disciplines’ operate in civil society—again, helping to deﬁne what it means to be ‘free’—in ways that also raise questions about the relationship between State and society and return us to the thorny issue of why State and society appear so well aligned in Victorian Britain. Does civil society set the State’s priorities, or vice versa, or both? In his chapter on market disciplines, Paul Johnson re-states the Victorian elites’ ideological commitment to free markets—even when to all appearances, as in the Irish Famine, they were manifestly failing—while at the same suggesting how the very terms on which free markets operate are themselves constructed by para-statal activity (especially through the law) and by a constant and unequal process of bargaining between economic actors. In a companion chapter on ‘moral disciplines’, Boyd Hilton shows how the same elites’ conﬁdence in free markets was built up by seeing them as Providentially-designed mechanisms for the cultivation of true morality—a conﬁdence that applied equally before the 1850s, when the operation of free markets appeared cruel and punitive, and after the 1850s, when the operation of free markets appeared more ameliorative and progressive. To these disciplines one could add a set of still less palpable social disciplines, which constrained individual behaviour and set limits to anarchy that helped to sustain the laissez-faire State—which indeed deﬁned what it meant to be a ‘free’ individual in the mid-nineteenth century— about which more below. Given the complexity and subtlety of the interactions between State and society, it is not surprising that at different points over the last century the Victorian State has been hailed (or condemned) as one of the least interventionist and one of the most authoritarian of political regimes, Victorian society as one of the freest and most constrained. What follows in the remainder of this introduction is a brief account of these historiographical twists and turns from the Victorians’ own self-estimates to the present day, and then some attempt to show how, in the widest context, these divergent estimates all capture some share of a complex truth, which the subsequent chapters then elaborate upon from their own variety of starting points.

6

Peter Mandler

I The Victorians argued vigorously over the proper scope of their government (as about most other topics), and at the end of the nineteenth century their immediate successors were already arguing over the right way to characterize the period then passing. Historical ‘debate’ over the boundary between State and society in the nineteenth century is often taken to have begun with A. V. Dicey’s account of the contemporary decline of the laissez-faire State in his Lectures upon the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (1905).⁵ Dicey uncontroversially identiﬁed the period between 1830 and 1880 as the age of ‘individualism’ and of ‘laissez-faire’ (though he also identiﬁed it as the age of ‘Benthamism’, confusingly, as the Benthamites appeared to contemporaries and also to posterity as the Victorians most likely to restrict individualism by State intervention);⁶ more controversially, he denounced almost everything that had happened since 1880 as a decline from that blessed state of affairs. For New Liberals and social democrats who had been the driving force behind those recent changes, the mid-Victorian decades were also seen as the age of individualism, but their characterization was a gloomy, even apocalyptic one. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, then the most inﬂuential historians of the recent past, wrote of a Victorian society condemned by the ‘Curse of Midas’ to a harshly individualistic materialism, of a State in which the traditional governing classes had abdicated their responsibility and no new ethos of collective responsibility had yet developed.⁷ This was polemical history aimed at awakening the conscience of contemporaries. However, at the same time, Fabian socialists—less romantic, more practical, already at work building up the bureaucracies of social reform ⁵ Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 55, calls Dicey’s book not only the ‘ﬁrst in the ﬁeld’ but the book which (to that date) had ‘dominated it ever since’; see also Harold Perkin, ‘Individualism Versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A False Antithesis’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1977–8), 105–18, on Dicey’s role in the creation of an individualist ‘myth’. ⁶ As famously discussed by J. Bartlet Brebner, ‘Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Economic History, 8 (1948), suppl., 59–73, and more extensively still by Henry Parris, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 17–37. ⁷ ‘The Curse of Midas’ is a chapter heading in J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (London, 1925): see the discussion in Stefan Collini, ‘The Literary Critic and the Village Labourer: “Culture” in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 14 (2004), 93–116.

Introduction

7

at least in local if not yet very widely in central government—were keener to ﬁnd precedents and predecessors for their cause. It was this Fabian impulse that was responsible for a growing tendency to heroize the Benthamites as Victorian architects of the welfare state—perhaps lonely, perhaps embattled by the forces of selﬁshness and conservatism, but still laying legislative and bureaucratic foundations on which the Fabians were themselves building. The apotheosis of the Benthamites came in 1952 with S. E. Finer’s magniﬁcent biography of Edwin Chadwick, portrayed here as the central inspiration of factory regulation, the modernization of the poor law system (itself laying the basis for national education and health provision), and the public health movement.⁸ This interest in locating the ‘Victorian origins of the British welfare state’⁹ became more intense and widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, when ‘the welfare state’ appeared in full bloom and was taken (for better or worse) as a characteristically British invention. Scholars outside of as much as inside Britain—notably in the United States and Australia—were keen to study Victorian attitudes to State intervention to see how and why the abandonment of laissez-faire capitalism, apparently complete in their own time, had begun in the last century. It was at this point—especially from the late 1950s—that Dicey’s mythologization of an ‘Age of Individualism’ came under scrutiny. A number of linked debates ensued, often but not always polarized between political left and right.¹⁰ Was ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ so bleak and unsparing in its impact upon the poor and the vulnerable that even contemporaries recognized the need to rein it in? This was one question raised by the ‘standard of living controversy’ that disputed the trends of wages, prices, and ‘quality of life’ in Britain to the mid-nineteenth century.¹¹ Was ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ ever so pure as to set its face against State intervention of all kinds, or did even its ideological architects, the classical political economists, set out a systematic theory of ⁸ S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1952); a real Fabian hagiography can be found in Maurice Marston, Sir Edwin Chadwick (London, 1925). ⁹ The title of an inﬂuential book of 1960 by David Roberts. Note also Maurice Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State (London, 1961) and Ursula R. Q. Henriques, Before the Welfare State (London, 1979). ¹⁰ The connections between these linked debates are neatly outlined in Arthur J. Taylor, Laissez-Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1972). ¹¹ Key contributions reprinted in Arthur J. Taylor, ed., The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1975). The ﬁrst peak of debate came between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s in the interventions of T. S. Ashton, E. J. Hobsbawm, R. M. Hartwell, and E. P. Thompson. And for an explicit connection to the ‘Victorian origins of the welfare state’, see C. G. Hanson, ‘Welfare before the Welfare State’, in Institute of Economic Affairs, The Long Debate on Poverty (London, 1972).

8

Peter Mandler

the legitimate role of the State?¹² Were the interventions of the early nineteenth century really the ‘Victorian origins’ of the later welfare state at all, or were they, as some latter-day admirers of Edmund Burke’s conservatism argued, paternalistic rather than socialistic?¹³ The most enduring of these debates was that triggered by Oliver MacDonagh’s 1958 article, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’.¹⁴ MacDonagh’s concern was not so much with the extent of State intervention—which he did not dispute (indeed, he spoke of a ‘catastrophic and very general collapse of political individualism’ by the end of the century)—as with the reasons for it. His principal target was those earlier Fabian hagiographies (and Dicey’s misapprehension) which attributed so much weight (and credit) to the Benthamites. This motive force he replaced with a more structural ‘model’ of government growth, of which the Fabians were the outcome rather than the driver: in the nineteenth century, social problems arose, were identiﬁed, reached a level of ‘intolerability’, had bureaucracies established to treat them, and only at the end of the process did the bureaucrats take on an initiating power of their own, producing ‘a dynamic role for government within society, a new sort of state’.¹⁵ The ensuing literature—‘the Victorian revolution in government’ debate— was not conﬁned to addressing the role of the Benthamites. It took up MacDonagh’s challenge to explore both the motive force behind ‘government growth’ and the pattern of State intervention itself. A wide range of forces were cited: the role of ideas (including Benthamism but also ‘humanitarianism’, different varieties of liberalism, and, again, paternalism), ‘pressure from without’ (this could take on a quasi-Marxist form seeing State intervention as a consequence of the class struggle), a process of ‘modernization’ or ‘civilization’, a process of State formation either normal or abnormal in European context.¹⁶ ¹² Key contributions reprinted in A. W. Coats, ed., The Classical Economists and Economic Policy (London, 1971). ¹³ An argument assessed by David Roberts, ‘Tory Paternalism and Social Reform in Early Victorian England’, American Historical Review, 63 (1958), 323–37. ¹⁴ This and other key contributions reprinted in Peter Stansky, ed., The Victorian Revolution: Government and Society in Victorian Britain (New York, 1973); see also the symposium on the debate, Gillian Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of NineteenthCentury Government (London, 1972). ¹⁵ MacDonagh, ‘Nineteenth-Century Revolution’, 61, 62. ¹⁶ In addition to the works collected in the Stansky and Sutherland volumes cited above, important interventions include Jenifer Hart, ‘Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History’, Past and Present, 31 (1965), 39–61; William C. Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes Toward State Intervention

Introduction

9

By the late 1970s, this debate was running into the sand—as many debates do, not because it was resolved, but out of incoherence or inanition. So wide a range of motive forces had been cited that they could not all any longer be contained within a single model or even a single debate. The ‘Victorian revolution in government’ debate had become a debate about the nature of the Victorians, or even the nature of government. More importantly, historians had moved on. The motive forces of the ‘Victorian revolution’ debate had run down. The welfare state no longer looked to be the subject of modern history, and its Victorian origins seemed less crucial. In the 1980s, to the contrary, the advent of neo-liberalism in both the United States and Britain renewed historians’ interest in laissez-faire.¹⁷ This had two main historiographical consequences, very different in character. One was a wave of writing in the ﬁeld of political history that substantially developed our understanding of the intellectual roots and character of liberalism. Liberalism had, naturally, always been a subject of interest to nineteenth-century political historians, but through the 1970s most political history had focused on particular politicians, governments, and legislative programmes, not on enquiries into the nature of liberalism. The new political history of liberalism took a number of different forms. One fertile line, pursued by Boyd Hilton, re-examined ‘liberal Toryism’ from Pitt the Younger through Liverpool and Peel to Gladstone in order to explain when and how ‘Conservatives’ came to embrace laissez-faire positions in economic and social policy. Hilton put a good deal of weight on the inﬂuence of evangelicalism, which persuaded many Conservatives that the ‘natural order’ of God’s Providence would discipline the weak and punish the vicious without the need for many artiﬁcial (for example, governmental) interventions. Hilton’s view that this pessimistic interpretation of laissez-faire began to yield in the 1850s to a more optimistic 1833–1848 (Newton Abbot, 1971); Patricia Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without in Victorian England (London, 1974); Paul Richards, ‘The State and Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Past & Present, 83 (1979), 91–115; David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, 1979); Peter Marsh, ed., The Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, 1979); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1986). ¹⁷ This inﬂuence is not always obvious (or present), but sometimes it announces itself: G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), vii. 274; and see ‘Historians take issue with Mrs. Thatcher’, a special supplement to the New Statesman, 23 May 1983, especially Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Poor Laws and Market Forces’, pp. x–xiii, for a very alert contemporary yoking of historical scholarship (notably the work of Boyd Hilton) to the Thatcher phenomenon.

10

Peter Mandler

position, further elaborated in his chapter here, dovetailed nicely with Colin Matthew’s contemporaneous writing on Gladstone’s transition from Peelite Conservatism to Liberalism.¹⁸ Another, related current re-examined the Whig contribution to Victorian Liberalism, ﬁnding in various ways a more interventionist spirit, either in the form discussed by Jonathan Parry in his chapter here—a concern for the ‘character’ of the people, to be cultivated often indirectly by governing elites through the inﬂuence of the churches, education, and exemplary leadership—or more directly through the principled or pragmatic embrace of programmes of social and economic regulation.¹⁹ Both of these currents put a great deal of emphasis on the role of Protestant thought not only as the midwife of Victorian liberalism but also as the common language of politics in a pre-democratic age. A third body of literature, reﬂected here in Eugenio Biagini’s chapter, emphasized the wide popular support for laissez-faire policies beyond the governing classes, as evidenced in radical thought and agitation across the whole of the nineteenth century.²⁰ Free trade and laissez-faire have thus become less closely identiﬁed with the politics of a particular class and more clearly perceived as tied up with broad, crossclass features of a liberal culture in the nineteenth century, which again also intertwine with varieties of Protestant thought.²¹ This deepened appreciation of the character and broad popularity of the ideology of laissez-faire ¹⁸ Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977); id., ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 585–614; id., The Age of Atonement: The Inﬂuence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988); Matthew’s interpretation emerged in his introductions to successive volumes of the Gladstone Diaries published from 1974, the ﬁrst tranche of which were then knit together into Gladstone 1809–1874, published in 1986. ¹⁹ J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986); id., The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993); Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987); Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1990); H. Stuart Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke, 2000). ²⁰ E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992); Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995); Philip Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996). An important inspiration for much of this literature was an early essay by Gareth Stedman Jones, originally appearing as ‘The Language of Chartism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds., The Chartist Experience (London, 1982), 3–58, and then reworked as ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in a volume of Stedman Jones’s essays, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983). ²¹ See e.g. the emphasis on the broad audience for ‘entrepreneurial values’ in G. R. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993), taken further in his Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), or on the

Introduction

11

in the nineteenth century was further sharpened by yet another body of literature, inspired by John Brewer’s work, which highlighted how ambitious and wide-ranging the eighteenth-century State had been, climaxing in the Napoleonic Wars, the reaction against which could be seen thoroughly to colour nineteenth-century attitudes to an overmighty State.²² Most but not all of this political history drew attention to the limits to State action and to the wide popular support, spanning classes and political ideologies, underpinning a limited State in the nineteenth century.²³ But the other main historiographical contribution of the last few decades has adopted an almost diametrically opposite analysis. This is the ‘postmodern’ analysis inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s wide-ranging and philosophical œuvre touched on every aspect of life and thought, but had two main points of relevance here. First, he raised awareness of the overtly disciplinary structures of the modern State, particularly in his writing on the history of the prison and of the criminalization of certain sorts of sexual behaviour. Second, more relevantly still, Foucault suggested that the liberal State—or, more broadly, ‘power’— works most radically and effectively not through such overt disciplinary structures but through ‘governmentality’, by deﬁning approved behaviours (or ‘norms’) in such a way that people are induced to adopt them ‘voluntarily’, without even noticing the operation of power. Thus there are ‘technologies of power’ in the modern State but also ‘technologies of the self ’.²⁴ cultural authority of free trade in Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), or on the growth of trust in the State in Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001). ²² For Brewer’s work, see especially The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), and the symposium on it in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1993); for nineteenth-century reactions, Philip Harling and Peter Mandler, ‘From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), 44–70; Daunton, Trusting Leviathan. ²³ Helpful syntheses that sum up this point of view include Pat Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1990), iii. 1–62; Philip Harling, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge, 2001). For a nice historiographical reﬂection on and critique of this literature, see Susan Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2002). ²⁴ The key texts are Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, Ideology & Consciousness, 6 (Autumn 1979), 5–21, and ‘Technologies of the Self ’ in L. H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, Mass., 1988), esp. 18; but more important than the texts are the Foucauldians’ adaptations of them both in ‘theory’ and in historiography: a useful survey is Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999), esp. ch. 6.

12

Peter Mandler

Much of Foucault’s writing (and much more of his followers’ writing) is opaque, his theses, while provocative, hard either to substantiate or disprove, their chronology vague or slippery. However, his inﬂuence has explicitly inspired a very substantial body of historical writing that explores the discursive construction of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour through both technologies of power and technologies of the self. Perhaps the greatest impact has been made by Nikolas Rose’s account of the technologies of the self in the twentieth century, which hints at a plausible longer-term process by which modern norms of the ‘work ethic’, familial morality, and other ‘personal capacities and conducts’ were ‘socialized, shaped, and maximized in a manner that accorded with the moral and political principles of liberal society’, yet without the explicit intervention of the State. To the contrary, the process by which the liberal, noninterventionist State came to be deﬁned and distinguished from civil society, particularly from the family, was itself the chief means by which the moralization of society was achieved. In Rose’s view, the family, ‘deﬁned and privileged by law . . . both freed from detailed prescriptions of conduct and . . . permeable to moralization and normalization from outside’, became ‘the matrix for the government of the social economy . . . not through the activities of the state’, but through instruments not directly identiﬁed with the State, such as philanthropy.²⁵ Other studies have applied Foucault’s insights more immediately to the nineteenth century, either to reveal the workings of a disciplinary State in ﬁelds which the orthodox historiography had wilfully neglected—for example, the punishment of crime, the incarceration of the ‘insane’, the moral regulation of women, or the regulation of sexuality and the body more generally—or to show how philanthropy, social investigation, and other vectors of ‘governmentality’ established norms of family structure and individual behaviour that obviated or mystiﬁed crude State intervention.²⁶ These two Foucauldian emphases on the disciplinary or authoritarian— or even possibly totalitarian—effects of government and ‘governmentality’, ²⁵ Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (1989; London, 1991), 102, 126–7. ²⁶ Prominently, Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (New York, 1978); Michael Donnelly, Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1983); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995); Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick (Cambridge, 1998); Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003).

Introduction

13

especially if they are seen to work in tandem, of course give a very different picture to that provided by political historians’ emphasis on laissez-faire. These two pictures are rarely viewed together, but they are not completely incompatible. In the remainder of this introduction, I consider how the Foucauldian perspective, by inducing us to reconceptualize the whole relationship of State to society, has helped us to arrive at the much more complex and multi-faceted conceptualization represented by this volume; and I suggest some ways in which the political history and postmodern perspectives might ﬁt together, not too uncomfortably.

II It is to social as much as to political or cultural history that we owe a good deal of the relevant recent research suggesting how the ‘liberal subject’ was constructed in nineteenth-century Britain: that is, how behavioural norms and patterns were established that made conceivable the retraction of the authoritarian State in some of the ways indicated (though not necessarily for the reasons indicated) by Foucauldian analysis. From the late eighteenth century onwards, across a wide range of human activities, we can identify both signiﬁcant changes in behavioural patterns and peaks of anxiety about them, and also subsequent responses that established the Victorian norms of a liberal society, often without State intervention or even perhaps the operation of ‘governmentality’ obviously emanating from centres of power. The process which Karl Polanyi famously called ‘the great transformation’²⁷—the creation, whether in theory or in practice, of a ‘self-regulating’ society—was long and uneven. In certain respects in the English context one could trace it far back into the early modern or even the medieval period, considering England’s early development of nuclear families less reliant on extended kin and community networks, or its early experience of monetization and commercialization which permitted freer physical mobility.²⁸ Rapid urbanization—centred on London in the eighteenth century, spreading nationally (including to South Wales and lowland ²⁷ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York, 1944). ²⁸ Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978), makes a claim for medieval origins; Richard Price, British Society 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge, 1999), emphasizes continuities between early modern and nineteenth-century structures.

14

Peter Mandler

Scotland) from the end of the eighteenth century—did, however, pose a series of testing challenges to existing patterns of social organization and regulation on the eve of our period. Crammed together increasingly into towns and cities, with a limited and rapidly overwhelmed social and political infrastructure, ordinary people now seemed ‘free’ to pick ﬁghts with each other, to blaspheme, to have unsanctioned sex, to ingest intoxicants ad lib (with some of the aforementioned consequences), to thieve and rob, and to defy established authorities in Church and State. A burgeoning field of enquiry—the gathering of ‘social statistics’—provided ample evidence of all these ‘disorders’.²⁹ Such statistical ‘proofs’ of the breakdown of social order can be and have been interpreted as evidences only of anxiety amongst the established authorities and of their determination to create new instruments of control.³⁰ It does not take a Foucauldian to make that argument—there is an older Marxist and marxisant tradition of documenting the machinery of ‘social control’ in and around the State³¹—but one can easily see how such social statistics ﬁt into a Foucauldian analysis of ‘governmentality’, whereby the statistical inquiry itself helps to construct deﬁnitions of ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal’ behaviour and begins a process of repressing the former, cultivating the latter. Nevertheless, social historians have not relied only or naïvely on potentially suspect evidence of this kind, and have still found reason to argue that there was, for example, a sudden surge in illegitimate births though at the same time (in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) the age of marriage was falling, suggesting a removal of customary restraints on sexual activity;³² a rising tide of family violence;³³ steadily rising levels of alcohol consumption until the ²⁹ Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986), though cf. ch. 6 on contemporary criticisms of statistical thinking in defence of ‘liberty’. ³⁰ V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Crime, Authority and the Policeman-State’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History, iii. 243–310; Howard Taylor, ‘Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 51 (1998), 569–90; Hamlin, Public Health in the Age of Chadwick. Under this interpretation, social reformers—the heroes of the Fabian story—perhaps too quickly get transformed into villains: for a critique of this view, see Peter Mandler, ‘After the Welfare State’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), 382–8. ³¹ A. P. Donajgrodzki, ed., Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977); Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London, 1980). ³² Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), esp. chs. 2, 5; Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford, 2004), ch. 1. ³³ Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995), esp. ch. 5.

Introduction

15

1870s, at which point levels fell off sharply³⁴—and in general high levels of public disorder with both economic and political motivations from the 1780s to the 1840s.³⁵ Nor were these crises only an urban phenomenon; commercialization and, in some areas, growing population density triggered genuine signs of social breakdown and uncertainty about behavioural norms (not just ‘moral panics’) in the countryside as well.³⁶ Furthermore, even where behaviours were not changing in ways that betoken social breakdown, the widespread sense of uncertainty about the norms of right conduct in social relations triggered a new sensitivity to the potential hazards of social interaction. For example, the whole apparatus of the law which had operated in the eighteenth century predominantly to protect property began to shift its attention in this period to punishing and preventing interpersonal violence, even though overall levels of violence—at least as measurable in its most serious manifestations, i.e. murder—were in steady decline.³⁷ Not all of these ‘crises’ are connected, nor are they all self-evident signs of a ‘disordered’ or ‘unhealthy’ society; but they did provoke a reaction, social and ideological, across wide swathes of society, and accordingly the same kind of social history has detected emergent behavioural patterns that can reasonably be interpreted as a response to crisis. Robert Shoemaker, for example, has recorded a decline in London over the course of the eighteenth century in prosecutions for defamatory speech in public. He interprets this not only as a decline in the utility of legal mechanisms for regulating public behaviour but also as a real decline in the incidence of such violent interactions between individuals, ‘a basic change in the relationship between the individual and the neighbourhood in London’ that might be the harbinger in the ﬁrst great metropolis of changes in other newly urbanizing centres in the nineteenth century. Both the recourse to insult—and the punishment of defamatory insult— made sense in a traditional, face-to-face setting where you and your neighbour had some common standards of behaviour and where there ³⁴ D. J. Oddy, ‘Food, Drink and Nutrition’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History, ii. 264–7. ³⁵ But for an argument that popular disorder stems not from ‘breakdown’ but rather from growing mass solidarities, see the work of Charles Tilly, e.g. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (London, 1995). ³⁶ K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985); David Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government 1780–1840 (Oxford, 1994). ³⁷ Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), ch. 1.

16

Peter Mandler

were community institutions designed to judge you by them; in an increasingly anonymous setting, insult had no such function, enforcement mechanisms were weak, and the results of defamatory insult might be nugatory or lethal. A new way of relating—more aloof, ‘individualistic’— may have resulted.³⁸ Similarly, Michael Mason has argued that the breakdown of traditional sanctions against extra-marital intercourse which led to rising illegitimacy rates over the course of the eighteenth century—in some areas, over half of all births were conceived (if not necessarily born) out of wedlock—also engendered new modes of interpersonal relations, including an ethic of sexual restraint that has become familiarly known as ‘Victorian’.³⁹ Outright violence was harder to ignore than insult or promiscuity; it was also harder for elites to imagine the lower orders could ever do without it. Authoritarian or terroristic responses to violent crime remained the order of the day into the nineteenth century in the form of the ‘Bloody Code’ and bloodcurdlingly staged public executions.⁴⁰ But by mid-century both the penal code and the mode of punishment were aiming explicitly to develop ‘inner behavioural controls’ to inhibit violence, and by late-century there was a growing sense across all classes that they were working.⁴¹ Certainly by the 1880s something recognizable as the ‘liberal subject’ was widespread in stabilizing urban communities across Britain, and recognized as such by an ofﬁcial ideology of liberalism at its peak. Authoritarian mechanisms were more likely to be applied now—at a higher pitch of intensity—to non-compliant subjects who appeared more conspicuous and liable to stigmatization. Of course this was precisely the point at which the wide acceptance of the full citizenship of the majority would also begin to nurture a new kind of collectivism, aimed not so much at behavioural control as at social justice, and manifesting itself in ‘New Liberalism’ and social democracy. Yet even in this sphere, as Jose Harris has argued, ‘what is perhaps most surprising . . . is, not that traditional notions ³⁸ Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660–1800’, Past & Present, 169 (2000), 125–31, foreshadowed by Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 60–1. ³⁹ Mason, Victorian Sexuality, and a companion volume, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford, 1994); Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, chs. 2–4, makes a similar argument, but suggests that women bore the brunt of the consequences and thus took principal responsibility for behavioural change. ⁴⁰ V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994). ⁴¹ Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, chs. 2–3; Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), 11–14, 19–27.

Introduction

17

of government and society were challenged, but . . . the extraordinary tenacity with which mid-nineteenth-century principles and practices survived’, right through the twentieth-century ﬂowering of the welfare state.⁴² If the ‘liberal subject’ was constructed at about the time the Foucauldian analysis requires, that does not mean that he was constructed in the same way or for the same reasons; for one thing, she had a hand in constructing herself. The changes in behaviour are so various and uncoordinated, and stem from so various a range of processes and reactions, that it may only be in retrospect that we have constructed them in our imaginations as a particular kind of subjectivity in the ﬁrst place. They do not obviously emanate from government or even ‘governmentality’. Historians are now much more inclined to see the development of civil society as a complex, quasi-autonomous, and internationally highly differentiated process, neither the plaything of the State nor the obvious servant of capitalism or embourgeoisement.⁴³ For one thing, as Michael Mann has argued, the complexity of civil society grew much more rapidly than the resources of government in this period; the State could hardly keep up.⁴⁴ Sometimes behavioural changes appear as almost functional responses, fumbled towards through a myriad separate experiments by ordinary people facing unprecedented social and economic stresses. Shoemaker and Wiener have revived Norbert Elias’s idea of a ‘civilizing process’ to describe this amorphous set of behavioural changes, while diffusing responsibility for this process from a ‘civilizing’ elite to society as a whole.⁴⁵ In recent work, Peter Baldwin has also re-engineered Elias’s ‘civilizing process’ to point to a general trend away from external and towards internal behavioural controls, a trend in which Britain was a nineteenth-century leader but which most Western—and indeed nonWestern—societies followed over the course of the twentieth century.⁴⁶ ⁴² Jose Harris, ‘Society and the State in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History, iii. 67–70, 115–17. ⁴³ For some recent historical treatments of civil society in the nineteenth century, see Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord, eds., Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lanham, Md., 2000); Frank Trentmann, ed., Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York, 2000); Jose Harris, ed., Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003). ⁴⁴ Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II: The Rise of Classes and NationStates, 1760–1914 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. chs. 11, 14. ⁴⁵ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, originally published in English under that title in two vols., 1978–82; Shoemaker, ‘Public Insult’, 130–1; Wiener, Men of Blood, 11, 27, 289. ⁴⁶ Peter Baldwin, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (Berkeley, 2005), 13–17, 159–60, 261–4; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), 474.

18

Peter Mandler

Some changes, such as the new ethic of sexual continence described by Mason, appear to originate within cultural minorities in all classes and spread, often for different reasons in different social milieux (and almost certainly in different ways for men and women). Something of the same sort could be said about temperance. Women constructed a distinctive kind of citizenship for themselves in civil society precisely because they had been excluded from the kind of citizenship badged as masculine and embodied in the State.⁴⁷ The repeal of the ‘Bloody Code’, it has been argued, was achieved by pressure from ‘public opinion’ against the more authoritarian instincts of the political elite; belief in the educability and potential for self-restraint of the mass of the people did not always so obviously spread from the top down.⁴⁸ This returns us to the evidence for broad popular resistance to the ‘ﬁscal-military State’ after 1815 and for broad popular support for libertarian ideals. It also returns us to the point that the relationship between the State and the individual in this period is a complex and richly mediated one. If State control and dictation was shunned, that does not mean that the ‘liberal subject’ was meant to or wanted to stand alone. Other means of collective provision were traditionally available or could be newly developed. At the most basic level, the ‘single male breadwinner norm’ could only be sustained by a combination of family and community solidarities to augment earnings, share wealth, and keep up morale.⁴⁹ As Michael Roberts has shown, faith in the moral agency of individuals and hostility to the direction of the State was also sustained in practice by the work of voluntary associations, a strength of eighteenth-century English society which grew if anything stronger in the nineteenth.⁵⁰ For women, in particular, social reform through voluntary associations was the principal means of asserting that distinctive kind of citizenship— ‘woman’s mission’—necessitated by their exclusion from participation ⁴⁷ Amanda Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001). ⁴⁸ Phil Handler, ‘Forgery and the End of the “Bloody Code” in Early NineteenthCentury England’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 683–702; Shoemaker, ‘Public Insult’, 131; Wiener, Men of Blood, 29. ⁴⁹ Wally Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, 11 (1986), 53–76; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 1993). ⁵⁰ M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004); see also Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1994) and Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Oxford, 2003).

Introduction

19

in the State.⁵¹ Nor was organized voluntary provision a particularly ‘middle-class’ tendency. Working-class hostility to an undemocratic State, as expressed for example through Chartism, was accompanied by a process of colonization of civil society: in E. P. Thompson’s famous words, ‘the workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from end to end’. The result was ‘the characteristic class institutions of the Labour Movement . . . trade unions, trade councils, T.U.C., co-ops, and the rest . . . [a] truly astronomic sum of human capital’.⁵² In the more Marxist interpretations of this process, ‘warrening’ is a poor substitute for revolutionary overthrow or capture of the capitalist State, but other interpretations have gained purchase in recent years, indicating again the deep roots of these ‘class institutions’ and the strong workingclass partiality for their provision of mutual aid in preference to intrusive State institutions.⁵³ There was certainly a long history of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ in which the State did not necessarily play the largest or most effective role.⁵⁴ The idea of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ suggests that it may not have mattered much whether Britain had a ‘liberal’ State in the nineteenth century. Welfare comes from many sources—the market, family, voluntary associations, the State: does it matter where the boundaries are drawn, what size share each provider gives at any particular moment? Something of the same sort could be said about behavioural controls. Perhaps inhabitants of urban and commercial societies do have to behave differently than inhabitants of traditional, face-to-face communities: does it matter whether they internalize those rules or have them imposed? Alexander Herzen, the Russian refugee in mid-Victorian London, thought not: ‘The freer a country is from government interference, the ⁵¹ Alex Tyrrell, ‘ “Woman’s Mission” and Pressure Group Politics in Britain (1825–60)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63 (1980–1), 194–230; Simon Morgan, ‘ “A Sort of Land Debatable”: Female Inﬂuence, Civic Virtue and Middle-Class Identity, c. 1830–c.1860’, Women’s History Review, 13 (2004), 183–209. ⁵² E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York and London, 1978), 281. ⁵³ John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), 208–10, 226. Thompson’s assessment of ‘warrening’ is more positive, and Stedman Jones’s view of Chartism (for which see above, n. 20) sees it as the opposite side of the same coin rather than as the positive alternative. ⁵⁴ Paul Johnson, ‘Risk, Redistribution and Social Welfare in Britain from the Poor Law to Beveridge’, in Martin Daunton, ed., Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), 225–48; Pat Thane, ‘The Working Class and State “Welfare” in Britain, 1880–1914’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 877–900; Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare, ch. 1.

20

Peter Mandler

more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.’⁵⁵ Yet Herzen’s presence in London—rather than Petersburg—suggests that in practical terms it did matter, to him, to thousands of refugees from Continental authoritarianism, and to millions of Victorian natives whose very identity in this period was largely predicated on their freedom from ‘bureau and barrack’.⁵⁶ The relatively low proﬁle in Britain of policemen, soldiers, bureaucrats, ﬂags, and patriotic leagues not only made room for rebels, eccentrics, and heterodoxies that was not widely available elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe; it also made for a different kind of citizenship and national identity in Britain, more centred on civil society than on the State.⁵⁷ This peculiarity of the British had advantages and disadvantages. It devalued democracy—Britain was the last nation in Europe, with Hungary, to enfranchise fully its adult males. It meant that even when the State did begin to grow relative to civil society from the 1880s—as it did impressively over the course of the twentieth century with the emergence of the modern ‘Welfare State’—growth may have been motored as much by utilitarian and material as by social and solidaristic considerations.⁵⁸ That in turn may have facilitated the apparently sudden reversal of gear betokened by Thatcherism. But the libertarian environment of Victorian Britain also fostered the development of solidaristic infrastructures within civil society without counterposing them too aggressively against the State.⁵⁹ Fewer people felt completely excluded or marginalized. The ability to organize was strong. ⁵⁵ Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (London, 1968), 1226. ⁵⁶ Bernard Porter, ‘ “Bureau and Barrack”: Early Victorian Attitudes Towards the Continent’, Victorian Studies, 27 (1983–4), 407–33; J. P. Parry, ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001), 147–75. ⁵⁷ For a broader argument along these lines, see Peter Mandler, ‘Nation and Power in the Liberal State: Britain c. 1800–c. 1914’, in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005), 354–69. ⁵⁸ Harris, ‘Society and the State’, 115–17, but cf. Harris, ‘Political Thought and the State’, in Green and Whiting, eds., Boundaries of the State, which treats this phenomenon as more aberrant and limited to the mid-twentieth century. ⁵⁹ For inﬂuential but differing interpretations of the relationship between associational life and the State, see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900’, in Languages of Class, 179–238, emphasizing the defensive and depoliticizing elements, and Ross McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?’, in The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), 1–41, emphasizing the complementarity of associational life and political mobilization.

Introduction

21

When, from the late nineteenth century onwards, demands for State intervention in economic and social policy did begin to mount, classbased organization and bargaining with the State could be intense without being destabilizing. State responses, however grudging, had a high degree of legitimacy from the start—consider, for example, the relative smoothness with which the Post Ofﬁce evolved from a service organization (delivering post) to a self-help organization (accepting savings deposits) to an arm of the Welfare State (issuing pensions and other beneﬁts).⁶⁰ An interventionist State inherited some of the trust and reputation for accessibility and transparency that had been built up by the laissez-faire State. As a result, self-organization in civil society continued to ﬂourish in the twentieth century but became much more institutionally entangled with the State.⁶¹ As the essays in this volume show, State and society have always to be considered in their relationship to each other, both when (as in the nineteenth century) that relationship is avowedly at arm’s length and when (as in the twentieth) they are supposed to be more intimately intertwined. ⁶⁰ Martin Pugh, ‘Working-Class Experience and State Social Welfare, 1908–1914: Old Age Pensions Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 775–96. ⁶¹ One of the principal themes of Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare, chs. 2–4; on the persistence of trust in the State, see also David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain 1832–1998 (Oxford, 1998).

This page intentionally left blank

THE STATE

This page intentionally left blank

2 The Powers of the Victorian State Philip Harling

Before the Thatcherite assault on the putative excesses of the postwar British welfare state, few historians would have contested the idea that the modern British State was rooted in ‘Victorian origins’ and that the Victorian era witnessed a ‘revolution in government’.¹ Virtually everybody agreed that the era witnessed a dramatic broadening and centralizing of the responsibilities of the State. What accounted for this was a matter of controversy. Some subscribed to a pragmatic ‘stages’ approach, according to which government growth was a commonsensical way of responding to the problems thrown up by unprecedented urban-industrial growth.² Others argued that government intervention, far from a consensual exercise, was forced onto the political agenda either by the heroic efforts of a handful of ‘Benthamite’ bureaucrats,³ or earnest evangelicals,⁴ or working-class activists,⁵ or some combination thereof. What was never in doubt was that the Victorian State grew dramatically over time, and, more speciﬁcally, that the powers of the central government gradually triumphed over the forces of local obstructionism to create a more salubrious environment and a better quality of life for the mass of Britons. This essay is based on material from chapters 3 and 4 of Philip Harling, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Polity Press, 2001). The author wishes to thank the Rights Controller at Blackwell Publishing/Polity Press for permission to adapt portions of those chapters for inclusion here. ¹ David Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, 1960). ² See e.g. Oliver Macdonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52–67; id., A Pattern of Government Growth 1800–1860 (London, 1961). ³ See e.g. Jenifer Hart, ‘Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History’, Past & Present, 31 (1965), 39–61. ⁴ See e.g. G. F. A. Best, Shaftesbury (London, 1964). ⁵ See e.g. J. T. Ward, The Factory Movement 1830–1850 (London, 1962).

26

Philip Harling

Today, most historians would scoff at the notion of a Victorian ‘revolution in government’. Of course, it is true that the British State was a more palpable force in the lives of its subjects at the turn of the nineteenth century than it had been at the turn of the eighteenth. But considering that the chief and virtually sole responsibility of the late-Georgian ‘ﬁscalmilitary’ State was the defence of the realm, this isn’t saying very much. The seventy years after Waterloo did indeed witness an accretion of social responsibilities to the central and particularly the local agencies of government, such as compulsory primary education and the regulation of working and sanitary conditions. But the scholarly consensus today is that this was a slow and ﬁtful process, chieﬂy because the Victorians instinctively feared the growth of State power as a threat to the individual and corporate freedom that they so deeply cherished, and thus instinctively sought to rein it in. There are ﬁve points about the powers of the Victorian State that will receive close attention here. The ﬁrst is that the remarkably deep and broad legitimacy that Victorian Britons conferred on their agencies of government was largely predicated on what those agencies did not do: spend too much of the taxpayers’ money, or blatantly privilege some sectional interests at the expense of others. Restrained by the liberal commitment to negative liberty and a modicum of social fairness, the Victorian State’s greatest strength was its inability to do much harm to the interests of ‘respectable’ citizens. The second point is that the ostensibly ‘minimal’ Victorian State was nevertheless a strict moral disciplinarian that was armed with formidable powers to force self-reliance, sobriety, orderliness, and sexual decency on the reprobate, most notably paupers, prisoners, and prostitutes. It was armed with no less formidable powers to enforce the legal subordination of much broader (and, on the face of it, unobjectionable) categories of people, most notably women and working men. The third point is that the Victorian State’s attempts to impose market discipline on the poor obliged it occasionally to intervene in the market itself in an effort to make the living and working conditions of the poor broadly tolerable. The line between laissez-faire and State intervention was constantly renegotiated because it was obvious to just about everyone that strict non-intervention would generate unsustainable social tensions. Still, Victorians strove to keep State intervention the exception rather than the rule, ensuring that the advance of social reform was halting and deeply contested, a matter of chronic controversy rather than ineluctable progress. The fourth point is the centrality of the local agencies of the State in the delivery of non-military services. Virtually all

The Powers of the Victorian State

27

responsibilities of civil governance were delegated to local government, and in the long run the local authorities did a better job of coping with the social evils spawned by unprecedented urban-industrial growth than historians used to give them credit for. The last point is that the imperial and social crises of the ﬁn-de-siècle challenged traditional notions of the proper limits of government and triggered the rapid expansion of the responsibilities and ﬁscal capacities of the State. The end result was an Edwardian State that possessed broader powers than its Victorian predecessor, not only to promote a more capacious notion of the ‘common good’ but to punish those who were thought to pose a threat to it.

I The institutions of central and local government were arguably held in higher and broader esteem by the mid-Victorian generation than by any other one before or since.⁶ This was because they were widely thought to be relatively cheap, fair, and unobtrusive. The abiding Victorian perception of the late-Georgian ‘ﬁscal-military’ juggernaut⁷ was that it had made been far too expensive, that it had extended far too many privileges to narrow sectional interests, and that its maldistributive excesses had come dangerously close to undermining public conﬁdence in the State. A series of Victorian governments sought to restore that conﬁdence chieﬂy by promoting social fairness through the extension of negative liberty. Negative liberty took several forms in the Victorian decades: freedom from expensive government, freedom from some of the more blatant forms of sectional favouritism enshrined in (for instance) the Corn Laws and in the privileges of the Anglican Church, freedom from currency manipulation, and, more generally, freedom from the sort of government interest brokerage which in the recent past had been seen to reward privileged sectional interests (the Church, the landed interest, City ﬁnanciers, etc.) at the expense of everybody else. Let us now brieﬂy examine each of these ‘freedoms from’. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant way in which the Victorian State was much less perceptible than its late-Georgian predecessor had been was in ⁶ See e.g. Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993), 8–9; T. A. Jenkins, Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1996), 18–19; Angus Hawkins, British Party Politics, 1852–1886 (Basingstoke, 1998), 10–13, 44–5. ⁷ The most detailed account of which is John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State 1688–1783 (New York, 1988).

28

Philip Harling

the scope of its ﬁscal demands. The defence of the realm remained the most signiﬁcant duty of the central government straight through the nineteenth century, but for most of the Victorian era it was a far less expensive one than it had been hitherto. Public spending was cut by a full 25 per cent over the two decades after Waterloo, and relative peace in Europe thereafter (with the notable exception of the Crimean War) made it possible for British governments to contain military spending until the build-ups of the ﬁn-de-siècle. It is true that the civil costs of government slowly began to rise as the State gradually assumed broader domestic functions. But these new responsibilities were as yet extremely modest compared with the customary ones of defending the realm and servicing a national debt that was very much the legacy of the chronic war-making of the ‘long’ eighteenth century.⁸ The mid-Victorian State was relatively inexpensive for three main reasons. The ﬁrst was something it held in common with the major States of the Continent: a lower level of military spending. Expanding the empire and maintaining the dominance of the British navy guaranteed that defence would remain the central government’s biggest ﬁnancial commitment. But in important respects this was an empire on the cheap, superintended by fewer than six thousand administrators as late as the 1880s, proﬁting from overwhelming technical military superiority in the face of sporadic indigenous resistance, and policed to a signiﬁcant extent by an Indian army that was paid for by taxpayers in the subcontinent rather than the metropole.⁹ Meanwhile, with the important but relatively short-lived exception of the Crimean War, Britain managed to avoid committing itself to major land campaigns in the European theatre. Of course, the hundred years’ peace in Europe had much to do with the devastating consequences of the hundred years’ war of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, from which Britain emerged the sole victor. The second reason for the relative cheapness of the Victorian central government was the slow pace with which it accumulated new civic responsibilities. It did of course allocate much more tax money to public health, workplace regulation, and so on at the end of Victoria’s reign than it had done at its beginning, but at no point in between was there a ⁸ For detailed accounts of postwar retrenchment, see Philip Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996), chs. 5–6; Philip Harling and Peter Mandler, ‘From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), 44–70; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986, 1993), ii., ch. 11. ⁹ See e.g. Lance Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge, 1986), 13–14.

The Powers of the Victorian State

29

dramatic shift in the State’s spending priorities. Per capita spending on civil government was exactly the same under Sir Robert Peel as it had been under the younger Pitt. It is true that civil-government spending accounted for an ever greater proportion of total spending from the 1840s onward, but it grew at an easy pace until very late in the century, from about 10 per cent in the later 1840s, to 17 per cent by the early 1860s, to over 20 per cent by the later 1870s. Defence spending and debt service still accounted for about two-thirds of all central expenditure as late as 1880.¹⁰ Thus, for at least the ﬁrst two-thirds of Victoria’s long reign, British taxpayers continued to beneﬁt from lower per capita military spending without being obliged to spend a great deal more for civic or social purposes. The third and perhaps the most signiﬁcant reason why the mid-Victorian State was a relatively light burden on British taxpayers was that they were considerably more afﬂuent than their Georgian predecessors and their contemporaries on the Continent. Relative afﬂuence was one of the more conspicuous beneﬁts that ﬂowed from Victorian Britain’s status as the world’s greatest ﬁnancial, commercial, and industrial power. As the gross national product expanded, the proportion of it allocated to central and local public expenditure shrank, from 15 per cent of GNP in 1830 to 9 per cent in 1880. France witnessed exactly the opposite trend over these decades, with central expenditure alone growing from 7 per cent of GNP in 1830 to 13 per cent in 1880 (and 18 per cent in the latter year if one factored in local-government spending). While central and local expenditure in Britain was much more buoyant after 1880, as late as 1910 it only accounted for 12 per cent of GNP, as against 15 per cent in France and 16 per cent in Germany.¹¹ Post-Waterloo retrenchment was accompanied by a series of reforms that made the mid-Victorian central bureaucracy recognizably ‘modern’ and less noticeably parasitical and ‘corrupt’ than its Georgian predecessor. The sinecures and reversions that had riddled the older departments of state were things of the past by the 1840s, and government pension money had been drastically pared down and brought under parliamentary scrutiny. The notion of public ofﬁce as a public trust and not a freehold property was now universally accepted, as were the supporting notions that ofﬁce-holders were obliged to carry out the work of their ofﬁces in ¹⁰ B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), 9–12, 580–7. ¹¹ Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), 65.

30

Philip Harling

person and ought to be compensated strictly by salaries and superannuated according to ﬁxed scales. The only way in which the mid-Victorian bureaucracy fell markedly short of Weberian rationality was in its slowness to accept the principle of competitive recruitment, which was not uniformly adopted until the closing years of the nineteenth century. In consequence, nepotism remained a noticeable feature of the system. It was, nevertheless, much more closely bounded by strict rules and thus much better protected against charges of ‘corruption’ than the Georgian bureaucracy had been.¹² The instruments of this relatively cheap State were still largely in the hands of a narrow and predominantly landed political elite. But after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 there were very few issues raised either in Parliament or outdoors that starkly opposed the interests of landowners to those of other groups of property holders, all of whom felt that their interests were reasonably well represented at Westminster. Virtually all of the politicians sent there agreed with their constituents that the central government’s most important duty was to leave ‘respectable’ Britons more or less alone. It is chieﬂy for this reason that politicians, in the words of Jose Harris, sought ‘to create a neutral, passive, almost apolitical state, standing above and apart from the fast-moving, chaotic, and open-ended evolution of mid-Victorian society’.¹³ ‘Disinterestedness’ was probably the most highly and broadly prized political virtue of the day. Accordingly, most of the reforms of the mid-Victorian decades sought to convince an ever greater and more complicated body of social interests that the State was no longer involved in the dangerous game of interest brokerage. Even the relatively activist Whig governments of the 1830s sought to promote an essentially negative sort of social fairness, distancing the State from social quarrels by paring down contentious political privileges, such as the Anglican monopoly on higher education and the payment of cess in Ireland. At the same time, the Whigs’ constitutional reforms inspired underprivileged groups—most notably via the gargantuan Chartist movement—to demand that the State assume a more active role in the amelioration of ¹² See e.g. Jenifer Hart, ‘The Genesis of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report’, in Gillian Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government (London, 1972), 63–81; Henry Roseveare, The Treasury: The Evolution of a British Institution (London, 1969), 68–70; J. M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1986); Philip Harling, ‘The Politics of Administrative Change’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte, 8 (1996), 191–212. ¹³ Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1994), 184.

The Powers of the Victorian State

31

their grievances. ‘Respectable’ opinion concluded that Whig activism threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the State by exposing it to a dangerous popular clamour, and for much of the rest of the century governments of all partisan stripes sought above all else to dissociate the State from sectional controversies. Religion was the focus of many such controversies, and one of the most notable casualties of the preoccupation with ‘negative liberty’ was the ‘confessional State’ which for a century and a half had sought to enforce an Anglican monopoly (or at least a near-monopoly) of public life. Over a span of ﬁfty years beginning in the late 1820s, Anglicanism lost one after another of its special privileges, and while it remained an established Church, it no longer retained its privileged status at the direct expense of Dissenters, Catholics, and Jews. Catholic Emancipation, repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, tithe commutation, the abolition of cess in Ireland, the abolition of compulsory church rates in England, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the removal of the last major civil disabilities pertaining to Jews—these and a number of less dramatic measures did a good deal to level the religious playing ﬁeld and to insulate the State from religious conﬂict.¹⁴ Another means of enhancing ‘negative liberty’ and securing the neutrality of the State was to take it almost completely out of the game of economic interest brokerage. Whereas the incessant monetary tinkering of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras had left the government susceptible to charges of ﬁnancial cronyism, it almost entirely removed itself from the monetary system by means of the Bank Charter Act (1844), which strictly linked the issue of banknotes to the gold supply. While the government’s strict adherence to the gold standard thereafter disproportionately beneﬁted the City exporters of ﬁnancial services at the occasional expense of manufacturers, none of the major players in the buoyant mid-Victorian economy felt it was doing them signiﬁcant harm.¹⁵ ¹⁴ See e.g. Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987); Jonathan Parry, Democracy, Religion, and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1986); David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven and London, 1994), esp. 46, 72–3; John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London, 1994), esp. 126–30. ¹⁵ F. W. Fetter, The Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy, 1797–1875 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), esp. chs. 2–3; Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development (Basingstoke, 1984), ch. 5; Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977); id., ‘The Political Arts of Lord Liverpool’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 37 (1987), 147–70.

32

Philip Harling

While the manufacturing interest was not terribly put out by sound currency, earlier in the century it had of course been very put out indeed by the Corn Laws, which manufacturers saw as an outrageous piece of agricultural favouritism. Repealing the ‘bread tax’ became the raison d’être of one of the most potent pressure groups of the century, the AntiCorn Law League.¹⁶ When Sir Robert Peel famously broke with the protectionist majority in the Conservative party to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846, he was motivated by several factors. But arguably the most signiﬁcant was his conviction that one of the most effective ways of legitimating the State and its elite stewards was to do away with the most glaring ﬁscal privilege it had at its disposal.¹⁷ The immense popularity of Free Trade goes far to explain the hegemony of the Liberal party in the 1850s and 1860s as the party of ﬁscal fairness, in contrast with the protectionist Conservatives, who were tarred with the brush of class favouritism.¹⁸ ‘Disinterestedness’ and ‘negative liberty’ were cross-class values central to the mid-Victorian ﬁscal settlement, and that settlement marked the most important chapter in what Martin Daunton has memorably called ‘a political history of trust’.¹⁹ The Gladstonian Treasury played a pivotal role in that settlement, not merely by presiding over retrenchment, Free Trade, and Sound Currency, but by gradually easing the burden of indirect taxes (from over 80 per cent of the central tax burden in 1820 to 65 per cent by 1865), consolidating government accounts, facilitating parliamentary scrutiny of government spending, and keeping lobbyists out of the budget-making process.²⁰ While observers at the time and historians since have tended to associate ﬁscal fairness, ‘negative liberty’, and minimal government with Gladstonian Liberalism, Disraelian Conservatism was no less committed to it in principle. Whatever one’s preconceptions about Disraelian ‘paternalism’, in practice it did not stake claim to a noticeably more interventionist role for the State. Indeed, arguably Disraeli’s most notable legislative achievement was the extension ¹⁶ See esp. Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London, 2000). ¹⁷ See Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’, ch. 7; David Eastwood, ‘Recasting Our Lot: Peel, the Nation, and the Politics of Interest’, in Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–1850 (Manchester, 1997), 29–43. ¹⁸ Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), esp. chs. 1, 3, 7–8; Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, 166–79. ¹⁹ Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 64. ²⁰ Ibid., chs. 3–4.

The Powers of the Victorian State

33

of ‘negative liberty’ to trade unionists through the protection of the right to engage in peaceful picketing.²¹ Thus the great two-party rivalry in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli offered the expanded electorate created by the 1867 Reform Act precious little in the way of ‘collectivism’, but a good deal more in the way of ‘negative liberty’. Voters themselves were perfectly content with this, particularly newly-enfranchised ‘respectable’ working-class voters, for they continued to fear that the magniﬁcation of the powers of the central government would merely lead to a revival of ‘extravagance’, elite cronyism, and ﬁnancial manipulation. The radical critique of Old Corruption remained a hardy perennial of popular politics, and while in the wake of Chartism there was a broader conviction among radical politicians that it was possible to work through Parliament rather than against it, their abiding goal was to reduce the central government’s ability to do active harm by enforcing economy, promoting religious liberty, and creating a more level playing ﬁeld in industrial relations.²² In this they differed little from elite politicians themselves, and the cross-class commitment to ‘negative liberty’ goes far to explain why the third quarter of the nineteenth century was, politically speaking, an era of remarkably good feelings.

II Thus the legitimacy of the mid-Victorian State stemmed in large part from its ‘weakness’, if we understand by ‘weakness’ its inability to do very much either to help or to hinder ‘respectable’ interest groups. But the second point worth examining here is that this ostensibly ‘weak’ State was armed with signiﬁcant powers to discipline the ‘residuum’ into a mode of personal comportment that beﬁtted the regnant social virtues of the age: self-reliance, orderliness, sexual decency, and sobriety. In the wake ²¹ See e.g. Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, 1967); id., Disraeli: A Brief Life (Cambridge 1996), 181; Peter Ghosh, ‘Disraelian Conservatism: A Financial Approach’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), 268–96; Boyd Hilton, ‘Disraeli, English Culture, and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit’, in Brockliss and Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities, 44–59. ²² See esp. Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995); E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992); id., ‘Popular Liberals, Gladstonian Finance, and the Debate on Taxation, 1860–1874’, in E. F. Biagini and Alastair Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour, and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), 134–62; Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 385.

34

Philip Harling

of Foucault, historians devote far more attention now than they did a generation ago to the ways in which the agencies of the Victorian State attempted to regulate social conduct.²³ Foucault has been frequently and justly criticized for exaggerating the ability of the nineteenth-century state to punish social ‘deviance’. The Victorian State was in no position to undertake a thorough policing of public morals because it lacked the bureaucratic resources to do so and because freedom from State harassment remained a cherished ‘right’ of the freeborn Englishman. Still, it did not hesitate to use the powers it had at its disposal to attempt to modify the behaviour of substantial categories of the down-and-out, notably paupers, prostitutes, and prisoners. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which sought to make poor relief ‘less eligible’ to the able-bodied by making it contingent on the carrying out of loathsome tasks such as bone-crushing and oakumpicking in workhouses, provides the most vivid illustration of the point. Historians now agree that the New Poor Law’s bark was worse than its bite. The large majority of poor relief—whether directed at the ablebodied or not—continued to be dispensed outside the workhouse even many decades after passage of the Act. One of the main reasons why was that the ‘workhouse test’ utterly failed to take into account the seasonal and cyclical ﬂuctuations of a complex labour market. Those who had the dubious honour of administering it had little choice but to do so, making it impossible for them to effect the absolute divorce between wages and poor relief that the framers of the Act had envisioned.²⁴ Thus, in signiﬁcant ways, 1834 did not mark a revolutionary shift in the administration of poor relief. In no less signiﬁcant ways, however, it obviously did. Most notably, within twenty years of the New Poor Law’s enactment male breadwinners were being excluded from relief virtually altogether, as they made up a tiny minority of the workhouse population and a rapidly dwindling minority of those being relieved outdoors. Second, total expenditure on poor relief fell markedly over the early- and mid-Victorian years; as late as the 1870s it continued to lag well behind the average for the 1820s in absolute terms, that is, even if one does not factor into the equation the ²³ See esp. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). ²⁴ See e.g. Anne Digby, Pauper Palaces (London, 1978); ead., ‘The Rural Poor Law’, in Derek Fraser, ed., The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1976); Derek Fraser, ‘The English Poor Law and the Origins of the British Welfare State’, in Wolfgang Mommsen, ed., The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany (London, 1981), 9–31.

The Powers of the Victorian State

35

buoyant population growth of the intervening decades.²⁵ Third, a crackdown on outdoor relief spearheaded by the new Local Government Board in the early 1870s led to a 30 per cent reduction in the number of paupers given outdoor relief. While Poor Law expenditure started to creep up again shortly thereafter, there is no doubt that a good many women, children, and aged poor people hitherto on outdoor relief suffered considerably in the interim.²⁶ Finally, even relatively salubrious workhouses were penal institutions that isolated and stigmatized paupers in numerous ways: by segregating them according to age and sex, by obliging them to surrender their personal belongings, by setting them to humiliating tasks of negligible value, and by imposing a rigid uniformity on their diets and their hours of sleep and work.²⁷ It is easy to fall into Dickensian hyperbole in cataloguing the miseries of the workhouse system. Workhouses were hardly Foucauldian ‘total institutions’ because local Boards of Guardians found it difﬁcult to ﬁnd and were usually unwilling to pay for a sufﬁcient number of competent workhouse ofﬁcers to keep the paupers under strict discipline. Contrary to widespread plebeian belief, moreover, there was no basis in fact to the rumours that paupers were routinely poisoned, or that their corpses were used as fertilizer, or that pauper children were starved to death and then ground into mince-meat.²⁸ The point of the workhouse was not to kill paupers but to humiliate them into self-reliance. Whether it managed to do so or not is a debatable question, but the evidence suggests that the urban working classes tended to take a utilitarian attitude towards the workhouse; only towards the close of the century, when rising afﬂuence made it common for the ‘respectable’ poor completely to avoid the workhouse, did pauperism carry a stigma in working-class neighbourhoods.²⁹ ²⁵ Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 605; Eric Evans, The Forging of the Modern State (London, 1988), 224–5. Poor relief expenditure fell from 2.7 per cent of GDP in 1820–1, to 1.1 per cent in 1850, to 0.7 per cent in 1880. Peter H. Lindert, ‘Poor Relief Before the Welfare State: England versus the Continent, 1780–1880’, European Review of Economic History, 2 (1998), 114. ²⁶ Karel Williams, From Poverty to Pauperism (London, 1981), 89, 102–4; Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993), 72 ff.; Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), 178–210; Robert Humphreys, Sin, Organised Charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England (London, 1995). ²⁷ See e.g. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government, 11 vols. (Hamden, Conn., 1963), 55–6, 72–5; Margaret Crowther, The Workhouse System 1834–1929: The History of an English Social Institution (Athens, Ga., 1981), esp. 42–4, 198–9; Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers, 147. ²⁸ David Roberts, ‘How Cruel was the Victorian Poor Law?’, Historical Journal, 6 (1963), 97–106. ²⁹ Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers, ch. 5.

36

Philip Harling

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the workhouse system encouraged the poor to view the State as a cold-hearted disciplinarian that sought to shame them into self-sufﬁciency, even in hard times when self-sufﬁciency was an unreachable goal for all too many of them. Those among the ‘residuum’ who managed to keep clear of the workhouse, moreover, were ever more likely to have the occasional brush with some other disciplinary branch of the State, and most probably with the police. It is a further testament to the Victorians’ respect for ‘negative liberty’ that it was only in the 1850s that police forces were made compulsory in the boroughs and the counties, and that most of these forces grew at only a modest pace thereafter. Nevertheless, the over 30,000 policemen employed in England and Wales by 1880 amounted to a much more powerful law-enforcement apparatus than the parish constables and watchmen of the late-Georgian years.³⁰ This growth of police forces in the second half of the century signalled a noteworthy shift in the ‘respectable’ classes’ perception of State power: from something that was all too easily abused to something that could be trusted to protect property and to preserve social order and discipline.³¹ It also both reﬂected and reinforced a notable decline in social permissiveness. By the ﬁnal quarter of the century, prostitutes, vagrants, and drunkards were considerably more likely than ever before to ﬁnd themselves arrested and sentenced to brief stints in gaol. The penal reforms of Gladstone’s ﬁrst ministry (1868–74) strikingly attest to the police powers that stemmed from the new emphasis on moral interventionism. While crime rates were plummeting, a government notable for its championship of ‘negative liberty’ in other spheres of activity broadly expanded magistrates’ powers to commit adult vagrants and juveniles to gaol, narrowed pub opening times whilst tightening up licensing-renewal procedures, and launched an aggressive prosecutorial campaign against public drunkenness. It even placed on the statute book a Habitual Criminals Act that granted police the power to detain repeat offenders on suspicion of intent to commit crime, whether or not they had the evidence to prove intent.³² Given the growing powers and ³⁰ K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), 114–26. ³¹ V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Crime, Authority and the Policeman State’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1990), iii. 243–310. ³² Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), 141–56; F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 309–16.

The Powers of the Victorian State

37

intrusiveness of the legal authorities, it is little wonder that policemen were widely detested and frequently assaulted in a good many slum neighbourhoods.³³ The logical consequence of the growth of police forces and magisterial discretion was a growth in the prison population. Nowhere was the moral authoritarianism of the Victorian State more vividly exempliﬁed than in the ever more centralized prison system it fostered, one which sought both to discipline and to redeem the convict through an ever more elaborate set of punishments directed increasingly at the mind as well as the body. The ‘silent system’ and ‘separate conﬁnement’ reached their most extreme levels in the centrally-administered Pentonville Prison, established in 1842 as a model of the new carceral regime. So many inmates were showing symptoms of madness within a few years of its opening that prison authorities felt it necessary to cut in half the standard eighteen-month sentence.³⁴ It is true that meagre custodial staffs prevented most other early-Victorian prisons from being as harsh as Pentonville,³⁵ and no less true that the separate and silent systems were gradually replaced by the relatively benign ‘stages system’, whereby inmates were entitled to a growing assortment of privileges predicated on good behaviour.³⁶ Nevertheless, the late-Victorian prison system was still wedded to a harsh ‘reformatory’ discipline that vividly attests to the moral and physical force with which an ostensibly unobtrusive State could make its presence felt in the lives of its most wayward subjects. That State’s most infamous effort at moral control beyond prison walls was enshrined in the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, which aimed to curb venereal disease among soldiers and naval ratings by forcing vaginal examinations upon suspected prostitutes. The authorities had the power to conﬁne those who were found to have syphilis or gonorrhea in ‘lock hospitals’ for up to nine months at a stretch. In consequence, many working-class women (by no means all of them prostitutes) were subjected to a form of State compulsion that was tantamount to instrumental rape, and those who were consigned to venereal wards as a result ³³ See e.g. David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conﬂict and Control (Manchester, 1997), 106–7. ³⁴ Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York, 1978), ch. 7. ³⁵ Michael Ignatieff, ‘State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment’, in Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, eds., Social Control and the State (Oxford, 1983), 75–105. ³⁶ Ursula R. Q. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (London, 1979), 183–4.

38

Philip Harling

were thus incarcerated solely because of their physical state, not for any crime they had allegedly committed. Critics of the Contagious Diseases Acts, most notably Josephine Butler and the Ladies National Association, stressed the way in which they reinforced the sexual double standard by punishing prostitutes in the most humiliating way conceivable while doing nothing at all to punish their male clients.³⁷ Strenuous and wellorganized opposition ﬁnally resulted in the repeal of the Acts in 1886, but the fact that they remained on the statute books and were sporadically enforced for some two decades is eloquent testimony to the moral interventionism of the Victorian State. The Contagious Diseases Acts were just the most blatant example of the sexual double standard enforced by the State. It had long been assumed under the common law, for instance, that the family was a single legal entity, that the husband was its undisputed head, and in consequence that all of its assets and income were his to dispose of as he pleased, including those that his wife had brought with her into the marriage or had subsequently earned. This legal ‘coverture’ of women was admittedly more obvious on paper than it was in practice. Wives’ legal disability to contract and to litigate debts, for example, was often honoured in the breach,³⁸ and women were sometimes able to secure protection orders and judicial separations from the divorce courts, even though the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) made it a good deal harder for a wife to divorce her husband than the other way round.³⁹ But the double standard was conspicuous, nevertheless. The ‘protective’ measures that gradually limited the working week for women employed in factories, moreover, did much to promote a ‘male breadwinner’ ideology of labour, for they were based on the mutually-supporting patriarchal premisses that working men’s hours of labour could not be dictated by legislation because working men were free agents, whereas working women’s hours of labour could and properly should be meddled with because they were not free agents. The assumption that men bore the exclusive responsibility for ³⁷ See esp. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980); Stefan Petrow, Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Ofﬁce 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1994), 120–2. ³⁸ Margot Finn, ‘Women, Consumption, and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 703–22. See also ead., ‘Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts’, Past & Present, 161 (1998), 116–54. ³⁹ Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, 1989), ch. 1; Gail L. Savage, ‘ “Intended Only for the Husband”: Gender, Class, and the Provision of Divorce in England, 1858–1868’, in Kristine Garrigan, ed., Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class (Athens, Oh., 1992), esp. 26–8.

The Powers of the Victorian State

39

their families’ economic well-being was patently false with respect to most working-class households. It was nevertheless a bedrock principle of Victorian social policy, and it not only served to compromise women’s ability to work for pay, but to complicate their ability to obtain relief via the New Poor Law, which was so ﬁxated on the able-bodied male labourer that it failed to take the needs of women properly into account.⁴⁰ Despite all the talk of working men’s free agency, moreover, the State made it very difﬁcult for them to take collective action in their quest for better pay and workplace conditions. For the labour laws it enforced were heavily biased in favour of employers. This was particularly obvious in the case of the Master and Servant laws, which governed the legal relationship between employers and workers for much of the Victorian era. Among their more ﬂagrant inequities was the differential treatment they meted out for breach of contract; a guilty workman could be gaoled for three months, while an employer merely risked being sued in a civil action.⁴¹ There was scarcely any legal remedy at all for workers who had been injured on the job. Unions did not secure the right to engage in free collective bargaining until 1875, and a series of legal judgments thereafter put that right in chronic peril until the passage of the Trades Dispute Act in 1906. Thus the trade unions had every reason to be wary of the Victorian State. It had taken decades of struggle simply to ensure its neutrality in industrial disputes, and they had no reason to believe that a central government that had so long denied them the chance to compete on anything like an equal basis with management could be entrusted to intervene on their behalf on labour or any other issues.⁴² ⁴⁰ See e.g. Pat Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), 29–51; Wally Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy Stabilised: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, 11 (1986), 53–76; Mariana Valverde, ‘ “Giving the Female a Domestic Turn”: The Social, Legal, and Moral Regulation of Women’s Work in British Cotton Mills, 1830–1850’, Journal of Social History, 21 (1988), 619–34; Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1991), 50–72; ead., ‘Protective Legislation in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender, Class, and the Liberal State’, in Laura Frader and Sonya Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 193–210; Philippa Levine, ‘Consistent Contradictions: Prostitution and Protective Legislation in Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History, 19 (1994), 17–35; Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London, 1992), 145–7. ⁴¹ Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), esp. 47, 74–5, 217–33; Trygve Tholfsen, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (New York, 1977), 179–89. ⁴² See e.g. James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867–1974 (Amherst, Mass., 1983), ch. 3; Neville Kirk, The Growth of

40

Philip Harling

III A third point worth dwelling on is the gradual growth of the State’s powers to intervene in the daily lives of its less privileged subjects in more positive ways, as well. Victorians were virtually unanimous in their desire to impose strict limits on the State’s ability to meddle with social and economic relationships. But very few of them were so committed to strict laissezfaire as to preclude the State from some sort of regulatory role. Almost everybody could agree that the central government had some responsibility to reduce the suffering that rapid industrialization and urbanization had fostered in the shape of squalor, disease, and overcrowding, not least for fear that the ‘residuum’ might rise up in open rebellion if it abdicated this responsibility. As Karl Polanyi noted many years ago, the ‘great transformation’ from heavily regulated to self-regulating markets that turned laissez-faire into the organizing principle of economic life virtually guaranteed that this principle would be routinely violated in practice, simply because full-blown laissez-faire would have quickly brought the market system down in a violent wave of discontent.⁴³ One can go along with this without assuming that interventionism was an inevitable response to the challenges thrown up by the urbanindustrial explosion of the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Contrary to a line of scholarly thought that was very inﬂuential several decades ago, social reform was not always inspired by a humanitarian recognition that a particular evil was in fact an evil and hence deemed ‘intolerable’.⁴⁴ When it did come about, moreover, reform did not always amount to a series of rational and commonsensical bureaucratic measures that gradually built upon pioneering legislation. Social reform in the early- and Working-Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (Urbana, Ill., 1985), 24–5, 267–301; Jonathan Spain, ‘Trade Unionists, Gladstonian Liberals and the Labour Law Reforms of 1875’, in Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour, and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), 109–133; James E. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 1991), 24. ⁴³ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1944), 141. ⁴⁴ See esp. MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’; id., A Pattern of Government Growth; G. Kitson Clark, ‘ “Statesmen in Disguise”: Reﬂexions on the History of the Neutrality of the Civil Service’, Historical Journal, 2 (1959), 19–39; G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1953), 46; W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London, 1964), esp. 224–5.

The Powers of the Victorian State

41

mid-Victorian decades was a matter of chronic debate, a set of deeply contentious issues that threw powerful interests and ideologies against each other. Much of the legislation that was drafted in response to social questions was rendered ineffectual for long spans of time, because opponents often managed to limit and sometimes to neuter it and because the State often lacked the means and often even the will to enforce it.⁴⁵ Factory reform provides a telling example. It took twenty years of agitation to convince Parliament to accept the principle of the ten-hour day for women and child workers (which it ﬁnally did in 1847),⁴⁶ and an additional twenty years for this principle to be extended from textile to most non-textile factories and workshops. Even late in the century there was still no legal acknowledgement that the State had a right to limit the working hours of adult males.⁴⁷ While inspectors had access to the vast majority of factories and workhouses by the 1870s, moreover, they had extremely limited powers of compulsion, and there were still too few of them to detect (much less to punish) many infractions. It is true that inspectorates were thicker on the ground in Britain than they were anywhere on the Continent. But effective mechanisms of enforcement were nevertheless slow to develop.⁴⁸ They would have been slower still had it not been for the vigour of activist civil servants who skilfully wielded the tools of ofﬁcial inquiry and inspection to hasten the development of factory, public-health, and poorlaw reform. A number of these men were indeed self-proclaimed acolytes of Bentham, and even those who were not embraced the notion that it was a government responsibility to endeavour to promote the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and that occasionally this ⁴⁵ See esp. Jenifer Hart, ‘Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History’, Past & Present, 31 (1965), 39–61; Henry Parris, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), pp. 17–37. ⁴⁶ See e.g. Stewart Weaver, John Fielden and the Politics of Popular Radicalism, 1832–1847 (Oxford, 1987), 274–87. ⁴⁷ Henriques, Before the Welfare State, 79–87; Oliver MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977), 48–51. ⁴⁸ Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (ARK Paperbacks edn., London, 1985), 331–8, 438–42; H. W. Arthurs, Without the Law: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1985), 130–1; Ursula Henriques, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Machinery of Social Reform’, and Norman McCord, ‘Some Limitations of the Age of Reform’, in H. Hearder and H. R. Loyn, eds., British Government and Administration (Cardiff, 1974), esp. 175–7, 198; P. W. J. Bartrip, ‘State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?’, Journal of British Studies, 23 (1983), 63–83; id., ‘British Government Inspection, 1832–1875: Some Observations’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 605–26; Roberts, Victorian Origins, 106–9, 318–20.

42

Philip Harling

responsibility justiﬁed closer State intervention in the workings of society and economy. But at least as often they concluded that the utility principle was most suitably advanced by the withdrawal of government from the market. The best-known example is Edwin Chadwick’s championship of the New Poor Law, which he envisioned as a means of helping the poor to help themselves by strictly limiting their access to parochial relief. Like the vast majority of his contemporaries, whether Benthamite or not, he could see no prima facie conﬂict of interest between State intervention and laissez-faire, both of which could be invoked to advance a particular notion of the public good, even simultaneously if need be.⁴⁹ Chadwick’s most abiding obsession, sanitary reform, was no less contentious and almost as long-drawn-out a process as factory reform. The landmark Public Health Act of 1848 was amended into a largely permissive statute, and ratepayers who were loath to foot the bill for sanitary reform were understandably slow in petitioning for the establishment of local boards of health. Another thirty years passed before the establishment of nationwide compulsory sanitary machinery and the codiﬁcation of the (now comparatively formidable) powers of local public-health authorities. There were several compelling reasons why sanitary reform was such a halting and divisive business.⁵⁰ First of all, there was widespread and long-lasting controversy as to the proper technical means to promote it. Second, powerful local propertied blocs, most notably landlords, saw rate-aided local sanitary authorities as a threat to their economic interests. Third, putting in sewer lines was a very expensive job, and ratepayers were usually hesitant to foot the bill for it. Finally, and most signiﬁcantly, the Victorian faith in the supremacy of local government guaranteed that the march of the ‘sanitary idea’ would be slow and awkward. Ratepayers were all too apt to perceive the mere ⁴⁹ Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 267–9; David Roberts, ‘The Utilitarian Conscience’, in Peter Marsh, ed., The Conscience of the Victorian State (Syracuse, NY, 1979), 39–72; S. E. Finer, ‘The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas’, in Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, 11–32; A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905); Parris, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’; Henriques, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Machinery of Social Reform’; David Roberts, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Victorian Administrative State’, Victorian Studies, 2 (1959), 193–210; M. W. Flinn, ed., Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, by Edwin Chadwick (Edinburgh, 1965), esp. 29. ⁵⁰ See esp. Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution (Basingstoke, 1984), 60–4; Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), esp. 101–2, 170.

The Powers of the Victorian State

43

hint of compulsory sanitary measures as a government threat to ‘negative liberty’ and local autonomy, and resisted accordingly. Technical controversy, ratepayer rebellions, the resistance of local propertied interests, deep and abiding mistrust of centralization: all of these factors guaranteed that sanitary reform would proceed at only a ﬁtful pace at best. They also ensured that arguably the biggest sanitary problem of them all, urban overcrowding, would scarcely be addressed until after the turn of the century, when in a different ideological climate it became conceivable for municipal governments to assume the roles of builder and landlord.⁵¹ Until then, government was perceived as having no business meddling with the housing market. Nor was it seen as having any business meddling with the labour market. The very civil servants who pressed for sanitary improvements insisted that low wages, technological unemployment, and de-skilling were not appropriate subjects for social reform, but industrial ‘problems’ that could only be sorted out by proper adherence to the laws of the market.⁵² Thus Benthamites at the Board of Trade were instrumental in killing the minimum-wage bill that the radical MP John Fielden had introduced in 1835 as a means of shielding tens of thousands of handloom weavers whose jobs were threatened with technological redundancy.⁵³ It would take another three-quarters of a century before ‘respectable’ opinion would even begin to come round to the notion that the government had any business stepping in to regulate chronically low wages. In short, the prevailing instinctual commitment to laissez-faire did not keep the powers of the Victorian State from growing in response to the urban-industrial challenge, but it did help to ensure that this growth would be slow, ﬁtful, and limited to ‘acceptable’ spheres of activity.

IV My fourth point is that in those spheres in which the role of government was indeed expanding in the Victorian era, most of the expansion was restricted to the local level. Coping with urban-industrial growth was very largely a local responsibility, and recent scholarship supports the ⁵¹ See esp. Anthony Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London, 1977); Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing, 1780–1918 (London, 1974). ⁵² Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 250–2, 296–7. ⁵³ Paul Richards, ‘The State and Early Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 83 (1979), 91–115.

44

Philip Harling

view that—in the long run, at least—the local authorities developed more effective coping methods than they used to be given credit for. In line with the political trend of the past quarter-century, historians now emphasize the ‘mixed economy’ of Victorian social provision, that is, its heavy reliance on self-help, philanthropy, and the efforts of local as against central authorities—and are no longer tempted to read elements of the postwar welfare state back into it.⁵⁴ In the words of Martin Daunton, this was a ‘delegating-market’ state rather than a proto-welfare state, one which hived off virtually all the responsibilities of civil government to public and private authorities operating at the local level. As the range of civil government expanded in the second half of the century, moreover, so too did the annual average real rate of growth of local-government expenditure—2.9 per cent from 1850 to 1890, as against 1.5 per cent for the central government.⁵⁵Thus, when it came to social services, the emphasis throughout was ‘local provision, for local wants, locally identiﬁed’.⁵⁶ For a long stretch of time, however, the unprecedented pace of urban growth in the industrializing era was simply too much for the local structure of social provision to bear. Public investment did not keep pace with demographic trends over the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, and the inevitable result was a crisis in public health. The mushrooming urban areas became breeding grounds for tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chronic diarrhoea, and cholera. Densely-packed working-class districts suffered particularly high mortality rates; as late as the 1860s, the average age of death in the slums of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow was only a little over 30, a full ten years below the national average.⁵⁷ British towns and cities had managed ⁵⁴ See, most notably, Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1994); Martin Daunton, ‘Introduction’, and Paul Johnson, ‘Risk, Redistribution and Social Welfare in Britain from the Poor Law to Beveridge’, in Martin Daunton, ed., Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), 1–22, 225–48; Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain 1870–1939 (Oxford, 1985); Marguerite Dupree, ‘The Provision of Social Services’, in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2001), 351–94. ⁵⁵ Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 25–6. ⁵⁶ E. P. Hennock, ‘Central/Local Government Relations in England: An Outline 1800–1950’, Urban History Yearbook (Leicester, 1982), 39. ⁵⁷ Simon Szreter, ‘Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development’, Population and Development Review, 23 (1997), 693–729; Simon Szreter and Graham Mooney, ‘Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998), 84–112; Simon Szreter and Anne Hardy, ‘Urban Fertility and Mortality Patterns’, in Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 629–72.

The Powers of the Victorian State

45

not only to preserve but in some respects signiﬁcantly to enhance public health during several periods of signiﬁcant population pressure over the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century. What accounts for their relatively poor performance in the early-Victorian years? The unprecedented level of population growth was obviously one of the culprits. So too (historians now stress) was the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which put disproportionate political power in the boroughs in the hands of small manufacturers, small shopkeepers, and small landlords—humble ‘rateocrats’ whose property bore a disproportionate share of local taxes and who were thus intent on keeping those taxes down. The urban patriciate that had controlled so many boroughs and improvement commissions during the ‘urban renaissance’ of the ‘long’ eighteenth century had shown considerable willingness to invest in urban amenities. The new rateocrats were far more tight-ﬁsted, and retrenchment remained in the ascendant until another round of municipal reforms in the 1860s greatly increased the electorate by enfranchising most compound ratepayers. Urban democratization gradually spawned new cross-class alliances between the plebs and the patricians that were gradually able to dislodge the penny-pinchers and thrust collectivism onto the local agenda.⁵⁸ Here is one of the few places where the recent literature on State development in the nineteenth century supports the older, ‘welfare-statist’ view of Victorian government, for historians praising centralization from the Webbs forward have customarily pinned a good part of the blame for the public-health crisis on the frugality of the shopocrats.⁵⁹ But a signiﬁcant difference is that scholars have recently been more inclined to see that frugality as readily understandable under the circumstances. For instance, it was quite sensible for hard-pressed ratepayers to hesitate to commit to the construction of expensive sewerage systems at a time when sanitary engineers had not yet reached consensus on what those systems ⁵⁸ See e.g. Szreter, ‘Economic Growth’, esp. 707–12, 718; Szreter and Hardy, ‘Urban Fertility and Mortality Patterns’, 635–6; Miles Taylor, ‘Interests, Parties, and the State: The Urban Electorate in England, c. 1820–1872’, in Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, eds., Party, State, and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britiain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), 61; Martin Daunton, ‘Introduction’, in Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 22–4; id., Trusting Leviathan, 265–85. ⁵⁹ See e.g. the Webbs, English Local Government, iv. 480–1; E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London, 1973); V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Incorporation and the Pursuit of Liberal Hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in Derek Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, 1982), esp. 51–2; F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Town and City’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, 3 Vols. (Cambridge, 1990), i. 64–71.

46

Philip Harling

should properly be composed of.⁶⁰ More generally, the alternative to the devolution of ever more public-health responsibilities to the local level was of course centralization, and virtually nobody wanted this aside from Chadwick and his dwindling handful of supporters. The legacy of Old Corruption was a deep, broad, and abiding mistrust of the centre. This could probably only have been overcome by the retrenchment, minimalism, and disinterestedness that were indeed the most salient features of the Victorian central government. As Martin Daunton points out, ‘constraining the state, creating a sense of credibility in its actions, was a necessary prerequisite for positive action in the future’.⁶¹ Public scepticism required a localist approach to the improvement of public health in particular and to the development of the urbanindustrial infrastructure more generally. For at least the ﬁrst three quarters of the twentieth century it was fashionable among historians to damn localism as obstructionist and ineffectual. But the new scholarly trend is to emphasize its effectiveness in the long term. While the centralized approach to public health exempliﬁed by Chadwick and the General Board of Health was indeed killed off in the 1850s, for instance, local authorities made ever broader use of subsequent permissive legislation to hire medical ofﬁcers of health and to gradually extend the range of their discretionary powers.⁶² This more ﬂexible approach prepared the ground for a series of important compulsory measures of the 1870s that placed all local health authorities under the supervision of the Local Government Board, obliged all those that had not done so already to hire MOHs, and armed local authorities with a broad range of powers to regulate the quality of water and food within their districts. These measures gave birth to a formidable local public-health bureaucracy, and the strenuous efforts of MOHs, engineers, and inspectors resulted in the virtual eradication of smallpox, typhoid, and cholera by the end of the century.⁶³ As Peter Baldwin persuasively argues, for all the talk of Britons’ ‘peculiar’ localism and preference for a go-slow approach, by 1880 they ⁶⁰ Christopher Hamlin, ‘Muddling in Bumbledom: On the Enormity of Large Sanitary Improvements in Four British Towns, 1855–1885’, Victorian Studies, 32 (1988), 55–84. ⁶¹ Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 64. ⁶² See esp. John Prest, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers’ Democracies in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990). ⁶³ Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge, 1996), 190–99; Szreter, ‘Importance’, 21–6; Virginia Berridge, ‘Health and Medicine’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History of Britain, iii. 193–9; John Davis, ‘Central Government and the Towns’, in Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 264–7; Robert Millward and Sally Sheard, ‘The Urban Fiscal Problem, 1870–1914: Government Expenditure and Finance in England and Wales’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 501–3.

The Powers of the Victorian State

47

were far closer to attaining a national minimum standard of public health than any major Continental nation, not least because their health ofﬁcials were vested with a much broader array of regulatory powers. But what was most instrumental in bringing Britain to the top of the league table in public health as well as the provision of a good many other forms of social overhead capital was its unparalleled per capita wealth. However much penny-pinching rateocrats might have slowed the pace of infrastructural investment, it was nevertheless massive by contemporary standards, and it made possible the improved sewerage, relatively pure water supplies, and better-ventilated housing that was at the root of Britain’s publichealth triumph.⁶⁴ While a great deal of that wealth was being tapped in the form of rates, local investment was of course also greatly facilitated in the last decades of the century by the municipalization of gas and water (and later public transport and electricity) supplies and the ﬂoating of municipal stock. It was chieﬂy these new sources of local revenue that explain why per capita public capital expenditure nearly trebled between the late 1880s and the early 1900s.⁶⁵ Of course, the inevitable corollary of local discretion was the highly uneven development of the local infrastructure. Wide disparities in the rateable base, in the value of municipal property holdings, and in municipal trading opportunities guaranteed wide disparities in the provision of local services.⁶⁶ Differences in local political cultures also clearly made a very signiﬁcant difference in the provision of local amenities. Late-Victorian Birmingham’s unique blend of Dissenting civism and cross-class co-operation, for instance, goes far to explain the peculiarly extensive services offered by the local state there. No other town embraced the ‘civic gospel’ as early or as fervently, and some of them scarcely embraced it at all. But despite these important caveats, it now seems clear that by the European standards of the day (rather than the anachronistic standards of the second half of the twentieth century), Britain’s localist approach to the challenges of rapid urban-industrial growth was reasonably successful in the long run. ⁶⁴ Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. 6, 127–8, 149, 237–41. ⁶⁵ Robert Millward, ‘Urban Government, Finance and Public Health in Victorian Britain’, in Richard H. Trainor and Robert J. Morris, eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), 61. ⁶⁶ Millward and Sheard, ‘The Urban Fiscal Problem’, 526–7; John Davis, ‘Central Government and the Towns’, and Barry M. Doyle, ‘The Changing Functions of Urban Government: Councillors, Ofﬁcials and Pressure Groups’, in Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, esp. 272, 284, 294.

48

Philip Harling

V Until very late in the nineteenth century, ‘cheap government’, laissez-faire, and the primacy of localism remained ruling principles, albeit ones that were frequently honoured in the breach. While the mid-Victorians were willing to concede broader powers to the State in practice (if not in principle), they still sought to preserve an unobtrusive framework of government that left them to get on with the business of living. For the most part, they got what they wanted. By the time of Victoria’s death in 1901, in contrast, practically everyone acknowledged not only that the powers of the State were broadening and deepening, but that the principle of Sstate intervention was a readily acceptable fact of life. What accounts for this remarkable change? A number of familiar factors: a growing sensitivity to the environmental roots of poverty, noticeable (for instance) in the social investigations of Booth and Rowntree; the academic challenge to the premisses of classical political economy posed by the likes of Alfred Marshall; the broadening of the municipal franchise to include a signiﬁcant bloc of working-class voters who were a good deal less suspicious of local than they were of national government and inclined to look favourably on ‘gas and water socialism’;⁶⁷ and the (remarkably inaccurate) assumption of the political elite that the mass electorate created by the 1884 Reform Act would force ‘class legislation’ onto the political agenda unless they were bribed with piecemeal social reforms. The perceived imperial ‘crisis’ of the ﬁn-de-siècle rounds out the list of factors: a relatively sudden and enormous increase in military spending, chieﬂy related to the Boer War and the naval race with Germany, which combined with skyrocketing Exchequer subsidies to revenue-hungry local authorities to double central expenditure between 1894 and 1902;⁶⁸ and a ﬁxation on the imperative to enhance ‘national efﬁciency’ through a robust set of measures designed to reverse the (widespread if exaggerated) perception of industrial decline, through imperial federation, and even through limited regulation of the gene pool, as advocated by some prominent members of the eugenics movement.⁶⁹ In this ⁶⁷ See esp. Pat Thane, ‘Labour and Local Politics: Radicalism, Democracy and Social Reform, 1880–1914’, in Biagini and Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism, 244–70. ⁶⁸ Jose Harris, ‘The Transition to High Politics in English Social Policy’, in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1983), 76–8; E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995), 48–51. ⁶⁹ G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efﬁciency (Berkeley, 1971); Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists (Oxford, 1973).

The Powers of the Victorian State

49

anxious climate, the ‘degeneration’ of the urban ‘residuum’ became a widespread preoccupation. The coercive measures urged by would-be social reformers from across the political spectrum to force the ‘feckless’ poor up to a higher standard of social efﬁciency—penal colonies for habitual ‘loafers’, for instance—indicate that there was no sharp distinction between an ‘old’ moral and a ‘new’ environmental critique of poverty.⁷⁰ Admittedly, there were limits to the coercive tendencies of the Edwardian State. For all the talk of consigning ‘loafers’ to penal camps, they were never actually rounded up and sent off, and for all the talk of limiting the reproductive capacities of the mentally ‘unﬁt’, they were never sterilized in Britain, as they were in several American states during the Progressive era.⁷¹ Still, a conspicuous Edwardian trend was the narrowing sphere of permissible social behaviour, noticeable, for instance, in the raising of the age of consent for girls to 16, the turning of all forms of male homosexual behaviour into crimes punishable by up to two years’ hard labour, and the criminalization of drunkenness, of cruelty to children or animals, of solicitation for prostitution, and even of ‘failure to maintain one’s family’.⁷² While these new measures were going onto the statute book, petty offenders, many of them teenagers, were being incarcerated in record numbers for misdemeanours such as sleeping rough and use of obscene language.⁷³ In conclusion, then, it is true that the Edwardian State evinced its commitment to ‘positive liberty’ through its championship of interventionist measures designed to liberate human potential, measures that the mid-Victorian proponents of ‘negative liberty’ could scarcely have tolerated. But it is no less true that the Edwardian State was a good deal more intrusive in its policing of ‘deviant’ behaviour than even its mid-Victorian predecessor had been. Indeed, one can eschew the Foucauldian notion of anti-progress and nevertheless conclude that the Edwardian State was sometimes disturbingly authoritarian in its commitment to social discipline.

⁷⁰ Jose Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy (Oxford, 1972), 42–3, 141–2; Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (London, 1982), 10–11; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Victorians (New York, 1991), 123–5; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (New York, 1971), 312–14. ⁷¹ See e.g. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), 96–7. ⁷² Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1989), 86–103; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 259–62. ⁷³ Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, 208–10.

50

Philip Harling FURTHER READING

Daunton, Martin, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001). Greenleaf, W. H., The British Political Tradition, Vol. II: The Ideological Heritage (London, 1979). Hamlin, Christopher, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge, 1998). Harling, Philip, and Mandler, Peter, ‘From “Fiscal-Military” State to LaissezFaire State, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), 44–70. Harris, Jose, ‘The Transition to High Politics in English Social Policy’, in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1983), 58–79. Henriques, Ursula R. Q., Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (London, 1979). Johnson, Paul, ‘Risk, Redistribution and Social Welfare in Britain from the Poor Law to Beveridge’, in Martin Daunton, ed., Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), 225–48. Lees, Lynn Hollen, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998). Prest, John, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers’ Democracies in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990). Richards, Paul, ‘The State and Early Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 83 (1979), 91–115. Szreter, Simon, ‘Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development’, Population and Development Review, 23 (1997), 693–729. Thane, Pat, Foundations of the Welfare State (London, 1982). —— ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), 29–51. Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981).

3 The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective Peter Baldwin

Scholarly discussion of the State has only recently, if at all, become the focus of sustained attention from historians. Their contributions have tended to be detailed policy histories and accounts of specialized and narrowly circumscribed administrative developments. The big picture, in turn, has been cultivated by political scientists, sociologists, and others working the harder veins of social science. Even the most recent work comes from scholars who—however historically informed—are not servants of Clio: Michael Mann, Samuel Finer, James Scott, Thomas Ertman.¹ Yet, of course, if there is any topic where a historical approach could shed light, where institutional continuities are hard to overestimate, where path dependency proceeds along six lanes of blacktop with the cruise control on, it is the State and its development. Part of the problem, seen from Clio’s perspective, is that social scientists, hankering for abstraction, have seemed to conjure up something that historians are loath to believe even exists. They often speak of ‘The State’ as though it were a coherent, identiﬁable, Leviathan-like actor, locked in a slow and clumsy pas de deux with its partner, Civil Society. Historians, in turn, have tended to be nominalists, content to discuss speciﬁc actors and issues—bureaucrats, policies, administration, legislators—without necessarily agreeing that the sum total of the parts became anything more than just that. The social scientiﬁc binarism of the ¹ Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, 1986, 1993); Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times (Oxford, 1997); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1999); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997).

52

Peter Baldwin

distinction between State and civil society has also meant that discussions of the State are often phrased in terms of its presence or absence. A strong State is able to intervene in civil society, a weak State, in turn, leaves civil society alone to organize itself. Laissez-faire and interventionism have been the polar concepts that portray the State as smaller or larger, weaker or stronger. More recently, however, another school of thought has begun to efface the clear boundaries between public and private, State and civil society. Such ideas began perhaps with Norbert Elias, were inﬂated to heroic proportions by Foucault, and have been continued in a more circumspect, but also historically more accurate, form by Nikolas Rose, Marianne Valverde, and others.² They have focused attention on the nature of civil society and its interactions with the State. In their most recent formulations, several strands of argument twist together. One claims that the State has enlisted the behavioural psysciences on its behalf and that much of the behavioural control that earlier was administered with the hard hand of prescription and law is now cultivated by psychological conditioning, counselling, and advice. As a corollary of this comes the argument that humans have internalized much of the behavioural modiﬁcation required to be functioning members of peaceful societies, a form of conduct sometimes called prudentialism.³ We use our words, as the modern daycare mantra has it, or at least call the police, rather than duel; moderation in everything, especially food and alcohol, has become the watchword of bourgeois culture, obviating the need for sartorial or dietary restrictions imposed from without; our thresholds of sexual arousal have been raised enormously compared to just a century ago, allowing what we like to think of as a freedom in matters erotic, but only on the basis of a strict instinctual bookkeeping. The old social control problematique, with the State, sometimes acting on behalf of its governing classes, imposing norms of bourgeois behaviour on recalcitrant lower and rural classes, has been ² From the now massive literature: Colin Jones and Roy Porter, eds., Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (London, 1994); Graham Burchell et al., eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991); Johan Goudsblom, ‘Zivilisation, Ansteckungsangst und Hygiene: Betrachtungen über ein Aspekt des europäischen Zivilisationsprozesses’, in Peter Gleichmann et al., eds., Materialen zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie (Frankfurt, 1977); Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1990); Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge, 1998). ³ Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies’, in Andrew Barry et al., eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, 1996), 58.

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

53

replaced with a distinctively whiggish or at least optimistic vision of self-imposed limitation. We are free because we control ourselves. Democracies’ lack of strict enforcement mechanisms relies on their citizens’ willingness to set limits to their own conduct.⁴ For our purposes here, this new approach encourages us to pass beyond the inherited rigid distinction between State and civil society. Europe in the Victorian era is often portrayed as a binary opposition: on the one hand, Britain, with its laissez-faire, minimalist State, admittedly centralized, yet none the less devolving much authority and initiative to the local level. At the other extreme lies Imperial Germany and especially Prussia, with its hankering for strong interventions, its bureaucratic ethos, its culture of Kadavergehorsamkeit. The French, in turn, are crammed somewhere in the middle of this conceptual spectrum, with their ambition to strong centralized statutory control often falling prey to a Mediterranean distrust of authority. Admittedly, the historiography of the Victorian State, especially of its early years, takes the relationship between State and civil society into account. The argument is not that British society was signiﬁcantly different from the Continental variants, but that similar functions were pursued in different ways. Order had to be maintained, the old taken care of, children educated, waste removed. The question was not whether these purposes would be pursued at all, but how and by whom. What the State accomplished on the Continent was often—so the argument ran— the province of civil society across the Channel. Voluntary organizations, in co-operation with local government, took care of educational, welfare, and other ends that were elsewhere entrusted to the State, allowing Britain in the 1860s to have the most minimal State ever found in an industrial society.⁵ If we follow the suggestion of this new approach to the State, however, and look not so much at State and civil society in isolation from each other, as duelling monads, and more at the interaction between the two, matters appear in a new light. Both sides of the inherited conceptual division of Europe—into a Continent with strong States and weak civil societies, a Britain where the situation was reversed—have begun to be revised. For the eighteenth century, the traditional dichotomy between ⁴ This is also the theme of Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York, 1999). ⁵ Pat Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1990), iii. 33.

54

Peter Baldwin

Britain and the Continent has already been questioned, perhaps even narrowed.⁶ The picture of a wasteland civil society on the Continent has long been untenable for the German States. Much of the Sonderweg debate focused attention on the presence of a stronger civil society than had previously been recognized. And even what an earlier generation of scholars had regarded as the French stalemate society, unable to resolve its tensions at the local level and constantly in appeal to the Parisian authorities, has been revised by microhistorians revealing sociabilities and capacities of French civil society.⁷ Conversely, the image of a small and hands-off British State equally deserves a dip in the acid bath of revision. In certain areas, British citizens stood much more naked vis-à-vis the statutory authorities than their peers on the Continent. Medical conﬁdentiality, indeed privacy in general, was not nearly as protected as across the Channel. Nor was the inviolability of the private residence held in as high regard as in France, whatever the bromides about castles and homes. If we look not at State and civil society in mutual isolation, but in terms of their interaction, things appear differently. In this perspective, Victorian Britain had what was possibly a small, but none the less strong and effective State. The Continental nations, in contrast, often seem to have possessed States that blustered and swaggered, but which, in any reasonable accounting, were in fact less effective and strong. We may take two examples to illustrate this claim: public health and taxation. If we understand public health broadly, as the management of mortality and morbidity, then these examples deal with the two invariables of human existence: the reaper and the ﬁscus.

I The distinction between Britain and the Continent in terms of public health was ﬁrst formulated by the historian of medicine, Erwin Ackerknecht. He distinguished between a quarantinist and a sanitationist approach. Quarantinism meant attempts to keep the spread of contagious disease out by restricting travellers and trade across borders, isolating the ill at home until harmless, and otherwise attempting to cut chains of ⁶ John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth, eds., Rethinking Leviathan: The EighteenthCentury State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999). ⁷ Alan R. H. Baker, Fraternity Among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1999).

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

55

transmission. Sanitationism, in turn, implied a willingness to improve sanitary infrastructure to the point where, even though epidemics might occur, they would ﬁnd their spread limited by the unfertile ground provided by a population that washed its bodies, ﬂushed its excrement away, drank uncontaminated water, breathed clean air, and lived in uncrowded circumstances. Ackerknecht’s argument was that sanitary cordons, quarantines, and sequestration, which necessarily impinged on the individual’s autonomy and gave priority to the interests of the community, were most likely to be favoured by absolutist, autocratic, or conservative regimes.⁸ In contrast, more liberal, democratic systems, reluctant to interfere with individual freedom, sought less intrusive strategies, usually some variety of sanitationism, or, in default, preferred to forgo preventive interventions altogether. Though it distinguishes between different kinds of statutory intervention, the categorization between sanitationism and quarantinism does not separate weak from strong, or inactive from Active states. If anything, the reverse holds true. The English approach to public health relied on massive interventions to build and improve infrastructure—sewerage, potable water, zoning codes requiring ventilation and light, and the like—that promised to obviate the need for other forms of statutory action. In terms of overt interventions (uniformed ofﬁcials requiring detailed questionnaires handed over by tongs from arriving ships, lazarettos replete with bored travellers waiting out their incubation periods and the like), Britain may have been less prophylactically interventionist against the spread of contagious disease than some of its Continental neighbours. But the sort of measures required by its more pronouncedly sanitationist approach were in many respects, not just in terms of the funds required, more drastic than what was undertaken across the Channel. The historiography of British public health intervention has tended misleadingly to focus on what the British State failed or was ill-equipped to accomplish without bothering overly to enquire what its neighbours were up to at the same time. Much of the story of the General Board of Health, for example, doubtless concerned the Victorian allergy to centralized administration and the localist backlash to Chadwick’s Benthamite ambitions that eventually left the new Board responsible to Parliament and more ⁸ Erwin H. Ackerknecht, ‘Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22 (1948), 562–93; Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital 1794–1848 (Baltimore, 1967), 156–57. He was following the cue given by Sigerist who distinguished broadly between absolutist and liberal styles of public health: Henry E. Sigerist, Civilization and Disease (Ithaca, NY, 1944), 91.

56

Peter Baldwin

dependent on local authorities. It is also true that even the Chadwickian Board could not in fact accomplish what, on paper, it was capable of. Many of the Board’s directives were resisted or ignored by local authorities over whom it exercised but little direct power. But even though the old Board failed partly because of the dogmatism of Chadwick’s sanitationist ideology and partly because of the resistance to centralization prevalent among local authorities and well spoken for in the Commons, the pertinent British ofﬁcials, whether the Board in its various incarnations or the Guardians, were still able to take steps of a sort that public health authorities in, say, France could only dream of: enforcing zoning regulations, entering private dwellings to inspect for unsanitary conditions and remedying them if necessary, removing nuisances, and generally acting on powers that across the Channel were to be emulated only half a century later.⁹ Thus, for example, house-to-house visitations by health inspectors, a new policy implemented against cholera at mid-century, were performed on a scale unknown across the Channel. Such inspections were based on the idea that the main thrust of a cholera attack was preceded by prodromal diarrhoea, during which phase medical intervention could still prevent the worst. Because symptoms often struck the sufferers as trivial, self-reporting was unreliable and regular surveillance of lower-class dwellings was required. During visitations medical inspectors questioned inhabitants as to the condition of their bowels and other matters not normally the subject of interchange between the State and its subjects. In addition to their intestinal enquiries, inspectors also exerted inﬂuence to remove families from infected houses and patients to hospitals. They were to check for decomposing organic matter and cleanse ﬁlthy dwellings. To reinforce such visitations, heads of families, schoolmasters, and employers were to examine daily, either for themselves or through an agent, every person in their employ for loose bowels. The numbers visited and the meticulous detail in which the alleged effects of such inspections were recorded are remarkable compared to the epidemiological interventions undertaken in any other nation during this period. Similarly, from the 1860s, the British instituted a system of what one might call neoquarantinism that involved certain kinds of statutory interventions that the Continental nations failed to emulate. Neoquarantinist precautions against the import of contagious disease ⁹ The following is based on Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999).

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

57

required the inspection of all passengers. Those suffering from symptoms were detained, while the rest were at liberty to disembark. The latter, however, had to report the address of their destination, where they were to be inspected again for ﬁve consecutive days to check for the development of symptoms. The French, in contrast, felt that, short of putting a police ofﬁcer on the trail of each entrant, they had little chance of ﬁnding travellers who proved to be infectious once they had been admitted to the country. The surveillance or neoquarantinist system, which was advocated as an easing of strict quarantinist precautions, was thus one which the British could and were willing to implement, while the French were unable. Compulsory isolation of the ill, so ticklish an issue on the Continent, also quickly passed into law in allegedly liberal Britain. The 1866 Sanitary Act allowed mandatory removals to hospitals of the ill who had no adequate accommodation at home. In the early 1870s informal methods were used to enforce isolation. In Bristol, for example, the Medical Ofﬁcer dealing with typhus in lodging houses would frighten away the other inhabitants in order to sequester the infected. The Sanitary Law Amendment Act of 1874 ﬁned those who refused to be removed. The 1875 Public Health Act allowed local authorities to threaten ﬁnes in order to compel hospitalization of the infected without adequate accommodation, including residents of common lodging houses. In Birkenhead, for example, a police order was granted to remove a child with scarlatina whose mother, though claiming that he was isolated at home, in fact let him play in public. Finally, as part of this neoquarantinist system, reporting contagious disease to the authorities was mandated. After failed attempts during the early 1880s, a national law in 1889 introduced notiﬁcation to any district that so chose. So successful was this that by the early 1890s, ﬁve-sixths of the population of England and Wales had been brought under compulsory notiﬁcation. The law allowed Medical Ofﬁcers to prosecute a wide variety of citizens, from a lodging-house operator in Leith who, having neglected to give notice of a case of measles, was ﬁned £2 and deprived of his licence for three years, to a mother who failed to report her children’s scarlet fever and endangered the public by taking them out in a perambulator, ﬁned £4. One zealous Medical Ofﬁcer hired a detective to follow an ambulance calling at a private residence. When it headed for the fever hospital, he brought charges against the passengers for having failed to report the case. In 1899 notiﬁcation was required throughout the country. The Germans had little compunction about introducing various forms of reporting,

58

Peter Baldwin

though they formalized this later than the British. The French, in turn, were much more allergic to such interventions. Indeed, they have remained so down to the AIDS epidemic.¹⁰ Moreover, there were examples of sanitary reform on a local level that showed how effective even in decentralized Britain such measures could be. Under John Simon’s tenure as Medical Ofﬁcer of Health during the early 1850s, existing legislation was fully exploited to turn the City into a showcase of sanitary improvement. Using his powers of compulsory drainage, water supply, and nuisance removal and the powers of Medical Ofﬁcers to order improvements within dwellings, ﬁning recalcitrant owners, Simon managed to squeeze compulsion even from a laissez-faire system. Inspectors examined and certiﬁed weekly the progress of work previously ordered, notices were issued for negligence, and, when all else failed, the authorities intervened directly. Simon’s ‘sanitary rotas’ had inspectors examining hundreds of houses at regular intervals, thus transforming what had been envisaged as temporary visitations during epidemics into a system of permanent and periodic sanitary superintendence of the dwellings of the poor. One could make a similar argument for the campaign against venereal disease. The Continental approach—the regulation of prostitution—was a visible, elaborate effort to control a certain segment of society with all the paraphernalia of the police state: vice squads, identity cards, statutory inspections with VD physicians periodically inserting specula into the genitals of registered prostitutes, ofﬁcial certiﬁcates of epidemiological unobjectionability, and so forth. In Britain, in contrast, the solution sought was to change sexual behaviour tout court. Of course, the social morality movement was not a government imposition on civil society. Quite the contrary, it was an example of civil society organizing itself. And yet, from the point of view of the targeted prostitute or infected woman, which was the more drastic intervention: regulationism, that left her alone so long as she jumped through the ofﬁcial hoops? Or the system across the Channel where (admittedly in Scotland, but surely similar examples abound in England), lady almoners attached to female and child welfare clinics were empowered to follow up on women who did not return to VD clinics for treatment. They would familiarize themselves with the patient’s background and moral proclivities through a series of domiciliary visits and, in liaison with other social workers, induce ¹⁰ Peter Baldwin, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (Berkeley and New York, 2005).

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

59

a return to treatment.¹¹ Where the Continental approach did not seek to change habits, but only to regulate certain epidemiologically dangerous practices, the British ambition was much more thoroughgoing. The alleged paragon of laissez-faire, Victorian Britain, was thus in many respects a more drastic enforcer of public health than the land of Napoleonic centralization. Sanitationist efforts were doubtless different from the Continental quarantinist approach, but they were hardly less interventionist. Indeed, the quarantinist approach followed in the Continental nations was in large measure the path of least resistance, one chosen because they lacked the administrative resources to do otherwise.

II A similar contrast holds true for taxation. Much has been made of the fact that British government income and spending were below Continental levels during the latter half of the century. Less attention has been paid to the equally important observation that the nature of the taxation system, not just the rates levied, determined the kind and degree of statutory intervention.¹² The remarkable ability of the British State to marshal resources during the late eighteenth century and especially during the Napoleonic Wars, which has been described as the rise of the ﬁscal State, has been historiographically digested.¹³ Yet the prevailing assumption remains that, after a burst of heady animal spirits in the ﬁscal realm, the British state quieted such riotous impulses to settle into placid laissez-faire during the Victorian era. In the longue durée, reliance on indirect taxes rose, that on direct taxes declined, after the Restoration.¹⁴ But from a comparative view, what is notable about the British tax system in the nineteenth century is how this broad transformation slowed with the introduction and growth of the income tax. While the English introduced an income tax early in the ¹¹ Roger Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons: A Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Amsterdam, 2000), 118. ¹² The state of the art on British taxation is Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001) and Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002). ¹³ Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996), 190–2. ¹⁴ Patrick K. O’Brien and Philip Hunt, ‘Excises and the Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1586–1688’, in W. M. Ormrod et al., eds., Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830 (Stamford, 1999), 203.

60

Peter Baldwin

century, nailing it fast after initial tergiversation by the early 1840s, on the Continent similar developments took another half century, arriving not until 1891 in Prussia, 1914 in France, 1920 in the German Empire, though some of the smaller German States (Saxony in 1874, for example) were more precocious. Given that Britain’s economy was more heavily dependent on trade than its large Continental peers, this was not necessarily a logical, nor certainly the administratively easiest of solutions. Introducing an income tax implied the administrative reach, the penetrative ability, necessary to ascertain, measure, and extract a certain fraction of the citizenry’s resources—not, as with indirect taxes, in acts when money changed hands in any case, as an implicit part of the price of purchase or doing business, but as an unvarnished imposition by the ﬁsc. The income tax represented a fundamental change in relations between citizen and State, giving the authorities vast new resources and both requiring and providing access to information about their subjects.¹⁵ It both relied on greater trust of citizens, the implicit assumption of the accuracy of their tax declarations, and threatened them with new and harsh penalties in case they failed their part of the bargain.¹⁶ In the United States, legally binding oaths were sworn on tax declarations, symbolizing this new compact between State and citizen now introduced.¹⁷ Most early modern States had some form of taxation on the outward appearance of wealth, whether on house frontage or windows, on carriages and horses, male servants, dogs, hair powder, use of hats, gloves, clocks, or silver plate. Having postponed the transition to an income tax, the Continental systems remained dependent on external indicators of wealth for far longer than the British. They remained content, as one French observer put it, to measure the images in the Platonic cave, rather than reality.¹⁸ The French postrevolutionary system took the protection of the citizen’s privacy so seriously, combined of course with a chronic inability to muster the requisite administrative ﬁrepower to probe more deeply, that it was forced to rely on a system of external indicators of wealth.¹⁹ The business tax, for example, was determined according to a ¹⁵ Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, 1988), 122. ¹⁶ Wolfgang Peres, Die Steuerhinterziehung im Spiegel der Rechtsprechung: Die Entscheidungspraxis des Amts- und des Landgerichts Köln von 1950 bis 1959 (Berlin, 1963), 22. ¹⁷ Joseph v. Bauer, ‘Ueber Steuervergehen’, Finanz-Archiv, 19 (1902), 33–4; Franz Meisel, ‘Unrecht und Zwang im Finanzwesen’, Finanz-Archiv, 5 (1888), 31–2. ¹⁸ Gabriel Ardant, Histoire de l’impôt, vol. 2 (Paris, 1972), 321. ¹⁹ Gabriel Ardant, Théorie sociologique de l’impôt (Paris, 1965), 239; D. E. Schremmer, ‘Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France and Germany’, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8 (Cambridge, 1989), 378–9.

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

61

series of indications such as the estimated rent of the premises, the number of employees, and the type of machinery used. Even after the introduction of an income tax in 1914, the self-employed did not for many years have to declare their income. Indeed, most taxpayers did not declare, but were taxed on the authorities’ estimates of their intake. After 1933, the ﬁscal authorities reverted to a form of tax on external signs of wealth by asking for indications of income in the form of rent paid, number of servants, private automobiles, and so forth. Two years later, the authorities were allowed to use the citizen’s consumption as his tax basis if this appeared to be higher than his income and he could give no adequate account of the additional funds.²⁰ As late as 1984 many French farmers, whose income was evaluated by means of the authorities’ estimates, were spared having to make any declaration.²¹ In Prussia, early in the century, local authorities estimated which tax class citizens belonged to on the basis of possessions, type of property, occupation, status, and the like. As of 1851, authorities were explicitly prohibited from investigating personal incomes in depth, relying instead on external indicators. This did not change in Prussia until the new income tax as of 1891, requiring declarations of income, opening of business records, and detailed investigations by the authorities.²² In Saxony, however, similar arrangements were in place from 1874. To this day, Swedish tax authorities can bring returns with low reported income to local tax boards, where it is likely that someone with personal knowledge of the potentially miscreant citizen will spot the difference between alleged intake and lifestyle.²³ Before the imposition of an income tax, most pre-modern ﬁscal systems also relied on the principle of allocation, or repartition. Subordinate bodies, whether localities, municipalities, or sometimes, as in Prussia, occupational groups, were given lump sums by the central authorities that they were expected to raise, and then allowed to apportion them within themselves according to their more intimate knowledge of the ability to bear such burdens.²⁴ Tax farming was, in effect, but a variant of such techniques. Such a system, while present in England during ²⁰ Willi Albers, Die Einkommensbesteuerung in Frankreich seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Eine Analyse ihrer wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und administrativen Probleme (Kiel, 1957), 16–17; Louis Formery, Les Impôts en France, vol. 1 (Paris, 1946), 70; Lionel Fourny and Christophe Stener, Les Impôts: Droit ﬁscal français (Paris, 1986), 260. ²¹ Jean-Claude Martinez and Pierre di Malta, Droit ﬁscal contemporain, vol. 2 (Paris, 1989), 71–2. ²² Schremmer, ‘Taxation and Public Finance’, 431, 439, 444. ²³ Krister Andersson, ‘Sweden’, in Joseph A. Pechman, ed., Comparative Tax Systems: Europe, Canada, and Japan (Arlington, Va., 1987), 72. ²⁴ Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Income Tax (New York, 1914), 227.

62

Peter Baldwin

the eighteenth century, faded in comparison with the income tax during the following years, but remained more important on the Continent. One of the most distinctive results for English taxation was to free it from the constraints inherently imposed by allocation. When the government set the gross sums it hoped to receive, ambitions to increase these, even if only in tune with growing wealth and therefore not necessarily as a higher percentage of total resources, meant long and elaborate negotiations. The English system, in contrast, having set rates at a certain percentage of income, automatically enjoyed the lift that the rising tide of nineteenthcentury prosperity brought with it.²⁵ An income tax on the English model, in contrast to the pre-modern and Continental systems of the nineteenth century, required the State to collect accurate information of a sort that its citizens might wish to keep secret and then make a direct demand to hand over a certain percentage. It was thus, to hammer home this obvious point, far more intrusive than the Continental ﬁscal systems in that, from mid-century, it sought to determine citizens’ actual incomes. Allegedly liberal Britain was willing to subject its citizens to the investigations of income and wealth that Thiers, resisting proposals for an income tax in France, described as intolerable in a free society.²⁶ This in turn implied either remarkable power on the State’s part, unusual compliance of the citizenry, or some combination of both, compared to the early modern or Continental States’ reliance on indirect taxes hidden in the cost of the articles on which they were levied. In terms of enforcing assessment and collection, the English system rested on a savvy combination of obligation and consent. Britain was among the ﬁrst nations consistently to require a declaration of income, introduced by Pitt at the very start of the nineteenth century. In Prussia, a similar, but fruitless, attempt in 1812 required declaration only of those in receipt of income above 1,000 thaler. On the other hand, this obligation in England was mitigated in various ways. First, the attempt to require a declaration of total income was replaced by a series of schedules of different sorts of incomes, thus hampering the government’s hopes of transparent ﬁscal relations with its citizenry. The personal income declaration was cleverly crafted so that those who considered themselves taxed in excess of their maximum liability could provide proof by declaring their income from all sources, a technique that started with Pitt’s triple assessment of 1798. For those forms of income not subject to deduction ²⁵ Schremmer, ‘Taxation and Public Finance’, 347. ²⁶ Marcel Marion, Histoire ﬁnancière de la France depuis 1715, vol. 5 (Paris, 1928), 563.

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

63

at source (especially Schedule D, proﬁts from professions or family ﬁrms and partnerships), tax liability was determined by lay commissioners, assessors and collectors who were drawn from the ranks of the local taxpayers, monitored, however, by permanent ofﬁcials. The closest Continental variant on this system of lay assessment came in the Prussian system of 1891, where the commissions evaluating the accuracy of self-declarations contained a majority of elected members.²⁷ English tax commissioners could assess tax on a higher income than that declared on the return. This gave the taxpayer the right to appeal, but that, in turn, allowed commissioners to call for accounts and to charge triple duty where the appeal failed. Failure to submit a return was subject to penalty only if could be proven that there was in fact liability for tax and ﬁnes were in any case small. Very few taxpayers were actually prosecuted for failing to make a return or for making a false one (some 239 between 1842 and 1851) and no case actually went to trial. As of 1863, this system of carrots, giving taxpayers an interest in declaring their incomes, was extended by introducing and reﬁning a series of exemptions, abatements, and graduations, all of which required taxpayers to reveal what they actually enjoyed in the way of income in order to qualify. Tax commissioners began using novel sources of information to determine taxable income: the London Custom House Shipping Records, for example, or company records. By the 1880s, they had vastly improved their abilities to uncover underreporting of income.²⁸ Certain obvious socio-economic factors made it possible for England to impose an income tax earlier than on the Continent. That urbanization and a money economy had made further inroads earlier than across the Channel allowed its very possibility. In Prussia, a series of tax classes was established in 1820, differentiated by external criteria like social standing, occupation, and an estimate of wealth and mode of life. As defenders of the new law here put it, such a system of classes, while perhaps less accurate than a strict income tax, was the best that could be hoped for when most subjects were not accustomed, nor even able, to calculate their revenues and expenditures in money and to strike a balance in income.²⁹ In France, hopes of direct taxes were impeded by the preponderance of peasants and the self-employed.³⁰ Indeed, in Sweden, it was not until the ²⁷ Seligman, Income Tax, 254. ²⁸ Robert Colley, ‘The Arabian Bird: A Study of Income Tax Evasion in Mid-Victorian Britain’, British Tax Review, 3 (2001), 218–21; Schremmer, ‘Taxation and Public Finance’, 329, 343–4. ²⁹ Seligman, Income Tax, 230. ³⁰ Ardant, Histoire de l’impôt, vol. 2, 195.

64

Peter Baldwin

1870s that taxes paid in natura were changed to cash, and well into the twentieth century local agricultural taxes were still paid in kind. So widespread was the use of tax payments in kind during this period here that the total tax burden, in money terms, remains hard to calculate.³¹ During the American Civil War, when the ﬁrst income tax was imposed in the United States, it was levied on government and industrial workers only, since few other occupations had the level of payroll bookkeeping necessary for productive tax collection.³² That wage earners dominated the British employment landscape earlier than elsewhere not only allowed the State to seek information from employers, but also to extend its reach by having them deduct taxes at the source in a way not yet possible where self-employment, especially in agriculture, still prevailed. The English began discussing a pay-as-youearn system as early as the 1860s, though it was not enacted until the following century.³³ Tax on income from employment, Schedule E, was deducted from salary at the source, as was that from government stock and dividends and of real estate and houses, tax being deducted in the latter case from rent. Deducting tax at the source involved less intrusion by the ﬁsc—requiring no disclosure of income as such to the authorities—than a determination of total income and a demand for payment of tax thereon would have done.³⁴ Only farmers, traders, the professions, and commerce could not be brought into this regime. And yet, while less intrusive and requiring less contact between authorities and taxpayers, the stoppage at source system was signiﬁcantly more effective than determining income on the basis of external indicators of wealth on the Continental model and of course also reduced the chances of evasion. To this day, France remains the only industrialized nation, bar Switzerland, not to use the withholding system for employees. That there were simply more Englishmen with greater wealth to be taxed than in France or Germany was also adduced as a reason for touching them in this way.³⁵ ³¹ Peter Gårestad, Industrialisering och beskattning i Sverige 1861–1914 (Uppsala, 1987), 12, 42, 51. ³² Susan B. Hansen, The Politics of Taxation: Revenue without Representation (New York, 1983), 94. ³³ B. E. V. Sabine, A History of Income Tax (London 1966), 96. ³⁴ Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, ch. 7. ³⁵ Pierre LeRoy-Beaulieu, Les Impôts et les revenus en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne (Paris, 1914), 9–13, 63–5; Franz Meisel, Britische und deutsche Einkommensteuer: Ihre Moral und ihre Technik (Tübingen, 1925), 31.

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

65

III In both of these cases, public health and taxation, the Victorian State thus chose a route different from the Continent. It would be too simple to say that, in contradiction to its laissez-faire reputation, the British State in fact took the more interventionist approach and left civil society more changed than across the Channel. It is unclear whether (and it would in any event be hard to measure) the British approach in either case was administratively more difﬁcult, requiring greater penetrative power. Did the construction of sanitary infrastructure cost more than the imposition of quarantines at the borders? Did the administration of an income tax entail more ergs of bureaucratic oomph than the endless investigations of retailers’ books needed for an indirect form of taxation, or the efforts, for example, required for the French land tax of surveying practically the entire national territory—a task which took the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, having registered 126 million separate plots by 1850—or the window tax, which, in turn, registered some 37 million apertures by late in the century?³⁶ What can be said is that the British solution in both cases represented an initially steep outlay of capital, both ﬁnancial and political, in return for permanent and long-term gains. Not coincidentally, both sets of changes were related to the same goal: allowing free trade in the broadest sense. The sanitationist approach to public health meant that the nation could enjoy the beneﬁts of unobstructed trade without having to ring its borders with quarantines. The introduction of an income tax allowed it to shift the burden of raising government revenues from indirect taxes, especially tariffs, thus enabling Britain to remain free trading as the rest of Europe shifted in a protectionist direction during the 1870s. In the latter case, an allegedly minimalist governmental strategy—free trade—rested on maximalist ﬁscal tactics, a system of income taxes that eventually hit the wealthier classes harder than indirect levies and that was, as yet, without compare on the Continent.³⁷ This distinction between the Victorian and the Continental States echoes one drawn in the nineteenth century by the public health reformers Edwin Chadwick and Richard Thorne Thorne between the ³⁶ Schremmer, ‘Taxation and Public Finance’, 380–1, 385. ³⁷ John M. Hobson, The Wealth of States: A Comparative Sociology of International Economic and Political Change (Cambridge, 1997), 122. Just as, of course, anti-monopoly regulation, to ensure a level playing ﬁeld for the market, requires often drastic statutory interventions.

66

Peter Baldwin

preventive approach of the British and the curative approach taken across the Channel.³⁸ They were thinking of a number of related matters. One was the British emphasis on measures to prevent industrial accidents that concentrated the costs of risk on employers, who were most immediately able to prevent them. This course of action struck them as more sensible, though in an immediate sense more interventionist in the daily management of production, than downplaying safety concerns and giving workers disability pensions after the fact. In addition came the massive investment in sanitary infrastructure that Britain undertook half a century before the Continent. This meant both that the nation could snap its ﬁngers at disease and that it was spared reliance on the massive and intrusive Continental-style governmental machinery of keeping transmissible illness out of the country. The curative system of the Continent they traced back to the still undeveloped nature of these nations’ economies, with long working hours, low wages, and lacklustre productivity. From this sorry economic base, the Continental States could take only less decisive and effective interventions than the Victorian State. The Victorian State was in this sense more effective and interventionist than its traditional rendering has allowed. But simply to reverse the polarities would not get us far. Merely to claim that the British State was more interventionist than has been recognized, or that the Continental States were weaker, would be a tepid conclusion. More interesting would be a recognition that two themes are potentially fruitful for the further study of the modern State. First, the interaction of State and civil society is crucial. An effective regulation at the level of civil society can obviate the need for statutory action. The absence of intervention might reﬂect active informal social control, rather than reveal statutory impotence. A society’s moral sense could have an inﬂuence on the need for regulating prostitution, for example; the size of a society—the perceived possibility of free riding— might affect its tax compliance. Second, it is possible that States are not consistently one thing or another across the board.³⁹ States may be lumpy. They may be interventionist in one aspect, insouciant and unconcerned to act in another. Indeed, as with both taxation and public health and their relations to free trade, the authorities’ desire and ability to keep their hands off one aspect of policy may require drastic interventions in others. ³⁸ R. Thorne Thorne, ‘On Sea-Borne Cholera: British Measures of Prevention v. European Measures of Restriction’, British Medical Journal, 13 Aug. 1887, 339–40; Edwin Chadwick, ‘Preventive Administration, as Compared with Curative Administration, as Practised in Germany’, Sanitary Journal, NS 169 (18 Mar. 1890). ³⁹ Peter Baldwin, ‘Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History’, Journal of Policy History, 17 (2005), 12–33.

The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective

67

FURTHER READING Baldwin, Peter, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999). Brewer, John, and Hellmuth, Eckhart, eds., Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999). Daunton, Martin, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001). —— Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002). Hobson, John M., The Wealth of States: A Comparative Sociology of International Economic and Political Change (Cambridge, 1997). Rose, Nikolas, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London, 1990). Schremmer, D. E., ‘Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France and Germany’, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8 (Cambridge, 1989). Seligman, Edwin R. A., The Income Tax (New York, 1914). Thane, Pat, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1990).

This page intentionally left blank

LIBERTIES

This page intentionally left blank

4 Liberalism and Liberty J. P. Parry

The assumption that Victorian Liberalism was concerned primarily with economic freedoms—with the free market, free trade, and laissez-faire— remains widely held.¹ Indeed, the still-fashionable idea that there was a ‘New Liberalism’ in the early twentieth century gained its potency from the notion that it was a radical departure from its non-interventionist, anti-statist Victorian predecessor. Economic freedom was undoubtedly a signiﬁcant element in nineteenth-century Liberal discourse: free trade played a crucial role in securing Liberal political dominance in the late 1840s, and Gladstone’s budgets strengthened that dominance. The ‘Manchester school’ enjoyed a high proﬁle—although it was also the target of abuse. But the historical work of the last twenty years has undermined the simplistic equation between political Liberalism and classical economic liberalism. This is because we now have a much more sophisticated understanding of both Victorian attitudes to markets and Victorian political rhetoric.² Liberals hardly ever had a monopoly on the language of freer trade; after 1850 it was essentially a political commonplace, while beforehand its most inﬂuential practitioners were a school of Tories more ¹ See e.g. Robert F. Haggard, The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn., 2001). Richard Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London, 1990) is an interesting set of essays, conscious of the need to redeﬁne Liberalism as more than ‘a narrow economic doctrine’ (p. 2), though its emphasis is still on the relation between the individual, the market, and the state. ² Four of the most distinguished works on Victorian attitudes to markets are: W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, Vol. 1: The Rise of Collectivism (London, 1983); B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Inﬂuence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988); A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997); G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998).

72

J. P. Parry

concerned with the restoration of natural mechanisms than with the shaping and development of a political community.³ When, in the 1830s and 1840s, it became attractive to Liberals, it was as much for its constitutional as for its economic merits. It demonstrated a willingness to respond to popular grievances; it showed that the State was not controlled by narrow vested interests; it might also diminish the severe divisions between town and country.⁴ Taxation, similarly, involved questions of accountability and sectional or class favouritism. Consequently, it is now more generally argued that Liberalism was at heart concerned with political relationships and political liberties.⁵ This chapter, at any rate, considers the broader political rather than the speciﬁcally economic connotations of liberty, as discussed by Liberals in cabinet and Parliament, and the political commentators that they read. Suspicion of potential State oppression was fundamental to nineteenthcentury Liberalism. Libertarian language—about ‘self-government’ and freedom of conscience—was deeply rooted. Attempts to organize the party around the principle of resistance to State power would always attract some support. But this chapter also seeks to show that those attempts were never entirely successful. They involved too negative a view of the responsibilities of political leaders, and too narrow a deﬁnition of liberty to be generally attractive. In fact liberty, and its relationship with authority, involved awkward questions for Liberals. In general, liberty was seen as complementary to law, justice, and the State’s responsibility to improve morality and character. It was not to be confused with licence, with ‘doing as one likes’. It was ‘the right of being ruled according to stable and just laws’.⁶ And it was a religious as well as a political concept. This essay is divided into three sections. The ﬁrst two discuss some of the main uses of liberty in Liberal political discourse between the First and Second, and Second and Third, Reform Acts, respectively. Both sections bring out the difﬁculties, as well as the beneﬁts, that Liberals encountered in using the idea, particularly their ambivalence to State authority. While Continental Liberalism acquired a lot of its energy from the ﬁght against entrenched powers, in Britain the Liberals were in ³ Hilton, Age of Atonement, 220–1. ⁴ J. P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), 145–6. ⁵ See e.g. M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995); E. F. Biagini, ed., Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), and id., ‘Neo-Roman Liberalism: “Republican” Values and British Liberalism, ca.1860–1875’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), 55–72. ⁶ E. R. Conder, Liberty: An Address Delivered . . . April 8th, 1879 (Leeds, 1879), 3–4.

Liberalism and Liberty

73

power for most of the period between the 1830s and 1880s. As far as the propertied classes were concerned, the problem was a lack of authority as much as of liberty—they craved discipline, morality, the religious education of the lower classes, and the creation of an ordered community. Yet Liberal politicians needed a rallying cry capable of creating and sustaining a coalition of opinion—an illiberal state of affairs to be attacked. One solution was to exploit the comparison between the British polity and its ‘autocratic’ Continental counterparts, urging a patriotic defence of ‘English’ constitutional and religious liberties in order to avoid the political calamities that seemed to have afﬂicted Europe. British Liberalism obtained much of its focus in opposition to the autocracy, militarism, and socialism that were perceived to ﬂourish abroad. But the need to provide the party with political impetus also meant that there was constant tension about how best to deﬁne and defend liberty. This exploded in disagreements at regular intervals. The ﬁnal section considers liberty in its religious aspect. The emphasis on maintaining authority, checking man’s sinfulness, and developing national character and morality helps to explain why so many Victorian politicians attached such importance to religion. Conscience and responsibility were seen as key attributes, both in the political elite and, increasingly as time went on, in the political citizen as well. Liberty of conscience was a crucial Victorian Liberal idea, but it implied the liberty to obey Christ’s law.⁷ Individual responsibility was celebrated as an English virtue, particularly in the sense of responsibility and accountability before God. Liberal interest in democratization was always halting and ambivalent, but it was probably only as strong as it was because of a qualiﬁed conﬁdence that the citizenry could be moralized and because of a genuine sense that the elite had a Christian responsibility to promote that process. It was that measured conﬁdence in the moralizing task that distinguishes the mid-Victorian era. Between the 1850s and the 1870s, most elite Liberals sustained themselves on two ideas: that Britian was a uniquely successful political community based on the self-discipline and vigour of the national character; and that the combination of its libertarian political tradition and its public adherence to a properly libertarian Christianity offered the chance of developing and strengthening that community. From the 1880s, the elements of that optimism began to drain away. ⁷ Ibid. 5; R. W. Dale, ‘The Conference of Nonconformists’, British Quarterly Review, 55 (Apr. 1872), 520–2.

74

J. P. Parry

I The defence of national civil and religious liberties against overbearing Crown power was historically the deﬁning idea of the Whig party, and remained a visceral rallying- cry for Liberals up to at least the 1880s. Robert Lowe wrote in 1878: ‘the history of the English constitution is a record of liberties wrung and extorted bit by bit from arbitrary power’.⁸ The history of Parliament was the symbol of resistance to that power: to William Harcourt, it was the most authentic expression of English spirit.⁹ The last great crusade on which Victorian Liberals united, the campaign against ‘Beaconsﬁeldism’ in 1879–80, aimed to defeat Disraeli’s un-English unconstitutionalism. They claimed that his foreign policy was illiberal, secretive, and jingoistic, in ‘servile imitation of the Imperialism of the Second Empire’.¹⁰ Vested ﬁnancial interests distorted foreign policy to their selﬁsh ends, while government recklessly frittered away the money given it in trust by taxpayers—in the teeth of a depression. Moreover, he practised ‘personal government’ or ‘personal rule’ at home, ignoring Parliament and ﬂattering the court, and bestowing on Victoria a foreign title which seemed to demonstrate the imperial claim to be above the law rather than the respect for free institutions which was expected of a modern constitutional monarch. This campaign allowed Liberals to believe that they were once again ﬁghting the great battles of the 1820s and 1830s against Tory illiberalism. Before 1832, the Whigs’ main complaint about the electoral system was that Parliament was too often neutered. As a result, they claimed, the executive could exact taxes and erect an unaccountable civil and military bureaucracy without proper public consent, could exercise exceptional powers of law, and could maintain Anglican political privileges over Roman Catholics and Nonconformists. In these ways the civil and religious liberties of the people were imperilled, and power concentrated in the hands of vested interests. These arguments offered the rationale for the removal of the nomination boroughs in 1832. They allowed Whigs to edge towards a common front with radicalism from the late 1820s on the basis of the pursuit of economy and lower taxation, a rejection of ‘Old ⁸ R. Lowe, ‘Imperialism’, Fortnightly Review, 24 (Oct. 1878), 463. ⁹ A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, 2 vols. (London, 1923), i, p. vii. ¹⁰ J. P. Parry, ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001), 171–3. See also W. E. Gladstone, ‘Liberty in the East and West’, Nineteenth Century, 3 (June 1878), 1154–74.

Liberalism and Liberty

75

Corruption’, and the more complete integration of Nonconformists and Catholics into the political system, as well as a sometimes vociferous support for liberal constitutional movements abroad. Between 1828 and 1841 all these agendas were pursued vigorously: the criminal law system was overhauled, the rights of religious minorities were extended, and in 1834 public expenditure reached its low point for the nineteenth century. The Reformers of 1832 envisaged updating the ancient constitution so as to preserve England’s illustrious reputation as a land of liberty. They did not seek radical changes to the political structure. The Whigs were never unqualiﬁed critics of the old electoral system. Despite the rhetorical excesses that opposition sometimes required, on the whole they neither asserted nor believed that Tory Britain was a fully-ﬂedged autocracy. Moreover, the Liberal Tories’ cuts in taxation and patronage in the 1820s made the old opposition claim that Crown control over Parliament threatened liberty look tired and outdated. By the late 1820s the younger generation of Whigs such as Russell placed more emphasis on the sloth and unpredictability of the executive government, its inability to respond effectively and systematically to public grievances. The Reformers’ main charge against Wellington in 1830 was less his oppression than his feebleness and sectionalism. It was the weakness and incompetence of Tory government, especially in failing to respond adequately to the depression and unrest of 1829–30, that led to its downfall. Wellington’s opponents claimed that his ministry was inactive because it had no conﬁdence in its popular standing.¹¹ Public opinion was evolving in line with social and intellectual progress; executive power could be maintained only by responding to that evolution. Thus from 1830 the Whig Reformers emphasized authoritative national leadership and elite responsibility, which they argued provided the necessary framework for the preservation of popular freedoms. The 1832 Reform Act was at root concerned to improve the virtue and zeal of the governing classes, ﬁrst and foremost by strengthening the Whig grip on power, but also by enhancing the quality of political leadership. It was hoped that the need to be accountable to a more demanding electorate, and the checks introduced on corruption, would force MPs to develop their character, public-spiritedness, and activity. The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, similarly, would revitalize local elites.¹² France offered the example to avoid: the moral failings of the governing classes had led to the Revolution of 1789.¹³ Moreover, most Whigs were great believers in ¹¹ Parry, Rise and Fall, 67, 77–8, 89. ¹² Ibid. 113–17. ¹³ Lord John Russell, The Causes of the French Revolution (1832), 80–1.

76

J. P. Parry

party, which they saw as playing a crucial role in linking government and Parliament, increasing ministerial accountability and parliamentary discipline simultaneously. Party was a safeguard of character and integrity in leaders, by protecting them from the tempting faction, ﬂattery, and beneﬁts of court politics. It also checked corruption and selﬁshness by MPs, whom it educated into thinking in broad and patriotic terms. MPs should not have the freedom to be irresponsible critics of government: that was a republican notion.¹⁴ A Reformed Parliament, systematic registration at constituency level, and an issue-based party system would make politics more orderly and more national; the people would feel better integrated into the system and respect for the authority of the law would increase. Once the Reform Act had legitimized executive rule, its authority could and should grow. As Russell said in 1831: ‘it is upon law and government, that the prosperity and morality, the power and intelligence, of every nation depend’.¹⁵ The Whig reforms of the 1830s signiﬁed the executive’s concern to demonstrate the national reach and responsibility of the State, its selfconscious identiﬁcation with the nation. Nothing like the New Poor Law, imposing a controversial administrative structure across the nation, could have been passed under the unreformed system. The emphasis on the role of State authority in tackling pauperism, crime, and ignorance was primarily a response to general anxiety about social order in and around 1830, but it also demonstrated the ability of the Whigs to draw on two major traditions of thought, Benthamite utilitarianism and Coleridgean organicism. Both helped to justify a strong, purposeful, moralizing national government, particularly in social policy on the one hand and religious policy on the other. However, the limits to Whig centralism also need to be stressed. The government relied heavily on model institutions—prisons, teacher-training bodies, schools of design—which might inspire enlightened local leadership to copy them. Beyond that, it sought to raise awareness of social issues—the only solid basis for progress—by the more systematic collection and dissemination of information about education and poverty. Russell felt that opinion could ‘do the rest . . . authority never will’.¹⁶ Both the Liberal Tories in the 1820s and the Whigs in the 1830s spent a lot of effort on foreign affairs. They often contrasted the liberality of the ¹⁴ H. Reeve, ‘Earl Grey on Parliamentary Government’, Edinburgh Review, 108 (July 1858), 277–8, 281–2. ¹⁵ Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, iv. 345, 24 June 1831. ¹⁶ Parry, Rise and Fall, 127 and ch. 6 generally.

Liberalism and Liberty

77

British constitution with the autocratic excesses of the major Continental regimes. Fox had committed the Whigs to the promotion of ‘civil and religious liberties all over the world’.¹⁷ Canning publicized his battles with the Holy Alliance; after 1830, Grey and especially Palmerston projected an image of Britain crusading for the extension of constitutional liberalism through Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal. By his Iberian policy—and his later policies in Italy and elsewhere—Palmerston aimed to suggest that Britain had an attractive combination of global power, nobility of vision, and awareness of the power of liberal ideas. He sought, like Canning before him, to use these struggles to imply—to radicals, and to public opinion—that Britain was so genuine a supporter of the spread of liberal ideas and institutions that her own constitutional arrangements did not require further inspection and amendment. By sustaining national conﬁdence, this strong liberal diplomatic and rhetorical proﬁle also allowed defence cuts to be made, at least until the international crises of the late 1830s forced spending up again. In the depressed conditions of the late 1830s and 1840s, signiﬁcant social and political tension erupted and radicals became very critical of high taxes and other signs of government interference with the liberties of ordinary people. The New Poor Law, the Anatomy Act, the heavy military presence in disturbed districts, high tariffs on corn, and the continued levy of church rates were among the examples that, according to radicals of various schools, demonstrated governing class oppressiveness. Though Peel’s Tories bore the brunt of this abuse until the cathartic repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the Whigs’ enthusiasm for an active State was also severely criticized. This led to tension within the Liberal coalition, particularly during Russell’s government which took ofﬁce in 1846. In 1847–8, the Whigs’ commitment to the Church Establishment, to Statesponsored religious education, and to an interventionist social policy led to radical criticism of them that was as virulent as their criticism of the Tories had been in 1829–30. So did their tardiness in economy and their perceived reluctance to reduce costly colonial bureaucracy in favour of self-government for the settlers in Australia and New Zealand, which was, radicals claimed, their birthright.¹⁸ Russell’s tendency to load his cabinet with Whigs from a small number of aristocratic families made it easy to ¹⁷ J. P. Parry, ‘Past and Future in the Later Career of Lord John Russell’, in T. C. W. Blanning and D. Cannadine, eds., History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), 147. ¹⁸ See the Hansard debates of 25 July 1848, 16 April 1849 and 24 May 1849 on the subject of colonial expenditure and self-government, prompted by the colonial reformers.

78

J. P. Parry

pillory them as a narrow and elitist place-loving clique. Moreover, radicals and Peelites used the Continental comparison against the government, claiming that Whig ministers had a poor understanding of English liberties and that only a more vigorous assertion of freedom from State oppression could preserve the character values that protected national health. In the late 1840s, these tensions climaxed in a political crisis. The combination of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the breakdown of the party system, and the experience of revolution abroad destroyed many established landmarks. In 1848–9, Europe was a battleground between repression and revolution, autocracy and socialism; when the dust cleared, Russian power seemed to cast a shadow across the east, while a new Napoleon had emerged in France. These events enormously strengthened the feeling that the British people were capable of selfdiscipline and self-government, and that Britain’s political and economic vigour depended on rejecting the various political errors of the Continent. For the next few years, politics resounded with celebrations of British political and economic libertarianism, which it was almost universally claimed had protected the country from revolution, had allowed it to outstrip its overly-centralized Continental rivals in good government and prosperity, and had thus secured its leading global position.¹⁹ This tidal wave of libertarian language owed a lot to the political game. Palmerston and several leading Peelites and other Liberals adopted it in order to smear Russellite Whigs and Protectionist Conservatives with the charge that they were self-interested dictators rather than patriots. Russell countered, not entirely successfully, by attempting to rally public opinion against a perceived Continental threat to British liberty, in the shape of the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850. He followed this with a series of tussles with Palmerston to see who could most vigorously defend British constitutional values at home and promote them overseas. Their enthusiasm to outbid each other in asserting that Britain had a global mission to defend constitutional liberalism against Russia played a signiﬁcant part in leading a divided cabinet down the slope to war in the Crimea in 1853–4.²⁰ By 1851 libertarian language dominated British politics. This had signiﬁcant consequences both for policy and for the image of the State. ¹⁹ I discuss the political crisis of 1848–51, and several other themes of this essay, at greater length in a forthcoming book, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), chs. 1, 4. ²⁰ For a recent treatment of this theme, see D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy 1846–55 (Manchester, 2002), ch. 7.

Liberalism and Liberty

79

Self-government in the settler colonies became less controversial.²¹ ‘Continental’ policies—on concurrent endowment and land—and State activism were largely ruled out in Ireland. At home there was a decisive swing against protectionism, patronage networks, and other glaring evidence of state support for particular vested interests. High-proﬁle interventionist social legislation became very difﬁcult to pass.²² Proposals for national education, like that of Russell in 1856, were ridiculed. Palmerston’s willingness to take advice from a Continental government and tighten the law on conspiracy to murder led to his downfall in 1858, for supposedly betraying English freedoms.²³ A cult of ‘manliness’ emerged, in which the values of self-reliance and straightforwardness were celebrated and ‘sentimental’ legislation, ‘petticoat government’, and ‘grandmotherly government’ were regarded as un-English.²⁴ The superiority of the national character seemed evident, especially in contrast to the failure yet again of the French to establish a stable liberal representative system of government. It looked as if over-centralization, materialism, and an inability to repress the passions had left Frenchmen unable to govern their own instincts and take responsibility for their own actions; instead they were prey to the temptations of socialism or caesarism.²⁵ In contrast, rampant self-conﬁdence about Britain’s economic success was generated by the successful repeal of the Corn Laws, the global dominance of its manufacturing products, the pressure that these developments put on other countries to lower their tariffs, and the spread of responsible government in the white settler colonies. As the 1850s wore on, it became increasingly plausible to assert that Britain could take the lead in spreading constitutional and economic liberty to the world, and indeed that this was its Providential mission. Britain’s international successes in this decade added powerful ammunition to the view that the country was fulﬁlling its destiny to promote liberty. It was able to cut an unusually bold dash in European politics. In its early stages, the Crimean War was widely celebrated as an ideological war against despotism, and despite its messy end it lightened the national ²¹ J. M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759–1856 (London, 1976), ch. 9. ²² Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990), ch. 7. ²³ B. Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge, 1979). ²⁴ Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1985); John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 455–72. ²⁵ Parry, ‘Impact of Napoleon III’, 150–6.

80

J. P. Parry

mood by removing the perception of a Russian shadow over eastern Europe. Then, in 1859–60, owing to great good fortune, Liberals found themselves able to develop a policy on Italy that combined national assertiveness (in contrast to the weak preceding minority Tory government) with support for Italian self-government against a phalanx of illiberal enemies: France, Austria, and the pope. At no previous point in the history of the Italian question had all three of the bêtes noires of liberalism been on the same side, and this made British action much easier to justify politically. Moreover, the fear of challenge and invasion by Napoleon III’s imperialism was seen off by increased defence spending combined with a push to convert the French to free trade. The diplomatic and tariff treaty victories of 1859–60 positioned Britain as the propagandist of political and economic liberalism, which now looked to be the Continent’s future—making Britain therefore the dominant moral force in Europe.²⁶ In fact these foreign policy successes were due to an unusual conjunction of circumstances: the breakdown of the traditional balance of power, Britain’s peculiar relationship with Napoleon III, and the concentration of diplomatic attention on the Mediterranean region, where Britain could assert its naval might. Britain would never again have as much power to sway the destinies of Europe. And from the early 1860s it was less plausible to portray most Continental regimes as backward autocracies, so that it became harder to present European politics as a virtuous struggle against autocracy or to use European comparisons to highlight British virtues. Similarly, the domestic rallying-cry of liberty against the State was more fragile than it appeared, and was never as effective again. In the 1850s, the rhetoric of freedom was attractive for two reasons: because it asserted— accurately or otherwise—that British politics were driven by the public interest rather than by vested interests, and because it celebrated speciﬁc qualities of manliness and self-reliance that seemed to have made the British the strongest nation in the world. The real object of celebration was British greatness and British character rather than mere liberty itself. Though it is often said that Palmerston’s domestic and foreign policies were based on warring principles, in fact they had the same root: chauvinistic self-satisfaction. Moreover, his dominance depended on exploiting the enfeebled state of the party system, de-emphasizing many speciﬁc Liberal rallying cries, and focusing instead on the celebration and exploitation of English vigour. The inability of Liberals to rally around any more ²⁶ Parry, ‘Impact of Napoleon III’, 156–62.

Liberalism and Liberty

81

positive creed allowed the triumph of a lowest common denominator politics resting merely on the language of freedom, low taxation, and British distinctness. The triumph of anti-statism, therefore, was caused not by the dominance of a coherent party political creed but by the absence of one. And even at this time, the State was able stealthily to increase its inﬂuence in social and educational affairs: the parliamentary grant for education rose to £1.3m by 1862, and John Simon, the chief medical ofﬁcer of health, quietly extended his powers.²⁷ The remit of the police also grew.²⁸ When, in the mid-1860s, the Liberals sought once again to function and develop as a creed-based party, they had to ﬁnd a policy which required some sort of State activity. A rough consensus emerged that parliamentary reform was needed. Russell took it up on Palmerston’s death partly to make the Liberal party a proper party again, and partly because an increased electorate would prod Parliament, inactive in the early 1860s, into a general policy of legislative activity, as in the 1830s. Most Liberal MPs sitting for sizeable borough seats were publicly committed to Reform after 1859, in response to artisan pressure for the vote.²⁹ Many argued that artisans had the practical qualities of common sense, self-discipline, restraint, and concern for others that typiﬁed the national character. Other Liberals supported Reform because they felt that there was too little political morality and national unity. Enfranchisement would integrate the working classes into the political nation and prevent them thinking as a separate class. It would abolish what R. H. Hutton called ‘class patriotism’ in favour of a reassertion of Parliament’s role to reconcile social tensions. Academic Liberals hoped that Reform would establish the mythical community of sentiment between brains and numbers that they convinced themselves had arisen in Britain over the American Civil War.³⁰These arguments also built on a mood in sections of the intelligentsia, which had begun as a counter-cultural ²⁷ Parry, Rise and Fall, 202–7; R. Lambert, Sir John Simon, 1816–1904, and English Social Administration (London, 1963). For Herbert Spencer’s lament about over-legislation in the 1850s, see D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London, 1973), 102. ²⁸ Here should be considered not only the Act of 1856 requiring all counties to establish a police force (Parry, Rise and Fall, 205n.) but also the granting of police powers to act against obscene publications, agreed in 1857 despite ‘libertarian’ opposition from MPs like Roebuck: M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Morals, Art, and the Law: The Passing of the Obscene Publications Act, 1857’, Victorian Studies, 28 (1985), 609–29. ²⁹ Parry, Rise and Fall, 209–11. ³⁰ C. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860–86 (London, 1976), 113–14, 149–50.

82

J. P. Parry

movement, especially among Unitarians and Christian Socialists, against the laissez-faire insularity of the 1850s. It became fashionable to argue that a sense of nationhood and social cohesion was being undermined by self-indulgence and excessive individualism. Two culprits were blamed. One was upper-class lethargy in failing to supply invigorating political leadership, manifested in a decline in party spirit and parliamentary efﬁciency; the House of Commons seemed selﬁsh and complacent and impossible to discipline in support of social objectives. The second, even more widespread, was what seemed the unrestrained triumph of commercial principles and ‘Manchesterism’, of money-worship and materialism at every level, down to penny-pinching ratepayers refusing to tackle insanitary local conditions and sheltering behind the rhetoric that such laissez-faire protected English character against Continental bureaucracy.³¹ George Dawson, Birmingham’s Unitarian pastor, lamented the decay of public virtue—of civic and national patriotism—since his youth and urged commercial leaders to take public ofﬁce and ratepayers to tolerate council spending.³² For Bagehot, in 1867, British suspicion of the executive was illogical and regrettable, for ‘freedom means that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive’.³³ This rhetoric of cross-class unity and nation-building is hardly surprising. Liberalism was at heart concerned with constitutional and ethical issues—with integrating different sections of the community, with checking vested interests, and with the development of character. This is not to deny that there were also inﬂuential doctrinaire political economists in the Liberal party throughout the nineteenth century. But it is striking that the leading politicians of this stamp, from Lansdowne and Wood to Lowe and Goschen, were those most easily tempted by the idea of cross-party coalitions in defence of economy and laissez-faire (in 1827, 1845–6, 1866–7 and 1885–6). To varying degrees, doctrinaires of this type were ambivalent about party, lamenting the compromises of economic principle that it required. The Liberal party was necessarily a political entity, concerned to integrate social forces into the body politic and respond to grievances. ³¹For example, this was a theme of Tennyson (see e.g. The Third of February, 1852 (1852) and Maud (1854)), of the Christian Socialists (see e.g. T. Hughes, ‘The Volunteer’s Catechism, with a Few Words on Butts’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 2 ( July 1860), 193, and J. M. Ludlow, ‘The Reconstitution of England’, Contemporary Review, 16 (Mar. 1871), 507), and of J. A. Froude (see ‘England’s War’, Fraser’s Magazine, 3 (Feb. 1871), 140, 147). ³² W. Wilson, The Life of George Dawson (Birmingham, 1905), 150–1. ³³ W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. P. Smith (Cambridge, 2001 edn.), 180.

Liberalism and Liberty

83

II The driving force of nineteenth-century Liberalism, then, was the desire to build an effective national political community and to develop the right virtues in the nation, rather than a particular attitude to the State. The same factors that bolstered the language of liberty in the 1850s—the hostility to vested interests, and the emphasis on disciplining and building national character—could in other circumstances encourage and justify State action. The extension of the franchise in 1867 deﬁnitively reinforced the assumption that the British State now reﬂected the will of ‘the people’ rather than merely the views of threatening, over-assertive vested interests. In October 1867, the Nonconformist voluntaryist radical Edward Miall switched to accept government interference in education explicitly because control of the State was passing from one class to another, so that there should no longer be grounds for working-class suspicion of it.³⁴ Increased popular enfranchisement encouraged the new leader Gladstone to press for further cuts in spending, particularly on the military: he saw Tory favouritism to the army as part of a ‘Continental system of feeding the desires of classes and portions of the community at the expense of the whole’.³⁵ However, it also encouraged critics of laissezfaire to urge an end to suspicion of State spending. For Froude, the logic of 1867 was more State interference to protect people’s health, sanitation, and legal rights.³⁶ He was far from alone. Modern Liberalism, G. W. E. Russell wrote in 1883, viewed the State as ‘the nation in its collective and corporate character . . . the one sovereign agent for all moral, material, and social reforms’.³⁷ There was nothing in principle controversial about Chamberlain’s claim, in 1885, that a government chosen by the people should have more power than former regimes controlled by a small class.³⁸ Liberal State activity after 1867 took two main forms, neither of them new. One was to increase fairness within the political community by disciplining over-mighty vested interests. These included irresponsible landlords, for example. By the time of the 1880–5 Parliament, nearly all ³⁴ A. Miall, Life of Edward Miall (London, 1884), 273. ³⁵ At Leigh, The Times, 21 Oct. 1868, 8. ³⁶ J. A. Froude, ‘On Progress’, Fraser’s Magazine, 2 (Dec. 1870), 682. ³⁷ G. W. E. Russell, ‘A Protest against Whiggery’, Nineteenth Century, 13 (June 1883), 925. The ﬁrst phrase was a quotation from Burke. ³⁸ R. Harcourt Williams (ed.), Salisbury–Balfour Correspondence: Letters Exchanged between the Third Marquess of Salisbury and his Nephew Arthur James Balfour 1869–1892 (Ware, 1988), 137.

84

J. P. Parry

Liberals had abandoned freedom of contract principles on Irish and Scottish land issues and on the game laws and agricultural holdings in England. Though particular historicist arguments applied in Ireland and Scotland, the legislation of these years was more generally defended by reference to the precedent of public utility—that the State had previously intervened for the common good, in education, factory reform, and the poor law.³⁹ In 1885 the Whig Arthur Elliot and the radical G. O. Trevelyan both maintained—thinking of the abolition of slavery in 1833 and the debates about Irish Church appropriation in 1834–5—that it had been standard Liberal doctrine that Parliament could interfere with private property subject to compensation, and that all public endowments were public property subject to public inquiry.⁴⁰ T. H. Green suggested that the Liberals had for ﬁfty years been ﬁghting ‘the same old cause of social good against class interests’.⁴¹ Secondly, the Liberal State was concerned with improving morality and character, especially in the lower classes. A major component of Liberal interest in Reform in the 1830s, the 1860s, and the 1880s was that a broader franchise would give the executive more authority to intervene in society to shape morals. Despite all the conﬁdent talk about the capacity of the English for self-discipline and self-government, it was not widely believed that this capacity was inherent in the English race owing to some ethnic uniqueness. Though some might wax lyrical about innate English traits, in general the view was that the English talent for self-government had been shaped more by generations of conditioning from a respected system of law. It was the common recognition of a patria, a community of institutions and laws, that had done most to shape English civic responsibility, and the fourfold expansion of the electorate between 1866 and 1885 demonstrated the future scale of that task. In the 1868–74 government, the Liberals’ social agenda was dominated by moralistic legislation, such as the 1870 Education Act, the 1872 Licensing Act, and ³⁹ Parry, Rise and Fall, 243–5, 293–4. In 1877, G. C. Brodrick denied that laissez-faire was a Liberal principle, in his pamphlet published by the Liberal Central Association, ‘What are Liberal Principles?’, reprinted in his Political Studies (London, 1879), 220. In 1870, Lowe remarked that the principles of political economy were violated every day: E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974), 306. On Ireland and Scotland, see C. Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish Land Acts, 1870–86’, Past & Present, 64 (1974), 30–70. ⁴⁰ See A. R. D. Elliot, ‘Three Reform Bills’, Edinburgh Review, 161 (Apr. 1885), 583–4. ⁴¹ T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and Other Writings, ed. P. Harris and J. Morrow (Cambridge, 1986 edn.), 196.

Liberalism and Liberty

85

the Poor Law reforms of 1869. At the 1880 election, the agenda took the form of a three-pronged strategy to bring the values of Liberal Britain to the ‘feudal’ counties, through franchise reform, the introduction of elected local authorities, and a restructuring of the relations between landlords, tenants, and labourers. Many Liberals and Conservatives consistently argued that State social reform, within limits, was immensely valuable, not least in warding off the dangers of Commune-style socialism by demonstrating that communal beneﬁcence was compatible with the maintenance of individual responsibility.⁴² It was usually seen as a constructive, relatively non-partisan and non-contentious cry. In general, and over time, the notion of State intervention in these two forms was accepted: the progressive extension of the franchise made it more difﬁcult to rally Liberals in principled arguments against it. Even so, the idea of an active State was subject to strict limits. Not least, this was because landowners dominated Parliament until the 1880s and were able to ensure that its activity did not damage elite interests but followed more congenial directions. In this period, Liberals assumed that two large counterweights would continue to operate alongside central government and check its potential for evil. The ﬁrst was the inﬂuence of Christianity and Christian responsibility, something that we will revert to in the ﬁnal section. This was a major theme in the thinking of Gladstone, of Russell, and of the leading Nonconformists, but also of many pundits. Frederic Seebohm, writing in 1880, believed that Britain—and its empire—stood the best chance among European regimes of rejecting authoritarian ideologies like imperialism and socialism, because the Liberal party was inﬂuenced by ‘Christian spirit’, which could teach the democracy the real meaning of individual responsibility and the brotherhood of man.⁴³ George Brodrick considered it necessary to carry ‘the spirit of Christianity, democratic as it is . . . into political life’ if we are to maintain ‘a high national character’.⁴⁴ The second was, as before, local government: ‘those ancient local institutions by which [the English] have been trained to self-government’, according to Erskine May.⁴⁵ The 1870s and 1880s saw a great ﬂowering of Liberal civic spirit. Local government expenditure rose strikingly and ⁴² See e.g. Duke of Northumberland, President of the NAPSS, in Illustrated London News, 1 Oct. 1870, 342; D. Steele, Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London, 1999), 79–81. ⁴³ F. Seebohm, ‘Imperialism and Socialism’, Nineteenth Century, 7 (Apr. 1880), 732–3. ⁴⁴ G. C. Brodrick, ‘The Progress of Democracy in England’, Nineteenth Century, 14 (Nov. 1883), 923–4. ⁴⁵ T. E. May, The Constitutional History of England since the Accession of George the Third 1760–1860, 2 vols. (London, 1861–3), ii. 492.

86

J. P. Parry

the powers of councils were greatly expanded through the use of Provisional Orders. Town halls, museums, libraries, and art galleries were built in profusion; the movement for civic universities took off.⁴⁶ In creating the new Local Government Board in 1871, James Stansfeld was at pains to argue that it was not a centralizing measure but gave ‘new force to the principle of local government’. It allowed local powers to expand but also checked the danger of extravagant schemes that would alienate ratepayers.⁴⁷ Liberal emphasis on local agency crucially implied popular sovereignty and control, which reconciled wary radicals to collectivism in some spheres. This was particularly the case with education: by the 1880s most Liberals—even those Nonconformist sects most hostile to State intervention in the 1850s—had become warm supporters of the idea of communal responsibility for education, and compulsory attendance, because of the work of the popularly-elected school boards. Not surprisingly, therefore, one of the points on which Hartington and Chamberlain were agreed in the 1880s was that the extension of local self-government was a cardinal Liberal principle.⁴⁸ But the emphasis on local power can be exaggerated: Brodrick, Bagehot, and many others thought it essential for politicians to subordinate local self-government to ‘the paramount rights and duties of national self-government’.⁴⁹ In practice there were still frequent tensions in Liberalism about the problem of liberty. The traditional concern about the potential for oppression by an autocratic or aristocratic State continued. There was also a new anxiety, after 1867, that the rising democracy might suppress the freedom, rights, and individuality of minorities in order to elevate the mass, the machine, and a uniform mediocrity. Moreover, there was scope for concern that ‘socialism’ might interfere with enterprise and property rights. But equally there was a countervailing alarm that an all-powerful commercial materialism might blunt conscience and crush spirituality, thus checking the development of the manly qualities on which true citizenship depended. All four anxieties were exacerbated by the ⁴⁶ Parry, Rise and Fall, 238–9. See also Simon Szreter, ‘Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On The Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development’, Population and Development Review, 23 (1997), 709–12. ⁴⁷ Hansard, ccviii. 79, 20 July 1871. This was a signiﬁcant rebranding exercise, since its predecessor, the Poor Law Board, had had an overly centralist and autocratic image, and Stansfeld—admirer of Mazzini and opponent of Contagious Diseases legislation—was known as a libertarian. For the LGB, see Christine Bellamy, Administering Central–Local Relations, 1871–1919: The Local Government Board in its Fiscal and Cultural Context (Manchester, 1988). ⁴⁸ Parry, Rise and Fall, 241. ⁴⁹ Brodrick, ‘What are Liberal Principles?’, 220; Bagehot, English Constitution, 180–2.

Liberalism and Liberty

87

awareness that the post-1867 State had greater authority to get its way, for good or ill. In a loosely disciplined party, it was inevitable that such differences of opinion would emerge, not least because individual politicians like Harcourt and Fawcett could make their names by trading on them. For example, as the Gladstone government’s authority waned after 1870, libertarian Whigs and radicals exploited the situation by campaigning against interventionist legislation for exhibiting autocratically illiberal and ‘continental’ tendencies. The 1871 Licensing Bill proposed a special police inspectorate for public houses, to be appointed by the Home Ofﬁce. The old Chartist J. R. Stephens claimed that this was a French-style government spy system designed to restrict the liberties of Englishmen. It was disliked so strongly by Liberal opinion that it never even reached second reading stage. The milder version of the Bill which became law in 1872, which put the special police inspectorate under local not central control, and again restricted opening hours, inspired protests from working men at which ‘Rule Britannia’ was sung, placing ‘particular emphasis on “Britons never shall be slaves” ’.⁵⁰ The government’s attempt to sell off most of the remaining Crown land in Epping Forest, which was a very popular spot for working-class East-Enders’ recreation, created an outcry and was defeated by a Liberal backbench revolt in April 1871.⁵¹ In 1872, Harcourt protested successfully against new regulations brought in by the junior minister A. S. Ayrton restricting the right of public meeting and speaking in the London Royal Parks—claiming that even French working men had more rights.⁵² Most of the blame for these errors fell on the hapless Home Secretary Bruce, who was eventually removed to the Lords in 1873. One radical claimed that the government aimed at ‘the perfectionment of the spy system in England . . . the trammels of which will prove as dangerous and demoralizing’ to liberty here as under ‘the despotic Governments of the Continent’.⁵³ But it could equally well be argued that liberty was threatened by a more democratic State. Indeed, in 1872 Cardwell, Secretary for War, fulminated about ‘democratic tyrants’ and the trend towards over-regulation by legislation, particularly in relation to a proposed amendment to the Ballot Bill to ⁵⁰ B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (London, 1971), 267, 276. ⁵¹ Parry, Rise and Fall, 235. ⁵² Gardiner, Harcourt, i. 236–9. ⁵³ Samuel Blackstone, ‘Paternal Government: Whither Are We Drifting?’, The Saint Pauls Magazine, 12 (June 1873), 725.

88

J. P. Parry

make it an imprisonable offence for a voter to show his ballot paper after voting.⁵⁴ Gladstone’s attempt to drive an unprecedented amount of executive-sponsored legislation through Parliament began to cause great resentment and to be counter-productive, since the bills were widely said to be ill-considered and a higher proportion than usual had to be withdrawn.⁵⁵ The main complaint was that legislation was being framed to catch the will-o’-the-wisp of popular sentiment. One seminal moment was the withdrawal of the match tax after a protest by match girls, requiring a recasting of the 1871 budget and higher income taxes on the propertied classes. The apparent courting of the American democracy over the Alabama affair, and the republican sentiments expressed by Dilke and Chamberlain, added to the sense of a drift towards a democratic tone. Hard-headed rational intellects such as Froude, Greg, Grey, and Fitzjames Stephen lamented the tendency of modern political leaders to prioritize sentimental or polemical issues because these were the ones on which a party cry could be mounted. They felt that there was an urgent need instead for scientiﬁc, considered, interventionist legislation, framed by experts in a non-partisan manner to deal with unfashionable but important issues like law, army, navy, and colonial reform.⁵⁶ Others, sensing that there was no longer so much scope for the independence of thought and action that they had always associated with being a Liberal or radical parliamentarian, criticized the increasing power of the constituency party machine, like Akroyd, or left British politics altogether in despair, like Henry Layard.⁵⁷ In the late 1870s, Akroyd’s concern that MPs were increasingly being required to pledge to support particular fads of concern to small but powerful groups of constituency activists developed into a more widespread fear of the caucus and the Americanization of British ⁵⁴ Cardwell to Gladstone, 12 April, 19 April 1872, Gladstone Papers, British Library, Add. MSS 44120, fos. 21, 23. See Bruce Kinzer, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics (New York, 1982), 207–10, and T. A. Jenkins, ed., ‘The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1868–73’, Camden Miscellany 32, Camden, 5th ser., 3 (London, 1994), 456–60. ⁵⁵ Parry, Rise and Fall, 254, 271; Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865–1898 (London, 1999), 95, 97, 102n., 108. ⁵⁶ W. R. Greg, ‘Cost of Party Government’, Quarterly Review, 126 (Apr. 1869), 394–413; J. F. Stephen, ‘Parliamentary Government’, Contemporary Review, 23 (Dec. 1873, Jan. 1874), 1–19, 165–81; J. A. Froude, ‘Political Prospects’, Fraser’s Magazine, 5 (Jan. 1872), 1–16; 3rd Earl Grey, Hansard, ccxi. 1429–30, 10 June 1872. ⁵⁷ J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986), 116–21. See E. Akroyd, On the Present Attitude of Political Parties (London, 1874), and the Layard–Gregory correspondence in Layard Papers, British Library, Add. MSS 38949.

Liberalism and Liberty

89

politics.⁵⁸ One sign of this was Forster’s bitter but eventually successful battle against Nonconformist zealots in his Bradford constituency.⁵⁹ There was also an underlying fear that democracy would spread socialistic economic notions, eroding the individual responsibility on which British success was based. It might encourage an over-sentimental attitude to pauperism—indeed, Goschen’s belief that this had happened in the United States and Australia shaped his plans to tighten the poor law in 1869–71.⁶⁰ Ratepayers, especially rural and suburban ones, complained that increased activity by central government was imposing substantial costs on local administration which were falling only on rated property, while other categories of wealth were escaping. Advocates of relief for local ratepayers repeatedly complained at what Harcourt called ‘the rapacious maw of centralized philanthropy and doctrinaire extravagance’. The elementary education issue also became caught up in the arguments about local taxation. The imposition of a rate for board schools caused considerable local irritation, especially among those social classes just too respectable to deign to send their children to these institutions.⁶¹ Tax- and ratepayer concerns of this sort were widespread, and it is undoubtedly the case that, from the 1880s especially, Conservatives were able to win middle-class votes by projecting themselves as the low tax party and claiming that Liberals had abandoned their old policy of economy and individual rights. The uncertainty about whether Parliament would still be dominated by the propertied classes after a further major extension of the franchise in 1885 intensiﬁed fears about property rights in the 1880s. As noted above, Liberals could afford to be relaxed about ‘socialism’ before the 1880s because Parliament reﬂected propertied interests, and in 1880–5, despite some radical rhetoric, Liberal land legislation was still unambitious. But Chamberlain’s threatening language at the 1885 election and his claim to speak on behalf of new voters understandably increased the sense that property might not be so fortunate in future. These anxieties helped to change the nature of the debate about liberty from this point. ⁵⁸ Brodrick, Political Studies, 257–77; E. D. J. Wilson, ‘The Caucus and its Consequences’, Nineteenth Century, 4 (Oct. 1878), 695–712; H. Reeve, ‘Plain Whig Principles’, Edinburgh Review, 151 (Jan. 1880), 279. ⁵⁹ T. W. Reid, Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster, 2 vols. (London, 1888), ii., ch. 5. ⁶⁰ J. Vincent, ed., Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Lord Stanley 1849–1869 (Hassocks, 1978), 327–8. ⁶¹ See J. P. Parry, ‘Gladstone, Liberalism and the Government of 1868–1874’, in D. W. Bebbington and R. Swift, eds., Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000), 99, and Gardiner, Harcourt, i. 263.

90

J. P. Parry

However, Liberal MPs were not seriously divided by these concerns, since there was little consistent zeal for the defence of pure laissez-faire principles. Though a Liberty and Property Defence League was established in 1882 to protest against interference with freedom of contract, with the support of some doctrinaire political economy Liberals, in fact few members of the League were Liberal. In so far as it was a political lobby rather than a business one, its inclinations were Tory.⁶² Indeed, the libertarian Herbert Spencer lamented the philosophical error that most Liberals made in believing that because the State was now ‘responsible’ to a wider electorate, it should concern itself with ‘the welfare of the many’.⁶³ The party split badly in 1886 on the Home Rule issue, but Liberal Unionists did not vote signiﬁcantly differently to Gladstonians on land reform issues afterwards.⁶⁴ It was difﬁcult for Liberals to argue that the new electors of 1885, whom after all they themselves had enfranchised with enthusiasm, would not be reliable citizens capable of rising above narrow class concerns. It was at the electoral level that ratepayer complaints did most to damage Liberal support. Moreover, the Conservatives were able to beneﬁt from libertarian anxieties in another way, by playing up the threat posed by local Liberal activists, particularly Nonconformist temperance zealots, to the working man’s right to enjoy his pint of beer.⁶⁵ In other words, it was not so much that Liberals were torn apart by the problem of State power; rather, their increasing tolerance of it allowed the Conservatives to develop an appeal around the idea of liberty. Nonconformists were among those Liberals whose attitudes to State activity were particularly complex. They often found it difﬁcult to agree on whether speciﬁc interventions would succour or blunt the religious conscience. Between 1870 and 1874, for example, their suspicion of the State came to the fore: many Nonconformist activists were offended by the idea of State funding for denominational schools, and ofﬁcial acceptance of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts. Arguably, however, as we can see by turning to consider the relationship between liberty and religion, this was a late expression of an old-fashioned ⁶² E. Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), esp. 770–3. ⁶³ H. Spencer, ‘The New Toryism’, Contemporary Review, 45 (Feb. 1884), 158, 164. ⁶⁴ G. D. Phillips, ‘The Whig Lords and Liberalism, 1886–1893’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 169–70. ⁶⁵ See J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language, and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998).

Liberalism and Liberty

91

Dissenting point of view, which was at odds with a general trend to have more conﬁdence in State power as the franchise increased and as political leaders seemed more morally trustworthy.

III Liberals discussed religion, ﬁrst and foremost, in the context of the concerns about political and civil liberties that we discussed earlier. The Whig/Liberal party was committed to improving the political rights of religious minorities and dismantling the Tory ancien régime. It never accepted that Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics should not have political representation, and, once this was achieved in 1828–9, there was unstoppable pressure within the party to support at least some of the subsequent grievances of these sects. The culture of the Liberal party was instinctively sympathetic to allegations of oppression by the socially and politically powerful Church Establishment, with its Tory connections. By the late 1850s, nearly all Liberal MPs had come round to advocating the abolition of church rates. Nonconformist freedom to take degrees at Oxford and Cambridge was secured by the Liberal legislation of 1854, 1856, and 1871. Suspicion of the Church’s capacity to use its privileged position to prevent true liberty of religious practice, and to beneﬁt the Conservative party in the process, was one of the main causes of the Nonconformist unhappiness with some provisions of the 1870 Education Act.⁶⁶ Even in 1880, an incoming Liberal government could still ﬁnd a legitimate Nonconformist grievance to rectify, with the Burials Act. In this most fundamental sense, Liberals deﬁned British identity in terms of constitutionalism and pluralism rather than Protestantism. The most searing Whig criticism of Tory rule in Ireland before 1829 concerned their refusal to give Irish Catholics a sense of belonging to the United Kingdom by the granting of Catholic Emancipation. Conversely, the compact of 1829 between Irish Catholics and the State was the basis of Liberal Irish policy subsequently. Liberals argued that, by swearing an oath of allegiance, Catholic MPs overrode any theoretical loyalty to the pope that might hinder their full-hearted support for British law. It was on these grounds that Liberals subsequently rejected nearly all the ⁶⁶ J. P. Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism and “Englishness”: The United Kingdom’, in C. Clark and W. Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conﬂict in NineteenthCentury Europe (Cambridge, 2003), 159–65.

92

J. P. Parry

anti-Catholic scare stories peddled by Tory evangelicals and others, despite their own deep hostility, in most cases, to what they perceived as the illiberal and dictatorial nature of Catholicism. Liberal politicians assumed that if the British acted on their responsibility to supply good and responsive government, the Irish would have no reason to reject the rule of law and British sovereignty. Many of them upheld continuously the argument that the State must not question the loyalty of law-abiding Irish Catholics. However, the issue became controversial on two occasions, when Russell, in 1850–1, and Gladstone, in 1874, became obsessed with the idea that the papacy was using its moral authority over the Catholic ﬂock to interfere in Irish politics. The notion that an autocratic alien power might seek to use its inﬂuence over minds to undermine the authority of the British government in Ireland led them both to make public statements which necessarily appeared very critical of the Catholic faith.⁶⁷ Similarly, there was a major ongoing problem about the degree of ﬁnancial support that the State should give to religion in Ireland, to which the only remotely viable solution was the policy of withdrawing State endowment from all sects, though that was neither possible in elementary education, nor attractive to Irish Catholic representatives when attempted for universities. Commitment to pluralism and suspicion of Catholic sacerdotalism were central to Liberalism because of the emphasis on freedom of conscience. Precisely what this entailed necessarily varied, depending on individual attitudes to religion. Still, most Liberals were convinced that freedom of thought had facilitated a beneﬁcial progress in the state of opinion in recent generations. This march of mind had contributed massively to civilization and wealth but also to a better spiritual understanding. Many high-proﬁle mid-Victorian Liberals were to some degree critical of orthodox Anglican teaching for holding too blindly to implausible dogma. But equally, nearly all of them subscribed to the essentials of Christianity, often adhering to the idea of progressive revelation. It was a commonplace of Liberal Anglican thought that the spread of Christian morality in a nation was the best defence against the decay and degradation that had overwhelmed past empires. The British, moreover, had a great advantage in this struggle because of the purity of their Protestant religion and their long-held freedom to develop a strong ⁶⁷ For Russell’s Durham letter, see S. Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell, 2 vols. (London, 1889), ii. 120–1; for Gladstone, see his The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation (London, 1874).

Liberalism and Liberty

93

individual relationship with God. Similarly, the leading Nonconformist R. W. Dale regarded the clash with Rome as heroic, and Protestantism as ‘one of the chief bonds of our national unity’.⁶⁸ Whigs and Nonconformists were bound to agree that the ability to interpret the Bible and the Christian revelation for themselves had contributed enormously to the virtue of Englishmen’s political culture. A living faith in the moral government of the world, a sense of individual responsibility, the ability to govern the self, a rejection of materialism and division, and an understanding of the brotherhood and unity of men in Christ: these were values to cherish and to inculcate. Further generalization is treacherous, not least because not all Liberals believed in original sin. But most Liberal Anglicans and Nonconformists would have accepted that the truest deﬁnition of liberty was reconciliation with God. Man was made to move with perfect freedom in harmony with the divine order, but his sinfulness had deprived him of that freedom by obscuring the knowledge of God that would give it to him. The idea of attaining freedom from the bondage of sin is part of the very ﬁrst deﬁnition of the word liberty in the Oxford English Dictionary. As the Congregationalist Henry Allon said, ‘freedom is conformity to the highest law—the law of moral right’.⁶⁹ Not surprisingly, in view of the tensions discussed in previous sections, Liberals disagreed about the role of the State in promoting these Christian values. Most Anglican Liberals attached enormous importance to the idea of an Established Church as a vehicle for promoting morality, for checking sinfulness and materialism, and indeed for underpinning the authority and Christian responsibility of the political elite. The strikingly commercial nature of mid-Victorian society, and the anxiety about class antagonism, meant that this view strengthened, if anything, as time went on. Broad Church critiques of theological dogma also helped the Liberal justiﬁcation for Establishment by making it easier to argue that a modern Church could rise above controversial creeds to serve the Protestant nation: that it could be a truly national and representative institution to ﬁt the national, representative Liberal State. From the 1850s the idea of the Liberal Establishment won a new lease of life, owing to the reaction against the dominant clerical parties of the 1830s and 1840s, the evangelicals and the Oxford movement. Hostility to the divisive sectionalism which both seemed to exemplify, and to the priestly pretensions of the latter, led ⁶⁸ R. W. Dale, Protestantism: Its Ultimate Principle (London, 1874), 10–11. ⁶⁹ H. Allon, ‘Why Nonconformists Desire Disestablishment’, Contemporary Review, 17 (June 1871), 397.

94

J. P. Parry

Anglican Liberals to argue that State support for the Church was necessary to preserve tolerance in national religious life and the liberties of laymen against possible clerical tyranny. They tended to be inherently suspicious of priests’ authoritarianism, intellectual narrowness, and power to manipulate weak minds, and saw a strong national Establishment as the best way of subjecting them to the rule of law. Its country-wide legal structure would promote national integration and public morality, while it would be legitimized by and accountable to representative lay parliamentary authority. These notions of Establishment were further underpinned when national education became a major political issue, from the late 1860s, since the idea that a basic undenominational Christianity should be taught in ratepayer-funded schools became the least controversial of the various options for solving the fraught question of support for religious teaching.⁷⁰ On the other hand, evangelical Nonconformists had a different strategy for improving the religious purity of the country. Intensely aware of sin and materialism, and committed to liberating the believer’s individual conscience as an antidote to it, they were convinced that State authority, like the priesthood, denied that freedom and undercut Christ’s authority. The principles of Christianity were universal, but the Establishment set man apart from man because it was a mere human organization, constructed on a geographical rather than a doctrinal basis. The alliance with the State corrupted its purity and spiritual zeal; the search for a national appeal led it to fudge doctrinal truth.⁷¹ Disestablishment would bring the Church back to basics. All sects could work to tackle the sin and sorrow in the world, and bring man back into harmony with God. England without its Established Church would be more religious, not less.⁷² These beliefs were genuinely held, but they could easily remain abstract principles. In order to be politically potent, they needed to be stimulated by hard examples of the evil perpetrated by the Church–State connection. It was no accident that radical Nonconformists took up disestablishment as a political cry in the 1840s, at the time when radical suspicion of the oppressiveness and sectionalism of the State was at its height, and the need for national spiritual puriﬁcation in the face of depression and social afﬂiction seemed most urgent. It was easy to portray the Anglican Church as seduced from its evangelizing duties by its extensive patronage structure, which gave material beneﬁts to the same ⁷⁰ Parry, Democracy and Religion, chs. 1–2. ⁷¹ Ibid. 202–5. ⁷² R. W. Dale, The Politics of Nonconformity: A Lecture (Manchester, 1871), 31–2.

Liberalism and Liberty

95

propertied class that controlled the State. At this time, provincial Nonconformists, convinced that purity did not extend far outside their own spiritual communities, typically looked on the whole metropolitan political world as effete and un-Christian. Whig support for extending State endowment to Catholicism, in Ireland and in English schools, was another stimulus to the Nonconformists’ campaign to cut the links between politics and religion. It led them into a vigorous agitation against a national system of State-supported education, and in favour of voluntaryism. It was widely held that only Nonconformists had secured the religious purity of Britain in the seventeenth century; perhaps only they could be relied upon to do it again.⁷³ These visceral instincts remained deep within Victorian Nonconformity. They could easily ﬂare up, particularly in the early 1870s, prompted by a panic about State endowment of resurgent Romanism in Ireland and of Anglican schools—training-grounds for Toryism—in England. This panic led to a campaign for disestablishment and secularism which in 1871–3 paralysed the Liberal party.⁷⁴ However, this was the last really powerful ﬂourish of Nonconformist anti-statism. By the 1870s, in general, Nonconformists were less suspicious of political power and more conﬁdent that their Christian values could make headway in national life. They shared the widespread Liberal assumption that the diffusion of power had made the post-1867 State more trustworthy than the pre-1848 one. And they found the tone of Victorian Anglicanism more reassuringly earnest than it had been in the days of ‘Old Corruption’. Nonconformists had always been staunch patriots, much less critical of the spiritual culture of Britain than of its Continental equivalents; by the 1870s, this attitude was all the stronger.⁷⁵ This did not mean that they became complacent about politics or the tone of national life. Indeed, one impetus to renewed evangelizing vigour after 1867 was the fear of a merely secular democracy. Religion, together with intelligence, were crucial ‘counter-balancing centrifugal forces’ to the ‘menacing . . . centripetal force in Democracy’ which posed a ‘terrible ⁷³ Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism’, 156–8. The principal Nonconformist body agitating for disestablishment, the Anti-State Church Association, was founded in 1844 and became the Liberation Society in 1853. ⁷⁴ Ibid. ⁷⁵ See e.g. on the developing cult of Oliver Cromwell, R. Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914: A Preliminary Sketch’, in J. Garnett and C. Matthew, eds., Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), 201–47, and B. Worden, ‘The Victorians and Oliver Cromwell’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young, eds., History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, (Cambridge, 2000), 112–35.

96

J. P. Parry

danger to the higher freedom and life of mankind’. Dissenters aimed instead to turn democracy into Christian paths, thus allowing it to fulﬁl its ‘sacred mission’.⁷⁶ Moreover, most Liberal Nonconformists were never entirely comfortable with the old radical strategy of blaming aristocratic politicians for national failures. They felt that it was the responsibility of each member of a Christian community to help to maintain its own virtue, rather than simply to pin the fault on elites.⁷⁷ Politics should not be shunned, as too many of their forefathers had done. Rather, the power of conscience should be asserted; voters should be taught by example the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical state of the nation. Nonconformists should accept that the State could act for a Christian purpose and should take part in the struggle to infuse it with righteousness. One early sign of their commitment to this process was the strong support that Dissenting preachers gave to the cause of British government in India after the Mutiny of 1857.⁷⁸ After 1867, a standard theme of politically-active Nonconformists was the need to infuse politics with a religious conscience, and to stand ﬁrm against evil. This helps to explain the intensity of the struggle over education and against the Contagious Diseases Acts, which opponents claimed were unacceptable because the State was behaving illiberally, amorally, and in a class-bound, sexist, and un-English way.⁷⁹ Both these campaigns have often been seen as awkwardly divisive for the Liberal party because they seemed to privilege conscience over party loyalty. But despite undoubted strains in 1870–3, the two were not incompatible. I have argued elsewhere that the Nonconformist campaign on education strengthened rather than weakened local Liberal parties in their struggle against the Conservative enemy.⁸⁰ The Bulgarian agitation of 1876, and the campaign against the unconstitutional and unethical ‘Beaconsﬁeldism’ in 1879–80, were the greatest examples of Nonconformist-dominated moral crusades, and, taken together, they improved party coherence. More importantly, they ⁷⁶ J. Baldwin Brown, ‘The English Church and Dissenters’, Contemporary Review, 16 (Jan. 1871), 320. ⁷⁷ See e.g. the speech made by Samuel Morley at the Administrative Reform Association meeting reported in The Times, 14 June 1855, 12. Although those to whom the people had entrusted responsibility had certainly failed in the conduct of the war, the system was as good as the public willed it to be; the real problem was that ‘there was a total absence of the recognition of individual responsibility on the part of the people of England’. ⁷⁸ Brian Stanley, ‘Christian Responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., The Church and War, Studies in Church History, 20 (Oxford, 1983), 283–9. ⁷⁹ Parry, ‘Impact of Napoleon III’, 167–8. ⁸⁰ Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism’.

Liberalism and Liberty

97

asserted that conscience rather than ofﬁcial and elite convenience should determine foreign policy, and that it was the responsibility of each voter to demand that those in charge of the State behaved in an appropriately Christian spirit—of which Liberals believed ‘Dizzi-ben-Dizzi’ quite incapable.⁸¹ In 1879–80 the Liberal party welded the two things it cared for most— conscience and constitutionalism—into a grand synthesis of patriotic righteousness which swept it back into power. Nonconformity was now bound to the party, and to the political process, by the conviction that Liberalism could raise the ethical tone of politics. Meanwhile, the apparent success of the virtuous struggle to purify the political realm made the issue of English disestablishment less pressing. Therefore, to Liberal Anglican relief, it was never a front-line issue again. Thus were the two main Liberal strategies for the Christianization of society reconciled. That did not, however, mean much in the long term. By the mid-1880s there were a number of signs that the tone of national life was much less sympathetic to Christian moralism than Liberal believers wished. A further extension of democracy, combined with ever more glaring manifestations of secularism and materialism, badly punctured the ethical conﬁdence of the mid-Victorian generation.

IV This chapter has made four main points. The ﬁrst is the continuing centrality to Victorian Liberalism of political and constitutional liberty, particularly the assertion of Parliament’s power to criticize the executive, hold it to account, and check its ability to raise unpopular taxes, to pass oppressive laws, and to favour particular interests. The second is that this was part of a patriotic concern with the rule of law, the adequate representation of the national community, the need to educate people into the traditions of English citizenship, and the improvement of morals. These latter concerns required Liberals to place as much emphasis on the legitimate authority of the State as on liberty against it, but this was not perceived as incompatible with true freedom, which involved obedience to just laws. There was therefore a powerful tradition within Liberalism that sought to elevate the power of the State, not least by ⁸¹ A. S. Wohl, ‘ “Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 375–411.

98

J. P. Parry

making it more respected and accountable. As successive extensions of the franchise achieved this, at least in Liberal eyes, the old radical suspicion of the State as a nest of vested interests waned. From the late 1850s, and especially from the 1870s, it was more difﬁcult to sustain a virulently anti-statist rhetoric. Once we have accepted that at the core of Liberalism was always a concern with the use of State power to integrate the classes and to create a common patriotism, we can put the ‘New Liberalism’ in a clearer perspective. It was a response to the new social and political circumstances of the early twentieth century, including the challenges of the labour and national efﬁciency movements and Tariff Reform organicism. But Liberals could reinvent themselves for this challenge without a philosophical volte-face on the role of the State. Their real achievement was to project a constructive image to counter the devastating Tory charge of the late 1880s and 1890s, that they had lost the sense of public-spiritedness that they had milked for most of the nineteenth century—that they had descended into unpatriotic Little Englandism and grubby-minded faddist sectionalism. They restated the superior inclusiveness of Liberal patriotism, in contrast to the selﬁshness and narrowness of inhumane, anti-consumerist, monopolizing, unionbashing, Anglo-centric Tory imperial-fortress-builders. Moreover, they aimed to maintain as broad a coalition of supporters as possible, which meant smoothing over age-old philosophical tensions between individualism and community, between liberty and efﬁciency, between the sectional and the imperial, and between the classes. The third point, then, is that liberty always generated arguments for Liberals, whether on political, religious, or economic issues. This was inevitable given the loose nature of party discipline; it did not suggest a complete absence of common ground, but reﬂected an emphasis on MPs’ independence of thought and conscience. There could never be a full agreement on how to use liberty, partly because of the nature of the political process: it was too good a rhetorical cry not to be used for different purposes by different people. In itself, it meant little except as a means to an end: the Congregationalist minister Eustace Conder argued that it was a worthless notion unless ‘we know to what kind of restraint or bondage it is opposed’. For Matthew Arnold, freedom was ‘a very good horse to ride; - but to ride somewhere’.⁸² It sparked particularly intense rows after 1848 and 1867. This was mainly because in tense political circumstances ⁸² Conder, Liberty, 3; M. Arnold, Friendship’s Garland: Being the Conversations, Letters, and Opinions of the Late Arminius, Baron von Thunder-ten-tronckh (London, 1871), 147.

Liberalism and Liberty

99

social classes and groups naturally concentrated on particular meanings that were relevant to their own concerns. In the few years after 1848 and 1870 there was also an especially pronounced sensitivity about the need to maintain the distinctiveness of English political practices and values, when compared to the unattractive state of the Continent. Consequently, libertarian protestations were attractive gambits for politicians seeking attention, who associated liberty with national identity and claimed that it was under threat. But, ﬁnally, the connection between liberty and national identity was more than just a political game. ‘Liberty’ seemed to account for much of the country’s greatness and achievement. It was constantly presented as a cornerstone of British international success, and a value that the British could export and by which the global reach of British could be gauged. At home, the establishment of true liberty under law seemed to have distinguished the country’s history; its future success would depend on its preservation, which in turn would depend on the inculcation of the values associated with the national character. In the 1850s and 1860s there was real optimism about this international and domestic agenda. Victorian Liberalism acquired its vigour from conﬁdence about the capacity of the British elite to spread beneﬁcial political, economic, and moral values both abroad and at home. Without that conﬁdence, the emphasis on libertarian language would have been much more restrained and qualiﬁed. But in the 1880s there was a striking decline of ebullience about both the international superiority of Britain and its liberal values, and the power of elite moralism to do improving work at home. Britain was no longer so obviously more liberal than other countries: they were extending their franchises while the rule of law was under threat in Ireland and Britain was occupying Egypt. ‘Liberal’ values that Britain had hoped to spread, and by which its global inﬂuence could be measured, were under threat from the return of tariff walls, the expansion of Continental armies, and their acquisition of colonies. At home, the extension of the franchise seemed to threaten a worrying turn to ‘socialism’, but the political culture of the 1880s was also beset by secularism, vulgar materialism, and imperialist Toryism. After 1886, class tensions in Parliament were visibly greater, while, after the Third Reform Act, it seemed increasingly implausible that the political process could be driven by the active religious conscience. Gladstone’s campaign for Home Rule in Ireland can be seen as a ﬁnal, if ﬂawed, attempt to organize politics on these lines. Goschen, though a critic of Gladstone, commented in 1882 that he was ‘the great link to the traditional Christianity and

100

J. P. Parry

culture’—after him, he feared ‘chaos’.⁸³ In 1879, the Nonconformist minister Eustace Conder asserted that, once the existence of ‘a Divine rule and order’ was denied, there was no ‘basis for public law or private freedom which does not substitute power for authority and expediency for justice’.⁸⁴ It is important not to exaggerate the spread of alarmism: optimism about the Liberal idea of founding society on individual personal development and ‘self-control’ survived and prospered in many quarters.⁸⁵ None the less, the growth of the secular political machine and the spread of freethought and other uncongenial values challenged a number of mid-Victorian aspirations. In this international and domestic situation, liberty seemed less easy to deﬁne, and less obviously a core political value, than it had been in the days when it appeared to explain national success. In the early twentieth century, liberty remained a significant political concept, frequently used by Liberals and Tories against particular instances of threatening State or vested interest activity. But it was never again to be quite so luminous a symbol of national identity and power.

FURTHER READING Bebbington, David, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982). Bellamy, Richard (ed.), Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (1990). Biagini, E. F., ‘Neo-Roman Liberalism: “Republican” Values and British Liberalism, ca.1860–1875’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), 55–72. Howe, Anthony, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997). Mandler, Peter, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990). Parry, Jonathan, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993). Parry, J. P., ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001), 147–75. Searle, G. R., Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998). Taylor, Miles, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995).

⁸³ A. H. D. Acland, Memoir and Letters of the Right Honourable Sir Thomas Dyke Acland (London, 1902), 346. ⁸⁴ Conder, Liberty, 5. ⁸⁵ See L. T. Hobhouse’s quotation from 1911 in Parry, Rise and Fall, 236.

5 Radicalism and Liberty E. F. Biagini

The boundary between liberal understandings of liberty, as deﬁned in the previous chapter, and radical understandings of liberty is not always easy to trace, largely because the two traditions shared considerable common ground. The latter included admiration for the parliamentary system of government, the founding myth of 1688, a Protestant culture married to the tradition of religious toleration, and the notions of individual liberty and local autonomy—which, in turn, were linked both to Protestantism and to ideas about the ‘English constitution’. Indeed, from the constitutional crisis of 1830–2 onwards a substantial and growing proportion of those who considered themselves radicals gravitated to the parliamentary Whig and Liberal party and, effectively, accepted the leadership of the more advanced Liberal MPs including Russell, Cobden, Bright, and J. S. Mill. Eventually, from 1864 to 1894, this heritage was passed on to Gladstone, who was able to forge a liberal–radical alliance which proceeded to dominate Liberalism and inﬂuenced Labour until 1931. However, when we move from the sphere of political alliances to the analysis of ideas, three main differences between ‘liberals’ and ‘radicals’ stand out. First, radical liberty was primarily about democracy and participatory citizenship (although both concepts were interpreted in a variety of ways by different people). Second, especially from 1846, radical liberty involved an enthusiastic and increasingly dogmatic espousal of free trade and the ideas of retrenchment and reform popularized by Richard Cobden. Radical free trade generated a series of other demands, related to the principles of no State interference with the labour market, fair play for all social groups, and ‘free trade in land’. Third, radical liberty was steeped in the culture of Dissent. This applied most obviously to the bulk of the British and Northern Irish middle-class, artisan, and working-class radicals, including most of the

102

E. F. Biagini

leaders of the Trades Union Congress from 1868. But it was true also of the small but inﬂuential group of militant secularists headed by Charles Bradlaugh, and of many of the other radical intellectuals. However agnostic in their personal beliefs, Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill, and John Morley were all inﬂuenced by the Protestant Nonconformist tradition (Mill through his wife, the Unitarian Harriet Taylor). The lasting appeal of the culture of Dissent on the progressive mind is also indicated by the fact that although the Oxford philosopher T. H. Green was Anglican, he always expressed admiration for the Nonconformist tradition. By the early 1890s, a new generation of Dissenting radicals was coming to the fore—including H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and, among the labour leaders and socialist radicals, J. Ramsay MacDonald, J. Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, and Arthur Henderson. This chapter consists of two parts. The ﬁrst offers a survey of the meanings and implications of liberty for Victorian radicals and explores the relationship between popular and intellectual radicalism. The second examines some of the internal tensions and inconsistencies in late-Victorian radicalism, focusing on Joseph Chamberlain’s response to imperial emergencies in Africa and Ireland. These highlighted questions which would continue to confront radicals in the twentieth century: in international affairs, the tension between the rhetoric of peace and international law and the practice of unilateralism; in domestic politics, the tension between parliamentary centralism and the claims of national separatism.

I Radical liberty was indeed rooted in the history, practice, and ideology of Protestant Nonconformity. Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Free Presbyterians (all forming the so-called Old Dissent), and the Methodists (New Dissent) provided the backbone of radical and labour movements in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Although they had their theological differences—for example, in their views of baptism and Church government—they all agreed on the practice of Church representative self-government and independence from State control. These strongly-held views contributed to making the Nonconformists politically radical. From the seventeenth century, Presbyterian, Independent, Quaker, and Baptist rejection of episcopacy and the Roman Catholic liturgical style of the Church of England had been accompanied by a political critique of the social establishment and the

Radicalism and Liberty

103

monarchist constitution which culminated in open republicanism during the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Defeated in 1660–2 and reconciled to the monarchy after 1688, the Dissenters retained a distinctive egalitarian style of worship and radical political orientation, which brought many of them to support the American rebels in 1776. Such oppositional tradition continued in the 1790s and contributed to both British and United Irish support for French revolutionary ideas. Despite the 1798 rising in Ireland, mainstream Dissent in both Isles remained staunchly loyalist, without however renouncing its radical ambitions, especially after the removal of the political disqualiﬁcations against the Nonconformists (repeal of Tests and Corporations Acts) in 1828. For most Dissenters the Church was not a territorial organization, but a gathering of believers, a voluntary society relying on the generosity and commitment of its members, rather than on royal endowment. Church government was based on lay participation in the various meetings, sessions, and assemblies, which appointed deacons, elders, and ministers. Although they insisted that this was a theocratic government, in practice it relied on majority rule and other formal democratic procedures. Indeed, Church governance operated as a school of democracy for chapel members. Selfhelp, both individual and collective, personal freedom (based on the principle of individual interpretation of the Scriptures), emphasis on the authority of conscience, and toleration of other groups were traditions rooted in the history of these religious groups. They were counterbalanced by a stern Puritanism which imposed high moral standards in both private and public life and was based on scriptural injunctions. Nonconformist politics in the nineteenth century was rooted in a humanitarian approach to social issues both at home and abroad, and included enthusiastic support for liberty and equality before the law as well as the improvement of society through the agency of unimpeded competition between religious groups. The latter demanded better popular education, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and what we would now describe as ‘an ethical foreign policy’. In such matters their leader was the Quaker John Bright who throughout his long parliamentary career was a consistent opponent of unnecessary wars, jingoism at home, and oppression abroad. More generally, Dissenting hatred for despotic and intolerant regimes, a traditional source of anti-Popery, generated a readiness for its proponents to mobilize against systematic abuses of individual rights—for example during the Bulgarian Agitation of 1876, the Armenian Atrocities of 1896, and the Chinese Slavery

104

E. F. Biagini

scandal after the second Boer War. In domestic politics, although the Nonconformists would generally support the extension of the suffrage, their most radical demands were about the dismantling of what J. C. D. Clark calls the ‘confessional state’ on which in the early nineteenth century the United Kingdom was based. They wanted the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England and full religious equality both in education and in other spheres of social life. Ultimately, Victorian radical Nonconformists looked to the USA as embodying their ideal of freedom: to them separation between Church and State did not mean a secular State, but one which would neither promote nor obstruct any particular religious denomination. It was summarized in the motto ‘free trade in religion’, a further reminder of the importance of economics in the radical mindset. Things, however, were different north of the border, where most Nonconformists demanded little more than a puriﬁed (Presbyterian) establishment, since their opposition to the Church of Scotland arose neither from theology nor Church polity, but focused on the question of ecclesiastical independence from the State (particularly, on the issue of lay patronage over ecclesiastical appointments, one which had caused the Great Disruption or schism of 1843). In practice, both in Scotland and in the rest of the Kingdom, all these groups gravitated towards the left of the Liberal party, the only organized parliamentary group which could be expected to sympathize with their demands. In terms of its social composition, Dissent was traditionally artisan and middle class, but the revivals of the ﬁrst half of the century expanded its appeal among the industrial labourers in Wales, the Midlands, the North of England, and north-east Ulster. Thus reinforced, Nonconformity became perhaps the single most important formative inﬂuence behind a particular form of radicalism—popular liberalism. After the collapse of Chartism as a national force, many local Chartist and organized artisan groups rediscovered the common ground they shared with middle-class radicalism, especially in the spheres of foreign affairs (support for European liberal and national movements), educational reform, and free trade. However, popular liberalism was primarily about democracy. The latter was a rather complex and equivocal notion in the nineteenth century, and, when it came to political rights, was about exclusion as much as inclusion. From Chartism until the end of the century, radicals and popular liberals agreed that all ‘free-born Englishmen’ should enjoy full political rights. The latter meant, primarily, the parliamentary suffrage. To be an

Radicalism and Liberty

105

elector meant to be ‘free’; to be excluded from the franchise was frequently equated with being a ‘slave’, especially during 1864–7, following the emancipation of the black slaves in America. In this respect, radical liberty was rooted in civic humanist or ‘neo-Roman’ understandings of liberty. Indeed, Victorian radicals were proud of the heritage of the Cromwellian Commonwealth and many would have regarded themselves as ‘nineteenthcentury Commonwealthmen’, a notion which appealed to republicans but also resonated with the much wider culture of Nonconformity— especially in the aftermath of the 1862 commemorations of the bicentenary of the ejection of Nonconformist ministers and congregations from their churches. How did ‘manhood suffrage’ relate to notions of masculinity? It is a question which is important to consider if we want to understand why household franchise—ﬁrst introduced in 1867 for the boroughs and extended to the counties in 1884—was not replaced by universal male suffrage until 1918. But then real ‘manhood’ was not a biological, but a civic notion: it was about ‘character’ and required ‘independence’. The latter implied primarily a degree of control over the most basic forms of property—those of one’s self, one’s will, and one’s work: without these, a man was not recognized as being fully adult, as possessing that manhood which gave the right to full citizenship. This came with a tendency to exclude from the vote those who showed themselves unable or lacking the intention to preserve their independence. In this context, a degree of ‘virtual’ representation was not only acceptable, but apparently regarded as natural. Until the end of the century and beyond, most working-class radicals accepted James Mill’s argument that women did not need to be enfranchised, because their ‘interests’ were already represented by their menfolk—their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Although in the early 1840s the Chartists had demanded universal male suffrage (and, occasionally, female suffrage as well), there is consistent evidence that after 1848 the exclusion of paupers was regarded as equally ‘natural’ and consistent with ‘manhood’ suffrage as the exclusion of women, in so far as paupers lacked the ‘independence’ necessary to formulate and express responsible political views—they lacked political ‘manhood’. After the adoption of the household franchise principle for the boroughs in 1867, demands for further reform focused on the extension of such a principle to the counties—which was ﬁnally achieved in 1884, with a radical redistribution of seats in 1885. Signiﬁcantly, after 1885 ‘one man one vote’ failed to spark off any major new agitations for parliamentary reform, despite the cause being adopted by the National

106

E. F. Biagini

Liberal Federation, many Liberal Unionists and the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s, and the fact that by then it would have been consistent with established constitutional practice in western Europe, North America, and the settlement colonies. There are a number of causes for this failure—including late nineteenth-century obsession with Home Rule, imperialism, and social reform—but the contrast with the period 1864–84, which had been dominated by demands for franchise reform, is nevertheless striking. The explanation must be found in the peculiar operation of the household franchise, which, although excluding more than four million adult men from the vote, did not discriminate along class lines. Rather, it did so along age lines, by limiting the vote to those mature, married men who represented the great majority of the householders and ratepayers. Moreover, one of the reasons why this ageist discrimination was tolerated for so long is that it was largely consistent with the patriarchal structure of the artisan and working-class family. As Patrick Joyce has pointed out, especially after 1850, technology and industrial management contributed to restoring traditional power structures within the working-class family, with the older men holding the most skilled and best paid jobs and ruling in the public sphere of political and trade union life (the older women ruled the private sphere in much the same way).¹ This patriarchal view of democracy was challenged by J. S. Mill and a group of feminist radicals about whom more will be found in the next chapter. Mill’s views on democracy were fully expressed in his trilogy of 1859–69. In On Liberty, he asserted the sovereignty of conscience against the encroachments of received opinions, customs, and conventions. Although Mill was an agnostic and the essay contained dismissive remarks about Calvinism, his appeal to conscience and the right of individual dissent was rooted ‘in Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, [drawing] nourishment from the distinctive feature of Christian civilization, the power and importance of personal identity’.² In Representative Government, he advocated individual rights and indicated his preference for proportional representation as the electoral system which would afﬁrm individual choice against the territorial and communitarian system of ﬁrst-past-the-post. All these appeals to individual responsibility included women as well as men, and in The Subjection of Women (1869), ¹ P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980). ² M. St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), 400.

Radicalism and Liberty

107

Mill further expanded on some of these ideas. He emphasized the importance of political rights as a safeguard for ‘negative’ liberty and suggested that there were alarming parallels between slavery and women’s exclusion from political and civil rights. He concluded that individual freedom and competition demanded ‘free trade’ in gender roles: women ought to be liberated to develop their full potential, to become what they can and what they wish to be. In Mill’s view liberty—indeed, happiness as self-development— required participation in the life of the polis or commonwealth. Individual, direct involvement was not only essential to the full development of the self, but was also a condition of the liberty of the community as a whole. He had ﬁrst elaborated on these concepts between 1840 and 1853, in his two reviews of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and then of George Grote’s History of Greece. His analysis of Tocqueville examined the question of ‘the despotism of the majority’, that is, the anti-liberal implications of democracy. This has often been associated with the contemporary fear of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’—the nightmare of bourgeois liberalism—but there is no evidence that Mill nurtured any speciﬁc qualms about the extension of the vote to the working class, and in fact in 1866–73 he was very popular with artisan reform organizations (he could have returned to Parliament after his 1868 defeat, but declined to stand again). What Mill did fear was the intolerance of any class who might come to dominate the political climate of a democratic country. Textual evidence indicates that, while he was aware of the dangers of a mass society, he linked them to the ‘commercial spirit’, rather than to democracy. Indeed, this was his main criticism of Tocqueville, who, in his view, had ‘bound up in one abstract idea the whole of the tendencies of modern commercial society, and given them one name—Democracy . . . [but] all the intellectual effects which M. de Tocqueville ascribes to Democracy are taking place under the democracy of the middle class’,³ which was turning citizens into consumers. These tendencies of mass, commercial society were best counteracted not by the preservation of the aristocracy or social inequality, as some argued, but by political devolution and the empowerment of communities through local self-government, which encouraged participatory citizenship. The institutional fostering of civic virtue was the main reason why Mill praised democracy in the USA. There the citizens’ interest in ³ John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols. (Toronto, 1981–91), xi. 62, 67–8.

108

E. F. Biagini

public affairs seemed to have an intensity comparable to that which they took in their own private lives, because they were continuously invested with one or other of the many popular magistracies. A constitution which forced citizens to take charge of the public arena counterbalanced the individualistic tendencies of mass consumer society, every day exorcising the ‘commercial spirit’ by awakening the civic one. Mill’s ideal, however, was not modern America but ancient Athens, which, he thought, had offered a good approximation to constitutional perfection. Its eminence in the ancient world was wholly the fruit of its institutions, which stimulated a multilateral development of human personality in a social setting within which the educated elite and the philosophers exercised a natural inﬂuence on the people. Mill’s vision was in tune with British constitutional practice. Although the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act had established the Whig model of a centralized, multi-purpose local government authority, Victorian Britain was characterized by a proliferation of smaller, special-purpose elective assemblies with separate jurisdictions and claims upon the rates. Most of these assemblies held elections on different dates, and as a consequence Mill’s idea of a permanently deliberating demos was almost literally realized. The most democratic among these were established by the 1870 Education Act and the 1894 Parish and District Councils Act. The local school boards were elected every three years by men and women ratepayers and wielded wide-ranging powers in the areas of primary education—including the delineation of the syllabus, the decision whether education should be secular, denominational, or non-sectarian but with Bible reading, compulsory or voluntary, and how it should be supported—by rates or fees. The 1870 Education Act was originally inspired by the Massachusetts school system, then regarded as one of the most advanced educational and democratic systems in the world, and conferred extensive powers on local boards elected by all ratepayers of both sexes. Women as well as men were eligible. The 1894 Parish Councils Act brought democratic decentralization down to the level of the smallest communities: even villages of just 100 inhabitants could become separate, self-governing entities under the Act. The Act elicited great expectations—soon to be disappointed, as the limited powers of the councils were tested over the next few years. However, in principle, the validity of the model remained unquestioned for many radicals: liberty required self-government and active citizens’ participation in the running of their local affairs. It was the equivalent of the self-government practised by Nonconformist Churches or co-operative societies. Improvement

Radicalism and Liberty

109

should not be dispensed from above, by the central government, but each community should work out its own salvation. By the same token, Victorian radicals had no sympathy for any expansion of the functions of the central government, and would have dismissed the idea of a ‘welfare state’ (had the latter been conceived) as incompatible with individual ‘independence’. While workers demanded good wages and employment opportunities, rather than public ‘charity’, radical politicians idealized peasant proprietorship as the foundation of popular prosperity and a school for self-reliance and character. State intervention was recommended only in so far as, by reforming land tenure and stimulating a redistribution of property, it would help to bring about the ideal self-regulating farming economy of independent yeomen. This reﬂected the extent to which farming continued to be important, especially in the socially deprived regions of the United Kingdom (most of Ireland, Northern Scotland, and Wales). Because their impoverished labourers and evicted crofters migrated to the towns and ‘ﬂooded’ the labour market, causing industrial wages to decline, land reform was supposed to have immediate social relevance for the industrial workers as well. Moreover, land was politically important, especially from 1879, when the collapse of agricultural prices created unprecedented tension and ‘land wars’ in all the areas mentioned above. But even at their most radical, Irish Land Leaguers and British radicals demanded that the State should intervene only in such a way as to make further intervention unnecessary—that the State should help the people to help themselves. In short, self-help in one shape or other was the sole recipe for social improvement. This required foresight and temperance but also co-operation, for example through the friendly societies. The government could help by providing adequate legislative frameworks within which individual and collective self-help could ﬂourish, and by stimulating economic growth. The latter was best achieved through a policy of free trade, the ‘remission of taxation’ (especially on items of mass consumption), and retrenchment in government expenditure. Taxes on the necessities of life had always been unpopular, none more so than the Corn Laws repealed in 1846, because of the way they targeted the staple food of the poor. The campaign for their abolition had been led by Richard Cobden, whose long-term triumph was to establish a close link, in the popular imagination, between the repeal of the taxes on the necessities of life and a policy of general free trade. By the 1860s the latter had become a sort of moral economy of the British consumer. Although some criticized unfettered free trade for its consequences on speciﬁc sectors of the British economy—for example,

110

E. F. Biagini

silk in 1860 and farming from 1880—dissidents always remained politically marginal, and even the Tory party did not dare resurrect the policy of protection until the beginning of the twentieth century. Free trade was associated with low indirect taxation on items of mass consumption, and with State neutrality in the sphere of economic and social conﬂicts. Modern trade union rights emerged from such a context: in 1860 T. J. Dunning, leader of a printers’ union, produced a pamphlet in which he argued that combinations among workers were essential to the proper functioning of a free-market society. His views were promptly adopted by a young Cambridge don, Henry Fawcett, and soon espoused by J. S. Mill, who amended his magisterial Principles of Political Economy (1862 edition) accordingly. The law would deﬁne the rules of the game, but the government would not guarantee the outcome, which would be determined by the free bargaining of the organized workers and the employers. The fact that, at the end of the century, a Unionist government both adopted tariff reform and allowed the courts and law Lords to reinterpret the trade union legislation of 1875—undermining their legal immunity during industrial action—further served to conﬁrm the radical suspicion that there was a close link between commercial protectionism and authoritarian State intervention. If the State was allowed to interfere in trade through tariffs, it could also do so in trade disputes to ensure that the workers behaved themselves. Behind this reasoning there lay the awareness that on the whole the State remained an undemocratic institution which could not be trusted with power beyond certain narrow and rigidly deﬁned limits. Yet in some respects by the mid-1880s the electoral process already exhibited many of the features of a modern democratic system, with a mass electorate, a dynamic popular press, charismatic leaders, and sophisticated party machines, including the Liberal caucus or National Liberal Federation (NLF, established in 1877). It is not clear to what extent these changes could be accommodated within the traditional idea of radical liberty. Neither party politics nor party organizations featured in Mill’s works, and he never thought very much about them or of them. Other contemporary observers expressed serious reservations about the ‘caucus’. To its defenders, as much as to many of its members, the NLF was not a ‘caucus’ in the derogatory sense of a corrupt machine designed to ﬁx candidatures, but ‘a Liberal parliament outside the Imperial parliament’. To them the NLF was the true voice of constituency Liberals and an expression of the participatory citizenship which they so earnestly supported: it was not a caucus, but the general assembly, the ‘Athenian

Radicalism and Liberty

111

ekklesia’ of the Liberal nation. ‘[The caucus] appears to be a necessary outcome of democracy. In a small community, such as the Canton of Uri, all the freemen may meet in a meadow to pass laws. In larger societies direct government by the people gives place to representative government; and when constituencies consist of thousands, associations which aid the birth of popular opinion and give it strength, stability and homogeneity seem indispensable.’⁴ The Liberal rank and ﬁle (mostly radicals) needed this ‘parliament’ as a forum for voicing their views and programmes and co-ordinating their efforts to counteract the forces of conservatism: for ‘[t]hose which are ineffective without each other must be united’.⁵ On the other hand, from the beginning, the NLF generated misgivings among both rank and ﬁle and national leaders, though for different reasons. Out of the 95 associations which had originally accepted Chamberlain’s invitation, only 46 actually sent delegates to Birmingham. Arguably, the actual formation of the Federation itself owed more to the Bulgarian Agitation than to any grand plan of reform of popular politics. Moreover, many MPs and parliamentary candidates feared that their ‘independence’ was now being threatened in the constituencies by the caucus, having already been curtailed at Westminster by increased party discipline. ‘Independence’ seemed to be what Liberals were most concerned about. Not only were MPs jealous of their right to vote according to conviction, sometimes against the wishes of their leaders and constituents, but also local Liberal associations were keen to safeguard their own freedom from interference by the whips. Furthermore, Liberal activists and voters in general were protective of their own independence from local associations or anybody else. In this context, it is not surprising that the NLF was not a monolithic organization, with some centralizing ‘wirepullers’ under the control of the party leadership. On the contrary, it was a loose federation of local parties, each organized on a more or less representative basis. The relationship between the individual ‘caucuses’ and the various social pressure groups at constituency level varied from place to place. For example, in the case of organized labour some eminent leaders, such as the moderate George Howell and socialist James Keir Hardie, complained about the allegedly anti-working-class biases of the caucus—which they held responsible for their electoral defeats. However, there is evidence that their troubles reﬂected either the local weakness of organized labour ⁴ J. Macdonnell, ‘Is the Caucus a Necessity?’, Fortnightly Review, NS 38 (Dec. 1885), 790. ⁵ Aristotle, The Politics, Book 1, Chapter 2.

112

E. F. Biagini

(in Howell’s case) or the fact that the trade unions supported a different candidate (in Keir Hardie’s case). Wherever the unions were both locally strong and politically united, they had a decisive voice in the selection of candidates and the deﬁnition of party politics: from 1885 such was the case, for example, in Durham county, where the miners’ union operated the equivalent of a block vote within the county Liberal association. In fact, the problems of the NLF derived not from its ‘despotic’ tendencies, but from its loose and representative constitution, especially between 1886 and 1895, when its leaders actually believed in party democracy. This is quite clear when we compare the NLF with the Irish National League (INL), the caucus of Parnell’s party. Ostensibly a democratic and representative organization, the INL was actually highly centralized and operated as the leader’s sounding board. Parnell managed to suppress rank-and-ﬁle aspirations through the ecclesiastical members of the county conventions on which from 1885 the clergy of all denominations were ex ofﬁcio representatives. They could be relied upon to vote for Parnell’s chosen candidates and to exercise their inﬂuence on the secular delegates to do likewise. The system worked well for as long as the party remained united, but after the schism of 1891 class and local tensions within the INL and the rivalries between its leaders brought about a series of painful splits.

II At this stage we need to consider the impact of the Irish Home Rule crisis on radicalism. In Britain the announcement of Gladstone’s adoption of Home Rule came as a surprise to many—but one which delighted those who had come to regard it as the only alternative to prolonged coercion and the only policy consistent with the ‘principles of Midlothian’, on which Gladstone had won the support of the radicals, as well as a landslide majority in 1880. Radical sympathy for Home Rule pre-dated 1880: from as early as 1874 several prominent labour leaders—including the three Lib-Lab MPs—had expressed their support for the idea. Admittedly, the latter was vague, but it was clear that Home Rule radicals were only prepared to endorse a limited measure of parliamentary devolution consistent with the preservation of the United Kingdom. That is precisely what Gladstone and Parnell seemed to be offering in 1886. Historians have tended to regard Gladstone’s adoption of this cause as one of his worst political mistakes, attributable to his personal ‘obsession’

Radicalism and Liberty

113

with Ireland and wish to retain the party leadership. Allegedly, by imposing Home Rule on his followers, Gladstone ﬁrst split the party, then lost his working-class supporters—thus indirectly paving the way for the rise of the Labour party—and eventually led British liberalism towards its terminal ‘decline and fall’. The Liberals’ defeat in the 1886 election and twenty years of ensuing political impotence have seemed to bear out this conclusion, which is based on the assumption that Ireland was merely a pawn in the British parliamentary game. However, there are three main problems with such an interpretation. The ﬁrst is that it takes little note of the fact that until 1921 the United Kingdom included the whole of Ireland and that the total number of Irish MPs accounted for about one-sixth of the House of Commons. Even within the British electorate, mass immigration from Ireland from the 1840s meant that the Irish comprised a sizeable proportion of the working-class voters in many constituencies. Thus, politically as well as morally, in the 1880s and 1890s the Irish question could not be ignored: indeed, more than social reform or anything else debated in Parliament, Ireland was the pressing question of the day. The second problem is that Liberal England did not die in 1886: it was alive and well both in 1906 when Gladstone’s heirs achieved a memorable election victory, and indeed throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. Moreover, even after its eventual ‘decline and fall’ in 1924–9, Gladstonian liberalism continued to inspire and shape the political outlook of Labour, especially in international relations, free trade, and imperial devolution. Thus the question to be answered is not about the early demise of liberalism, but its resilience and pervasiveness, which the Home Rule crisis strengthened rather than undermining. The third problem is that historians have tended to consider the Home Rule emergency in isolation, when arguably it was part of the broader ‘Question of Imperialism’. The latter has inspired several major studies on socialism and popular radical movements in Germany, France, and Italy, but has not yet been assessed for the British Isles, where the origins of Labour and the dynamics of Irish nationalism have been examined solely within the context of domestic politics. Such a gap in the historiography is surprising, especially when one considers Edward Said’s widely reiterated claims about the pervasive effect of imperialism on British culture. Gladstone’s contemporaries were more aware of this dimension to the problem than many modern historians. Indeed, in 1886–95 it was difﬁcult to disentangle the Irish Home Rule crisis from broader imperial concerns, as the Liberal Unionists insisted at the time. By the same token,

114

E. F. Biagini

while socialism remained a vague new jargon, both old and new radical pressure groups, including the ILP, demonstrated a ﬁrm commitment to Gladstonian causes such as imperial devolution, international arbitration, a foreign policy inspired by humanitarian concerns, and free trade. Far from being a ﬁgment of Gladstone’s imagination, Home Rule became the single most important catalyst in the remaking of popular radicalism after the extension of the franchise to the county householders in 1884. The 1886 Bill together with the subsequent agitation and electoral campaigns polarized British and Irish politics and the crisis created a new political awareness even among subjects—including women— who hitherto had been marginalized. Animosity and partisanship under the recently enlarged franchise stimulated the rise of the party machine and caucus politics. The latter had contrasting effects on popular radicalism—simultaneously increasing and limiting effective participation in national politics—but became an essential device of mass mobilization in both Britain and Ireland. As the years went by, the prolonged Home Rule crisis consolidated new identities, political cultures, and party allegiances. In Ireland, politics became concerned less with local issues than with a national debate sustained by both the Dublin and the provincial newspaper press, and animated by Parnell’s campaigns. Traditionally, historians have stressed the ‘negative’, anti-British dimension of Parnellism, and have dismissed Irish liberalism as a dwindling Unionist pressure group. Yet, when the language and demands of the League are studied in their own terms and context, what is most striking is the ideological and cultural ground shared by the INL rank and ﬁle with British popular liberalism, especially its rural manifestation which delivered a majority of the county seats to Gladstone in 1885. Both insisted on civil rights under the ‘Constitution’, praised responsible local government in contrast to central control, and were against militarized police forces and coercion laws. Moreover, both included a strong Christian dimension and an afﬁnity with Gladstone’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy. If these were the values of popular liberalism in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, in Ireland they amounted to a distinctively liberal nationalist deﬁnition of Irishness. By the late 1880s Home Rule for Scotland and Ireland was part of a broader programme for a federal reconstruction of the United Kingdom. Such a programme was vocally supported by the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) with increasingly separatist undertones. In 1892 James Reith, its Secretary, proposed to the Irish Nationalist leader Edward Blake the formation of a ‘Joint Parliamentary Party of the

Radicalism and Liberty

115

Representation of Scotland, Ireland and Wales’ to demand ‘Home Rule All Round’ as the only just solution to the Home Rule Question.⁶ The Irish response was cautious, aware that under the umbrella of ‘Home Rule All Round’ there were different and sometimes contrasting radical agendas. For many, especially in Scotland and Wales, Home Rule was intended to be accompanied by the disestablishment of the Church, ‘abolition of the Hereditary principle in the House of Lords’, ‘One Man One Vote, and Reform of Registration’, reform of land laws, local option, triennial Parliaments, and payment of MPs. However, while for the English Liberals and Nonconformists disestablishment was a complex democratic issue reﬂecting class divides, for the Scots it was an internal ecclesiastical dispute splitting the predominantly Presbyterian Dissenters into those who wanted disestablishment and disendowment, and those who demanded a ‘puriﬁed’ national Church, endowed but independent of state control. Thus the Welsh Liberals had a point when Stuart Rendel said that ‘[there] is no urgency whatever in the Scottish grievance. There is no national movement behind it. There is much religious sentiment against the secularization of religious endowments. There is substantial division in Scotch Liberal ranks.’⁷ He was equally dismissive of the English supporters of disestablishment. The latter should be pursued as a purely Welsh national question, rather than the thin edge of the Liberation Society. In Rendel’s view Wales was more similar to Ireland than to either England or Scotland. In Wales disestablishment was about dismantling the ‘alien’ Church which—like the Episcopalian Church of Ireland before 1869—symbolized the English conquest. Disestablishment was ‘a measure designed not alone to remove religious inequality but to initiate a scheme of social reconstruction and to secure the effective recognition of Welsh nationality’.⁸ Moreover, related to the church issue there was also the land question. The Welsh ‘Tithe War’ of 1886–91 was a phenomenon of Irish intensity and violence, reaching its apex in the summer of 1887, when in large areas of West Wales the tithe could only be collected by armed force. Church bailiffs were provided with a strong police and military escort, often amounting to hundreds of men. As columns of ⁶ J. Reith to E. Blake, 9 August 1892, in the National Library, Dublin, Blake Letters, [221] 4684. Enclosed with the letter Reith sent an ‘Outline of a Federal Union League for the British Empire’. ⁷ Stuart Rendel to T. Gee, 30 October 1892, in the National Library of Wales, Gee MSS, 274a. ⁸ From T. E. Ellis’s 1895 electoral manifesto, in the National Library of Wales, Ellis MSS, 2963.

116

E. F. Biagini

constables and soldiers paraded through rural Wales, incidents were frequent and sometimes very serious. Even when no incidents occurred, the deployment of the military was widely resented ‘as an insult to our humanity, loyalty and Christianity’.⁹ It is difﬁcult to establish whether the Episcopal Church had been more unpopular in Catholic Ireland in the 1830s than it was in Nonconformist Wales in the 1880s. In both cases, popular hostility was a form of nationalism (coincidentally, but quite appropriately, one of the Nonconformist leaders was called Garibaldi Thomas). Also some other Welshmen must have felt that they had to adopt Irish methods since there had been contacts and co-operation between Irish land agitators and their Welsh counterparts from before the commencement of the Home Rule crisis. Indeed, some Liberals feared that the land agitation would develop into a full-blown, quasi-revolutionary Welsh national separatist movement along Irish lines. A Welsh Land League was formed in Rhyl at the end of 1886 under the leadership of the ﬁerce Nonconformist preacher Thomas Gee of Denbigh, publisher of the intensely political Baner ac Amserau Cymru. This afﬁnity with Ireland is probably one of the reasons why Welsh Liberals were so solidly on the side of Irish Home Rule from 1886, despite the fact that until 1885 Joseph Chamberlain had been the English Liberal leader most sympathetic to Welsh demands in terms of disestablishment, drink control, education, and land reform. If in Ireland the Nationalist programme was intimately linked to the Catholic interest, in Wales the Cymru Fydd/Liberal programme was even more closely identiﬁed with the local ‘churches of the people’: it was, in fact, the programme of organized Dissent. Home Rule was seen as the only way forward for those who did not wish to join the Tories: in Wales this was a prospect so appalling that a Baptist minister considered expelling from his congregation the ‘heretics’ who would vote Conservative. For Tom Ellis—a farmer’s son and rising star of Welsh Liberalism—Home Rule was ‘a policy of prudence for labour’, ‘a policy of hope, of promise of growth’. Not surprisingly, at Nationalist meetings in Ireland he was cheered as ‘the Parnell of Wales’. When Home Rule split the Liberal party, the radicals’ main casualty was Joseph Chamberlain. From the 1870s his zeal for social reform— which had ﬁrst expressed itself through ‘municipal socialism’—counterbalanced Gladstone’s unrelenting enthusiasm for retrenchment at the ⁹ R. Morris from Pentre to T. E. Ellis, 19 August 1893, in the National Library of Wales, Ellis MSS, 1524.

Radicalism and Liberty

117

Treasury. There was no necessary contrast between the two policies: local authorities and the central government had complementary roles under the Victorian constitution. The latter could preach and implement drastic cuts to public expenditure in the areas for which it was directly responsible—mainly the army, navy, and national debt—while the former could expand its functions and related budgets. Indeed, Gladstone himself was largely responsible for the growth of local government in mid-Victorian Britain, especially through the 1870 Education Act, one of the most expensive social reforms adopted in nineteenth-century Britain. The contrast between central and local government was therefore purely apparent: in reality it was division of labour, readily understood and accepted by both sides. Indeed, as Jonathan Parry and others have argued, in Victorian Britain social reform was not politically controversial. Quite different was the case for issues pertaining to Ireland, foreign and imperial policy, on which the Liberals nearly split in 1876–9, and then actually did so in 1886, 1899–1902, and 1916–23. Chamberlain’s Unitarian politics did not include peace, and indeed his family had made a fortune out of Britain’s past wars. Rather they embraced Utilitarianism and Philosophical Radicalism, traditions which prized individual liberty of judgement, and scrutinized religious as well as social practices in the cold light of reason. In this respect, as Peter Marsh has pointed out, Chamberlain was the political heir to the eighteenth-century Unitarian Joseph Priestley. For a Liberal, this heritage came with obvious beneﬁts, but also a few disadvantages. Of the latter, crucial was the emotional impoverishment of strictly ‘rational religion’ which cut him off ‘emotionally’ both from the other Dissenters, and indeed from much of the rest of Victorian society, which was dominated by that powerfully emotional form of Christianity, Evangelicalism. Like the education of the young J. S. Mill (who also moved in Unitarian circles), Chamberlain’s education included no emphasis on sentiments or the poetic imagination. His consequent inability to interact with the country’s predominantly Evangelical mood—and especially with the famous ‘Nonconformist Conscience’— was bound to generate misunderstanding and mistrust, which originated not from the sphere of political difference, but from the deeper and nonrational sphere of emotional incompatibility. This is well exempliﬁed by the events of 1876, when Chamberlain supported the Bulgarian Agitation without sharing the emotions which played such an important role in mobilizing Nonconformist support for Gladstone. To Chamberlain the Agitation was not a moral crusade, but a matter of party politics in a situation in which—despite the claims of the

118

E. F. Biagini

Tory government—national interests were not really at stake because, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Disraeli’s purchase of the Khedive’s shares in the Canal Company in 1875, the barycentre of Imperial defence in the Mediterranean had shifted from the Dardanelles to Egypt. That is why imperial policy in the 1880s is so important if we want to understand the making of Liberal imperialism and radical Unionism. The Liberal government of which Chamberlain was a member faced a number of emergencies, including the collapse of law and order in Ireland, the Boers’ decision to force the issue of their independence in South Africa, and the crisis in Egypt, leading to British involvement in the area. Interestingly, in two of the three cases Chamberlain took a line consistent with traditional Liberal and radical concerns. In the matter of Ireland, he was strongly opposed to coercion, which he described—in Gladstonian fashion—as ‘a blot upon our civilization’.¹⁰ When the Irish Secretary W. E. Forster demanded the suspension of habeas corpus, Chamberlain threatened to resign. Instead of coercion what he recommended was land reform—again an approach with impeccable radical credentials, going back to John Stuart Mill’s 1868 pamphlet, England and Ireland, in which the great philosopher had indicated that only land reform could avert a nationalist agitation. Signiﬁcantly, Chamberlain found himself on Gladstone’s side against the coercionist cabinet members. Eventually he was prepared to accept further coercion, but only in response to Parnell’s open deﬁance of the law and challenge to the unity of the Kingdom. He responded in similar ways to the two African crises. The ﬁrst of them involved the Transvaal. During the Midlothian campaigns the Boers understood Gladstone to promise that a future Liberal government would restore their independence. Chamberlain had no doubt that this was indeed the right policy, both in moral and political terms. Here we need to pause and consider the question of motivation and attitude in foreign policy making. Marsh has pointed out that ‘Chamberlain was deaf to the moral cadences of Gladstone’s rhetoric on foreign affairs and never shared his altruistic concern for the comity of nations.’¹¹ That is certainly true, except that the reference to Gladstone’s concern as ‘altruistic’ is misleading. We should be careful not to confuse rhetoric with reality in Gladstone’s speeches: certainly he regarded ‘the comity of ¹⁰ Cited in P. T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (London, 1994), 151. ¹¹ Ibid. 155.

Radicalism and Liberty

119

nations’ as good in itself, but it was especially beneﬁcial because it promised to safeguard British interests without committing Britain to entangling European alliances. This was precisely what Chamberlain also believed: the main difference between the two statesmen was that Chamberlain did not share Gladstone’s ‘evangelical’ emotionalism, through which, for the beneﬁt of the Nonconformist masses, the G.O.M. interpreted the principles of ordinary diplomatic prudence as eternal and unalterable moral truths. Yet Chamberlain, like Gladstone, assessed foreign policy in moral terms of ‘right and wrong’ and, in his speeches and correspondence with John Bright, was as prepared to accept that imperial ambition ought to be subordinated to both liberal principles and the true interests of the subject races. This virtual convergence between Chamberlain and Gladstone became evident after the formation of the government in March 1880. Then Chamberlain urged a prompt British withdrawal from the Transvaal, while Gladstone supported annexation, but appointed Chamberlain as the cabinet’s parliamentary spokesman on South African affairs. When Kruger’s insurrection resulted in British defeats, Chamberlain insisted on concession rather than repression. Gladstone agreed and Britain withdrew. The outcome of the second African crisis, in Egypt, was very different, but once again Chamberlain sided with Gladstone, and both against Bright—though, of course, both professed the greatest respect for the old Quaker. From the start, Chamberlain and Gladstone responded in similar ways to the Egyptian crisis. At ﬁrst, like Gladstone, Chamberlain regarded Arabi as the national hero of a people ‘rightly struggling to be free’, but soon became more cautious in his assessment. By June, news of riots in Alexandria convinced him that Arabi was only a military adventurer and that there was no national party behind him. The time for Britain to act—and to do so swiftly—had come. However, ‘intervention should be directed not to impose on Egypt institutions of our choice but to secure for the Egyptian people a free choice for themselves so far as this may not be inconsistent with the permanent interests of other Powers’.¹² In reality, the latter turned out to be the overriding consideration, but for the time being Chamberlain insisted on the programmatic statement in the main clause, and in a memo of June 1882 suggested a contrast between the ‘sinister interests’ of international ﬁnance and ‘the rights of the Egyptian people to manage their own affairs’. On the other hand, such ¹² Chamberlain’s minute of 21 June 1882, cited ibid. 448. My italics.

120

E. F. Biagini

rights did not necessarily mean British non-intervention, for there was the preliminary question of legitimacy to establish, now that law and order had collapsed. At the time, the alleged lawlessness and the claim that Arabi was a military adventurer without popular support was the Gladstonian equivalent of Bush and Blair’s insistence on Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’—that is, the supreme justiﬁcation for liberal imperialism. Like Bush and Blair in more recent times, Chamberlain claimed that Britain had a mission in the East: ‘we have in Egypt interests and duties. The interests are a fair guarantee for the peace and order of the country, and the security of the Suez Canal and our route to India. The duty cast upon us, as the Liberal Government of a free nation, is to secure to the Egyptian people the greatest possible development of representative institutions.’¹³ However, as Gladstone knew (and Blair is now ﬁnding out), ‘exporting western and beneﬁcient [sic] institutions’ to Muslim countries¹⁴ has never been easy. British liberalism was concerned with civilization, progress, and individual liberty, which were supposed to be the essential prerequisites of self-government. For many radicals, the British government was justiﬁed in enforcing law and order, retrenchment, and ﬁnancial accountability on reluctant or corrupt subjects. It is remarkable that even J. S. Mill—who was an ardent supporter of national selfgovernment—believed countries such as India were not yet ready for representative institutions, let alone independence. He accepted the notion of a hierarchy of cultures within which ‘inferior’ ones should be trained for ‘order and progress’ by those that were ‘superior’. Interestingly, he was prepared to apply this reasoning to the Europeans as well—for example, he suggested that in response to foreign despotic rule the Italians had only recently emerged from various stages of anarchy and lack of civic spirit. For Mill’s successors in the 1880s, including Chamberlain, Ireland and Egypt were cases in point. In both instances, irrespective of ethnic or religious differences, people needed to be coerced to be free—an old ‘republican’ or neo-Roman injunction which acquired new signiﬁcance in Britain’s imperial heyday. Moreover, radical liberalism shared with the ‘neo-Roman’ tradition of liberty a strong emphasis on the normative concept of the ‘public ¹³ Chamberlain’s minute of 18 October 1882, in Birmingham University, Joseph Chamberlain Papers, 7/1/3/3. ¹⁴ Gladstone to Lord Rosebery, 15 November 1883, in William Ewart Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1968–94), xi. 59.

Radicalism and Liberty

121

interest’, one which ought to be pursued relentlessly as a supreme goal in the art of good government. Chamberlain shared these views and attitudes, and time and again appealed to the ‘public’ interest to defend his views on municipal socialism, educational change, and eventually land reform. Certainly during the Egyptian crisis of 1882 he was eager to be perceived as standing up for the ‘public’ interest, in contrast to the sectional concerns of the bondholders. He argued that there could be ‘no doubt’ that European control was in Egypt’s public interest. The only question was whether this rational consideration should be allowed to overrule the Egyptian people’s misguided and emotional inclination to ‘prefer native administration with all its consequences to the inﬂexible severity & honesty of European control’. He admitted that ‘[t]here is a great anxiety lest after all the bondholders should too evidently be the only persons who have proﬁted from the war, and lest phrases which have been used concerning the extension of Egyptian liberty, and Egypt for the Egyptians should prove to have no practical meaning’.¹⁵ However, he reassured himself that all the difﬁculties originated from the selﬁshness of ‘foreign powers’, especially the French. In fact, it is remarkable that Chamberlain could contrast the benevolence and disinterestedness of British imperialism with the ‘selﬁshness’ of the French, who had refused to take part in the invasion. It was a rather paradoxical stance to take for a politician committed to ideals of liberty and self-determination—an attitude with which we are very familiar nowadays, in the aftermath of the Iraqi war. At the time it was John Bright who played the role of Robin Cook.¹⁶ The old radical did not mince his words: ‘You speak of the “honour and interest of England” as justifying intervention, and you refer, further on, to “certain stock arguments of defeatism”. Are not your words of the stock arguments of the Jingo school? I have heard them for 40 years in the House of Commons. They are words of Palmerston throughout his mischievous career, & from William 3rd to our own time they have been spoken in defence of all the crimes which have built up the Debt & wasted the wealth & the blood of the people.’¹⁷ In response Chamberlain argued that ‘[e]verything turns in my opinion on the probabilities of what would have happened if we had not interfered. I think that anarchy in Egypt and the massacre of Europeans would have ensued and that this ¹⁵ Chamberlain’s minute of 18 October 1882, in Birmingham University, Joseph Chamberlain Papers, 7/1/3/4. ¹⁶ J. Bright to J. Chamberlain, 4 January 1883, ibid. 5/7/20. ¹⁷ Ibid.

122

E. F. Biagini

in turn would have been followed by European intervention and very likely by European war.’¹⁸ ‘We see now the evils of interference, but it is impossible to say what the result of a different course would have been, both in Egypt & public opinion here.’¹⁹ Bright’s assessment was completely different: he insisted that the war was no more justiﬁable in hindsight than when the decision to invade was taken. And it was easy to see what the situation would have been without the invasion: ‘there would have been for the moment a bloodless revolution & England, France and Turkey would have discussed the future of Egypt, but there would have been no war—no bombardment—no city in ﬂames—no thousands of men slaughtered.’²⁰ At the time Chamberlain seemed to concede Bright’s point, but over the next two years he moved towards the idea that the pursuit of public interest required a strong, decisive, imperial executive, rather than devolution: ‘As far as I know there is no instance in history of one nations [sic] having ruled another with its full consent & approval. If the people of India were of one race & one mind they could drive us into the sea & rule themselves. But is this ever likely to be the case? If not can we safely give any considerable extension of liberties? Except as a preparation for entire self-government a mixed system is productive of grave embarrassment.’²¹ Chamberlain had come to share the views traditionally articulated by the legal members of the Council of India, including Henry Maine, who denied that the quality or legitimacy of government rested on popular participation, and James Fitzjames Stephen. The latter was an unreconstructed utilitarian, who had criticized J. S. Mill for his willingness to fudge the issues of liberty and authority. Drawing on his imperial experience, Fitzjames Stephen insisted that—given that individuals were animated by desire for pleasure and fear of pain—only the overwhelming force of the State and the certainty that it would be used to crush resistance could impose the peace, law, and order on which ‘liberty’ relied.²² He was not embarrassed by the authoritarian implications of his utilitarianism, because only authority could enforce the pursuit of the public interest and the beneﬁt of ‘the greatest number’, whether Indian, Egyptian, or Irish. Neither was Chamberlain embarrassed by imperialism, ¹⁸ J. Chamberlain to J. Bright, 31 December 1882, ibid. 5/7/37. ¹⁹ J. Chamberlain to J. Bright, 14 January 1884, ibid. 5/7/39. ²⁰ J. Bright to J. Chamberlain, 18 January 1884, ibid. 5/7/21. ²¹ J. Chamberlain to C. P. Albert, Legal member of the Council of India, 19 December 1884, ibid. 9/1/2/1. ²² J. Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1st edn. 1873 (Chicago, 1991), 203.

Radicalism and Liberty

123

apparently not even in 1884. And it is important to note that this was not because he thought that the Indians were ‘not yet ready’ for selfgovernment: in fact, in 1882 he had ridiculed this view, as a general argument, with regard to the Egyptians.²³ The question was purely and simply one of British power and imperial interests. The logic of the argument did not support liberalism as a method of imperial administration. In the case of the Irish crisis from 1886, however, when Chamberlain stood for the Union and abandoned the Gladstonian Liberal party, his views were more complex, but relied on a similar logic. He reckoned that there was no future for Irish Protestant liberties without Britain, no future for the Irish economy outside the Union, and no future for the United Kingdom if it allowed a noisy but insigniﬁcant minority of short-sighted farmers and self-interested politicians to break away at the periphery. National interest, individual liberty, the cause of progress in Ireland, and the greatness of Britain in the world, all depended on the preservation of the Union. Many Liberals and radicals agreed: if politics was now about improving the lot of the people through land reform and popular education, and if poverty was to be reduced—as a younger generation of radicals and socialists demanded from the late 1880s—then true radicalism required not devolution, but the rational reconstruction and empowerment of the imperial executive at the centre. Despite Chamberlain’s marginalization within the Liberal party after 1886, these views would have an enormous impact not only on late nineteenth-century Unionist radicalism, but also on twentieth-century New Liberal and Labour politics. For better or for worse they continue to inﬂuence the leadership of the Labour party even at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century.

FURTHER READING Barker, M., Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain, 1885–94 (Hassocks, 1975). Bebbington, D. W., The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics 1870–1914 (London, 1982). Bew, P., Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin, 1978). ²³ Chamberlain’s minute of 18 October 1882, in Birmingham University, Joseph Chamberlain Papers, 7/1/3/3.

124

E. F. Biagini

Biagini, E. F., Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone 1860–80 (Cambridge, 1992). —— ‘Exporting “Western & Beneﬁcent Institutions”: Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Role’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift, eds., Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000). —— ed., Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996). —— and Reid, A. J., eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991). Cameron, E., Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands c. 1880–1925 (East Linton, 1996). Clarke, P. F., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). Hall, C., Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002). Hamer, D. A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972). —— The Politics of Electoral Pressure: A Study in the History of Victorian Reform Agitations (Brighton, 1977). Hutchison, I. G. C., A Political History of Scotland 1832–1924 (Edinburgh, 1986). Jalland, P., The Liberals and Ireland: The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914 (Brighton, 1980). Lawrence, J., Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998). Lynch, P., The Liberal Party in Rural England 1885–1910 (Oxford, 2003). MacColl, A. W., Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893 (Edinburgh, 2005). Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone 1809–1998 (Oxford, 1997). Moody, T. W., Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 1846–1882 (Oxford, 1982). Parry, J., The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993). Parry, J. P., Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party (Cambridge, 1986). Robbins, K., John Bright (London, 1979).

6 Women and Liberty Helen Rogers

In 1869, with scant debate or dissent the newly reformed Parliament passed the third Contagious Diseases Act which, extending those of 1864 and 1866, aimed to diminish the spread of venereal disease in the armed forces by providing for the medical examination of prostitutes in garrison towns and, if infected, their compulsory treatment.¹ Critics warned the legislation established the ‘state regulation of vice’ and would be widened to cover the entire civil population. The defence of liberty underpinned opposition to the Acts: presumed guilty until she could prove her innocence and subject to imprisonment if she resisted treatment, the suspected woman was deprived of a fair trial and thus, it was claimed, the legislation overturned the fundamental principles of British law, threatening the rights and freedom of all. Within weeks, a National Repeal Association had been formed with an allied Ladies National Association (LNA) which mobilized a mass-based abolition campaign. Though not an exclusively feminist movement—repealers came from a broad denominational and political spectrum while some women’s rights activists maintained a cautious distance—the legislation electriﬁed the ‘Woman Question’, exposing a wider audience than ever before to feminist ideals. The Act was particularly galling for those who had sought to include women’s enfranchisement in the recent extension of manhood suffrage, only to see a Liberal government curtail their existing rights. In defence of women’s personal and civil liberties, feminist repealers drew on a long-established politics of the rights and wrongs of their sex but, in their confrontation with the State, they began to examine women’s freedom and authority in distinctively new ways. Hitherto, women’s subordination and emancipation had been understood primarily in relation to their position in the family, ¹ Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Social Reform (London, 1980).

126

Helen Rogers

marriage, and civil society. Now, for the ﬁrst time, ‘the State’ was identiﬁed and challenged as a source of women’s oppression. The CDA have been read as exemplifying the new disciplinary structures of the mid-nineteenth-century State that produced knowledge about ‘fallen women’ by categorizing and regulating sexual behaviour and thereby policing the boundaries between the ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ poor. The repeal campaign has been seen as a major conductor of feminist consciousness yet, paradoxically, though studies have focused on the movement’s defence of women’s liberty and critique of the exclusively masculinist State, little attention has been paid to the sources or the implications of their political conceptions of the State per se.² While, for many, the CDA typiﬁed the dangers of State power for women, some women were beginning to target the State as a site for the exercise of their expertise and authority. As this chapter explores, the CDA posed challenging matters of principle and priority for the ﬁrst generation of professional female nursing and medical practitioners. Some of the most forceful interventions over State regulation were made by prominent pioneers in this ﬁeld, notably Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Garrett, and Elizabeth Blackwell, whose positions, like those of women employed in government-sponsored lock wards and voluntary reclamation homes, were shaped as much by professional experience and ambition as by moral and political principle. Their interventions are examined in the context of an intensely politicized debate about voluntary and public provision and the relationship between civil society and the State, from the initial drafting and implementation of the legislation to its repeal in 1886. The opinions of practitioners are compared with those of Josephine Butler, the repeal movement’s charismatic leader, who, voicing the most insistently libertarian critique of the State, defended women’s rights within an established radical-liberal discourse of British liberty. However, though she upheld a universal conception of personal and civil freedom, for Butler, like many Victorian women, the exercise of liberty was as much a matter of conscience and duty as a question of rights. While ideas of liberty in the nineteenth century were ﬂuid, contested, and highly charged, they were also acutely gendered, and this had profound implications for the ways in which women renegotiated their understandings of freedom and authority as the State came to occupy a distinctive place within the political landscape and imaginary of the late Victorian period. ² Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987); Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (London, 1990).

Women and Liberty

127

I From the end of the eighteenth century, even the most radical advocates of the rights of their sex connected women’s freedom with their domestic and familial obligations. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft challenged Rousseau’s claim that ‘women have, or ought to have, but little liberty’ since they were ‘apt to indulge themselves excessively in what is allowed them’. On the contrary, argued Wollstonecraft, female indulgence and illiberality were precisely the result of their lack of rational freedom: ‘Liberty is the mother of virtue and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics.’ How could woman be virtuous, she asked, ‘unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehend her duty’? For women, ‘liberty of mind’ was not merely a guarantee of individual reason and independence, as it was for men; it served an additional imperative—the fulﬁlment of their patriotic responsibilities as the mothers of citizens.³ Despite her insistence on women’s domestic responsibilities, in the conservative backlash against revolutionary ideals, both Wollstonecraft and her rational conception of liberty were associated with sexual radicalism and libertinism and with political and domestic disorder. While many Victorian feminists read and were inﬂuenced by her writings, in public they were careful to distance themselves from her dangerous reputation.⁴ Explicitly rejecting claims for female citizenship, conservatives and evangelicals asserted that British liberty and tradition were synonymous with women’s attachment to the home. As the conduct writer Sarah Stickney Ellis instructed the ‘Women of England’ in 1839, they were ‘free from many of the national prejudices entertained by the women of other countries, and they enjoy the inestimable privilege of being taught to look up to a higher standard of morals’. ‘[L]eisure and liberty’ were afforded by the ‘systematic regularity of their household affairs’; good Christian mothers knew they were ‘most at liberty’ when devoting themselves to the good of their family. To be free was to be selﬂess; ‘what man is there in existence’, contended Ellis,

³ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1st edn. 1792 (London, 1985), 91 and 41. ⁴ Pam Hirsch, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: A Problematic Legacy’, in Clarissa Campbell-Orr, ed., Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920 (Manchester, 1996), 43–60.

128

Helen Rogers

‘who would not rather his wife should be free from selﬁshness, than be able to read Virgil without the use of a dictionary’.⁵ The reiﬁcation by moralists like Ellis of ‘female inﬂuence’ within ‘woman’s sphere’ at the cost of her exclusion from the public realm and with it the rights of liberty was vociferously challenged by contemporary feminists, especially those associated with freethought, Owenism, and radical Unitarianism.⁶ In The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), Harriet Taylor argued that freedom was the condition for full human development: ‘The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained without complete liberty of choice.’⁷ But many middle- and upper-class women may not have perceived ‘woman’s sphere’ in such restrictive terms, for they held their domestic duties as compatible and coextensive with a wide range of religious, philanthropic, and missionary activities, especially ministering to the needs, souls, and protection of the poor and the heathen at home and abroad. As historians of women’s religious and charitable activism have shown, voluntary association afforded women of the higher classes considerable opportunity for participation in civil society, though on different terms from men and often restricted to female societies.⁸ Their freedom of movement and liberty of expression were inﬂuenced as much by the cultures and codes of class as by those of ‘separate spheres’, and in their efforts to reform people they considered ⁵ Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London, 1839), 105, 42, 24 and 71. Though eulogizing female domesticity and feminine virtue, Ellis did not see women as subordinate or inferior to men, and many scholars have overlooked her humorous and assertive tone. For studies that explore Ellis’s conception of female authority and the busyness of her life, see Henrietta Twycross-Martin, ‘Woman Supportive or Woman Manipulative? The “Mrs Ellis” Woman’, in Campbell-Orr, ed., Wollstonecraft’s Daughters, 109–19; and Alison Twells, ‘The Evangelical Family, Missionary Domesticity and “Woman’s Sphere” ’, in The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class (Basingstoke, forthcoming). ⁶ Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke, 1995) and Gleadle, ed., Radical Writing on Women, 1800–1850 (Basingstoke, 2002). ⁷ Harriet Taylor, The Enfranchisement of Women, in Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, eds., Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor (Toronto, 1994), 186. ⁸ Debate continues within this extensive literature over whether women’s sphere increased or decreased in the early century. While uncovering the signiﬁcance of women’s involvement in voluntary association, the more pessimistic evaluation is expounded by F. K. Prochaska in Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1980) and by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (London, 1987). For the more optimistic account, see Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of

Women and Liberty

129

morally or sexually ‘too free’, women were often the authors and enforcers of those codes. It was not so much protest against personal conﬁnement that prompted many women to challenge the limits of ‘woman’s sphere’ but rather impediments to their sense of mission to others. In the bonds of Christian sisterhood, for instance, female abolitionists claimed their right and duty to speak out for the protection of slavewomen and children and, on occasion, some broke rank from the abolitionist leadership in order to defend the autonomy of women’s anti-slavery activity or the principle of immediatism over gradualism.⁹ As many historians have shown, abolitionist rhetoric provided a highly resonant language of moralized protest for the women’s rights and repeal movements where the emancipatory rhetoric of liberation was often undercut by the more disciplinarian and maternalistic discourse of protection.¹⁰ The vocabulary of bondage and liberation inspired by the Old Testament and the radical constitutionalist idiom was deployed extensively within the popular movements for social and political reform, where working-class women frequently contrasted the concern of abolitionists for West Indian slaves with their indifference to the plight of Britain’s industrial slaves. As the Chartist women of Newcastle upon Tyne remonstrated, ‘the scorn of the rich is pointed towards us . . . the brand of slavery is on our kindred . . . We are a despised caste . . . we are oppressed because we are poor.’¹¹ While some in the freethought, Owenite-socialist, and Chartist movements argued that women deserved the same individual entitlements and freedoms claimed by men and pointed to sexual inequalities within the home and workplace, overwhelmingly working-class women activists portrayed themselves in a familial capacity.¹² As the English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 383–414; Kathryn Gleadle, ‘ “Our Several Spheres”: Middle-Class Women and the Feminisms of Early Victorian Radical Politics’, in Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds., Women in British Politics (Basingstoke, 2000); and Twells, Civilising Mission. ⁹ Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992). ¹⁰ Vron Ware, ‘Feminism in the Age of Imperialism’, in Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London, 1992), 121–66; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (London, 1994). ¹¹ ‘Address of the Female Political Union of Newcastle upon Tyne to their Fellow Countrywomen’, Northern Star, 2 February 1839. ¹² Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983); Dorothy Thompson, ‘The Women’, in The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1984), 120–51; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995); Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 2000).

130

Helen Rogers

Newcastle women contended, the sources of injustice and inequity came from outside the family, and they ascribed their poverty to tyrannical government that refused to protect British workers from an aggressive labour market and that used class legislation to tax and punish the poor. It was as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters that they sought to sustain the integrity of the working-class family in the face of low wages, unemployment, and the disciplinary regime of the workhouse that separated loved ones. Historians of gender relations in the Chartist movement have emphasized the patriarchal character of the movement in prioritizing the pursuit of manhood suffrage and the male breadwinner wage and marginalizing claims for women’s enfranchisement, but, while some were galvanized by political activism to claim their own citizenship rights, in their speeches and writings Chartist women seem mainly to have understood their freedom in terms of their own aspiration to maintain a comfortable and independent home and embraced what has been described as a ‘militant domesticity’.¹³ Their political protest was fuelled precisely by the want of ‘leisure and liberty’ enjoyed by more privileged women. While the mid-century State loomed large over working-class communities, especially through the shadow cast by the workhouse, it scarcely intruded in the lives of middle- and upper-class women except in relation to the law. The concerns of feminists were overridingly with women’s position in the family and civil society, particularly their legal disabilities in respect of property and earnings, protection in marriage, and custody of children.¹⁴ In the effort to sustain the national movement for women’s suffrage following the 1867 Reform Act, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, originally written in 1861 shortly after On Liberty. Following Wollstonecraft and his wife Harriet Taylor, Mill restated the classic feminist case for sexual equality, grounded in an enlightenment and democratic conception of natural rights and reason. Women’s subjection was explained in relation to their legal subordination in marriage and the family that underlay their social submission and political ¹³ For the patriarchal character of the movements and the restraints placed on women’s political expression see Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke, 1991). While emphasizing the defensive nature of Chartist conceptions of the family, other historians have stressed the attractions of ‘militant’ motherhood or domesticity for Chartist women. See Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, 220–32; Rogers, Women and the People, 80–123; and Michelle de Larrabeiti, ‘Conspicuous Before the World: The Political Rhetoric of the Chartist Women’, in Eileen Yeo, ed., Radical Femininity: Women’s SelfRepresentation in the Public Sphere (Manchester, 1998), 106–26. ¹⁴ Mary Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (London, 1989).

Women and Liberty

131

exclusion. Without the means of self-culture and independence in the home or as citizens, they were reduced to a state of de facto enslavement. While Mill noted that most wives were not treated as badly as slaves, in one respect they were held in ‘the worst description of slavery’ since they could not refuse their husband’s sexual demands and could be treated merely as ‘the instrument of an animal function’. Men’s sanction to exert arbitrary and brutal power over their wives was a throwback to savage times when power was the effect of physical superiority and force, but such authority was inappropriate to modern, civilized society, as ‘command and obedience become exceptional facts of life, [and] equal association its general rule’. Social and political equality were contingent on the eradication of power relations in the family: ‘Citizenship . . . is partly a school of society in equality; but citizenship ﬁlls only a small place in modern life . . . The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom . . . of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other.’¹⁵ Published, like The Subjection, in 1869 and as she embarked on her crusade against the Acts, Josephine Butler’s introduction to a collection of essays on Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture similarly defended the principle of liberty within the classic framework outlined by Mill but it also recognized important shifts in feminist concerns and activism since the 1850s.¹⁶ In comparison with Mill’s sceptical view of the contemporary home, for Butler the home provided the nurturing ground of liberty that could only be eroded by the centralizing tendencies of the modern State: ‘Everything lives and thrives better where there is the principle of play and freedom which home affords and which is necessarily excluded when rule prevails.’¹⁷ The challenge was not the radical overhaul of the family, but rather its reproduction: a task for which State institutions were singularly ill designed and ill suited. While agreeing with previous feminists that the regeneration of family life was a key to social and political renewal, Butler’s understanding of women’s subordination reached beyond the home and political governance. For the ﬁrst time in feminist polemic, Butler identiﬁed the State as a major site of women’s oppression. Though acknowledging the rights of women across the social classes and distinctions within the gender conventions of those classes, when analysing gender relations the freethinking feminists typically evoked a middle-class experience of home and family life. By contrast, Butler was ¹⁵ John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London, 1985), 248 and 259–61. ¹⁶ Josephine E. Butler, ed., Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays (London, 1869). ¹⁷ Ibid., p. xxxviii.

132

Helen Rogers

equally concerned with women’s vulnerability in the labour market as in the home: the central theme of Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture. With contributors from campaigns to open up higher education and the professions to women as well as social action and political citizenship, the collection examined improvements made and gains yet to be won in addressing the ‘surplus’ of women exposed by the 1851 Census. While the Census had attracted attention solely to the plight of single women, even from Mill, Butler pointed to the two-and-a-half million women working for starvation wages and those forced out of employment ‘by means of trade monopolies among men’, deﬁning emancipation positively in terms of all women’s right to work and to become self-supporting in a free labour market. Moreover, though she had not been permitted to include a chapter on the subject of prostitution, she insisted the public must be ‘constantly reminded’ of it. Whatever the position of sociallyprivileged women, the wretched condition of their poor sisters demanded their attention: ‘the existence of this class would alone have been enough to urge us who are happier to raise our voices to claim what we claim now—freedom and power to reach and deal with great social evils’ (my emphasis).¹⁸ While liberty, for Mill, was fundamentally the exercise of personal autonomy and will, for Butler, it was as much the fulﬁlment of altruistic and Christian duty.¹⁹ Butler’s antipathy to State institutions owed much to her radicalliberal inheritance which viewed centralized authority as antithetical to self-government, local democratic control, and active citizenship based on the self-reliant, morally-responsible individual.²⁰ But it was also animated by the ideal of the ‘communion of labour’, propounded by women activists from the mid-century as they sought to extend their sphere of social action—especially in the mediation between the classes— where ‘feminine’ powers of nurture, compassion, and sympathy should complement ‘masculine’ forms of knowledge and authority.²¹ According to Butler, both traditional feminine benevolence—‘independent individual ¹⁸ Josephine E. Butler, ed., Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays, pp. xci–xcii. ¹⁹ Fellow women’s suffrage activists increasingly argued for the female franchise as an expression of public duty as well as individual right; see Jane Rendall, ‘Citizenship, Culture and Civilisation: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866–1874’, in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan, eds., Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (Auckland, 1994), 127–50. ²⁰ M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004), 221–35. ²¹ Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant and the Communion of Labour, 1st edn. 1857 (Westport, Conn., 1976); Eileen Janes Yeo, ‘Social Motherhood and

Women and Liberty

133

ministering’—and ‘the masculine form of philanthropy’—‘large and comprehensive measures, organizations and systems planned by men and sanctioned by Parliament’—were incapable of addressing the urgent social problems faced by the poor. What was needed was ‘the large infusion of Home elements into Workhouses, Hospitals, Schools, Orphanages, Lunatic Asylums, Reformatories, and even Prisons’ and this required ‘a setting free of feminine powers and inﬂuence from the constraint of bad education, and narrow aims, and listless homes’.²² Butler’s optimism that institutions could be ‘infused’ by ‘home elements’ was soon eroded by the battle over State regulation and more and more she would argue that only the voluntary sector was capable of delivering the forms of social intimacy that would enable the poor to develop the selfrespect and skills to become self-reliant, morally-conscious citizens with the capacity to form stable and happy families.

II With her attention to the class dynamics of State power, Butler echoed many of the political and social concerns of the Chartists, and it is signiﬁcant that her ﬁrst lecturing tour against the Acts sought to mobilize Northern working-class communities in favour of repeal and that under her direction the campaign would be the ﬁrst national movement to involve close collaboration between working men and middle-class women’s rights activists.²³ Utilizing the discourse of popular constitutionalism upon which many working men had just secured their political enfranchisement, Butler demanded that they act to ‘protect’ their wives and daughters from the iniquitous legislation. In its engagement with working-class women, repeal agitation retained many of the ‘maternalistic’ characteristics of traditional female philanthropy and this would have important implications for the ways in which women repealers constructed their own authority and the liberties of poor women. However, Butler herself understood women’s vulnerability as a consequence of their the Communion of Labour in British Social Science, 1850–1950’, Women’s History Review, 1/2 (1992), 63–87. ²² Butler, Woman’s Work, p. xxxvi. ²³ Walkowitz, Prostitution, 137–48; Bertrand Taithe, ‘Working Men, Old Chartists and the Contagious Diseases Acts’, in Keith Laybourn, ed., Social Conditions, Status and Community, 1860–c.1920 (Stroud, 1997), 184–204; Rogers, Women and the People, 197–240.

134

Helen Rogers

powerlessness against the combined forces of the State, rather than their innate ‘helplessness’, and she frequently cited ‘the wail of a spirited woman’ subjected to the legislation: If it were a man insulting me in that way . . . I would use all the strength I have of muscle . . . to resist and defeat him. I would ﬁght him, for my person, for my honour, for my life, even if I was killed in doing so. But O! Madam, when you know that that man . . . has the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Queen, the Law, all at his back, you feel as if your heart died within you; you cannot ﬁght against all these. It seems to you then as if God himself is against you.²⁴

Working women were called on to challenge the legislation by signing petitions and opposing the election of pro-regulation parliamentary candidates. Legal support was offered to women who chose to refuse examination and refuge extended to those seeking to escape prostitution. While Butler often told meetings of working women that they too should be given the vote, such assemblies were distinctively different from those of men, often organized as prayer meetings rather than as political meetings.²⁵ While many activists would be animated by Butler’s vision of repeal as a missionary crusade, her messianic style of agitation was not approved by all women, especially those seeking to secure women’s authority within professional and State institutions. This can be seen in the initial opposition of Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau to the implementation of a regulatory system, which indicates concerns and priorities distinct from those of the subsequent repeal movement and different understandings of their personal inﬂuence over government and public opinion. In the early 1860s Nightingale was consulted by the Army Sanitary Commission, charged with monitoring the spread of venereal disease as part of the reform of medical provision in the military following the Crimean War.²⁶ In the ﬁrst instance, her opposition to State regulation was motivated less by fear of despotic State control than by her refutation of the germ theory of disease and insistence that sanitation and education were the solution to medical and social problems in the services and civil society: ‘all evidence tends to show that venereal disease is generated by vice not . . . propagated by infection’. As F. B. Smith contends, she ‘had no fear of the central state’ but rather ‘sought to make the state ²⁴ Butler, Storm Bell, June 1898, 58–60, repr. in Jane Jordan and Ingrid Sharp, eds., Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns: Diseases of the Body Politic, 5 vols. (London, 2003), v. 585–7. ²⁵ Rogers, Women and the People, 200–23. ²⁶ McHugh, Prostitution, 35–9.

Women and Liberty

135

coterminous with her private concerns’.²⁷ Many later repealers maintained an implacable hostility to government inquiries into regulation; famously, Butler refused to answer the 1871 Royal Commission’s questions about the operation of the Acts since government had no right to ‘meddle’ in such ‘delicate work’: ‘It is nothing to me whether they operate well or ill.’²⁸ By contrast, Nightingale was keen to preserve the position she had established during the war as a leading player in policy-making circles concerned with sanitation, nursing, and army conditions. She sought to scotch regulationist proposals by lobbying at the highest levels of government, and her evidence persuaded the 1863 select committee that the moral causes of contagion should be addressed as well as their physical consequences by improvements in the rational and moral education of troops and curbs against prostitution.²⁹ Despite Nightingale’s intervention, ofﬁcial clamours grew for periodical inspection and compulsory treatment on the assumption that prostitution was an inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of a ‘bachelor army’, and when the War Ofﬁce introduced the ﬁrst Contagious Diseases bill to Parliament, she alerted public opinion to the dangers of regulation by turning to Martineau, her trusted ally in the press and leader writer for the Daily News. But Nightingale’s conception of political inﬂuence was always autocratic. To retain authority and credibility within government—in 1867 she claimed to have ‘more political power than if I had been a borough, returning two MPs’—she endeavoured to keep her distance from activists and pressure groups, making her views known through friends and allies in ofﬁcial positions and anonymous articles or acquaintances in the press.³⁰ In backing Nightingale’s wartime campaign, Martineau had claimed to have done all she could ‘to keep the crowd off you, & leave you air & space & liberty’. Such liberty demanded the preservation of Nightingale’s special reputation and Martineau assured her that ‘I shall not bring the “Women’s Missionaries” upon you’ for ‘I detest all setting up of idols, & all proclamation of rights’.³¹ Like Nightingale’s ²⁷ Galton to Nightingale, cited by F. B. Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (London, 1982), 194. ²⁸ Evidence of Butler, Report from the Royal Commission on the C.D.A. Minutes of Evidence (1871), British Parliamentary Papers (henceforth PP), Q12,863. ²⁹ Smith, Florence Nightingale, 195–6. ³⁰ Nightingale to J. S. Mill, 11 August 1867, cited by Smith, Florence Nightingale, 188. For her antipathy to activism and ambivalence towards women’s rights and repeal see ibid. 188–98. ³¹ Martineau to Nightingale, 3 December 1858, reprinted in Valerie Sanders, ed., Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters (Oxford, 1990), 166–7.

136

Helen Rogers

special position in government, Martineau had an inﬂuential foothold in the press that, despite extensive writing on social and political issues affecting women, had been protected by a considerable degree of aloofness from active causes. In repudiating the ‘Women’s Missionaries’, Nightingale and Martineau were rejecting the impassioned mode of polemic that would animate the repeal campaign in favour of an expert approach to social reform, based on empiricism as well as principle. In their initial onslaught against State regulation Nightingale and Martineau seem to have been motivated by concern for the moral health of men and the nation rather than the liberty of women and they argued that delinquent male behaviour was the product of corrupt institutions, in this instance the army. Compulsory examination amounted to the introduction of the Continental system of State-regulated prostitution, Nightingale warned, denouncing ‘the French plan’ as ‘invented expressly to degrade the national character’.³² Believing the country was unready for a ‘system of police repression’, Martineau alleged that regulationists proposed, as an interim measure, the government funding of lock hospitals connected with military stations, which inevitably would involve ‘civil society in its trammels, its corruptions, and its snares’ and the end of the ‘distinctive honour and privilege of our country and people—the adoption of the family as the basis of society’. Treatment for infected soldiers should be paid from the army budget and not shouldered by civil society, she insisted, while ‘their tempters and victims’ should be catered for by private charity and the poor law.³³ The military should treat its recruits as ‘self-respecting’ men not ‘predestined fornicators’: ‘If the soldier is more immoral than his contemporaries of the working class, it must be because the standard of morality is lower in the army than out of it.’³⁴ While providing troops with opportunities for marriage and for acquiring useful occupations, the State should attack the causes of temptation through repressive measures. Martineau approved ³² Nightingale to Martineau, 25 September 1861, cited by McHugh, Prostitution, 35, and 35–6 for initial responses to regulation. ³³ Originally published in four letters in the Daily News between 4 and 20 September 1863, these were republished in pamphlet form: Harriet Martineau, The Contagious Diseases Acts as Applied to Garrison Towns and Naval Stations (Liverpool, 1870), repr. in Sheila Jeffreys, ed., The Sexuality Debates (London, 1987), 77–90; Letters 1 and 2. ³⁴ Daily News, Letter 3. As Myna Trustram shows, the military was reluctant to facilitate the marriage of servicemen since family obligation was seen as creating conﬂicts of allegiance and the maintenance of the ‘bachelor army’ was held as the best means of securing men’s commitment to the regiment. Repealers were among the many critics of this policy which ﬂouted the prevalent middle-class familial ideology. See her important study, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge, 1984).

Women and Liberty

137

the 1857 Obscenity Act against licentious literature and recommended the suppression of brothels.³⁵ While many repealers continued to object to the demoralizing consequences of the Acts on enlisted men and opposed their compulsory examination as well as that of women, with extensionist proposals to bring the entire civil population within the remit of the legislation, sympathy shifted ﬁrmly away from men and towards women, even prostitutes, who were now viewed as the primary victims of State repression. As Martineau told the readers of the Daily News in 1869, ‘the unhappy women’ were ‘subject to the extremity of outrage under the eyes, hands, and instruments of surgeons, for the protection of the sex which is the cause of sin, which is to be protected in further indulgence in it, and which is passed over by the law, while the victim is punished ’ (my emphasis). Before the Acts, ‘every woman in the country had the same rights as men over her own person; and the law extended its protection over all alike’; their institution marked an outrageous moral double standard and ﬂouted traditional conceptions of civil liberty since ‘penal consequences are imposed on an assumed offence [prostitution] which is not deﬁned. A woman, chaste or unchaste, is charged.’ This iniquitous legislation was being introduced by a cabal of medical and military men and politicians. As well as undemocratic, it marked the ‘importation . . . into our country, supreme in its privilege of personal liberty’ of the French spy-system, of registration of prostitutes, and licensing of brothels.³⁶ The depiction of extensionists as an unelected, conspiratorial clique corroding central and local government would vividly colour repeal constructions of the State in which an alliance of professional and elite men was portrayed as waging war against defenceless women. Their conspiratorial view of the State was powerfully inﬂuenced by contemporary critiques of invasive medicine and compulsory treatment, and repeal attracted considerable support from the growing anti-vivisectionist and anti-vaccinationist campaigns.³⁷ Where Mill had denounced the sanctioning of physical force against women within marriage, repealers now condemned the State’s barbaric treatment of women. Writing as Justina, Nightingale declared that compulsion amounted to ‘the crushing agency of physical force’ and the submission of women to ‘a regime which they loathe and abhor’ and that was contrary to ‘the spirit of genuine ³⁵ Daily News, Letter 2. ³⁶ Daily News, Letters 1 and 2. ³⁷ Brian Harrison, ‘State Intervention and Moral Reform’, in P. Hollis, ed., Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), 289–322; Roberts, Making English Morals, 213–21.

138

Helen Rogers

Christianity’.³⁸ While extensionists protested that a woman who traded in sex could hardly be brutalized by medical procedure, repealers insisted, following Mill, that ‘that which is compulsory seems . . . always more degrading in its effects on the character than what is done voluntarily’.³⁹ In evading the Acts, women were afﬁrming their constitutional liberties and their womanhood: ‘They feel like they are treated like cattle,’ claimed Justina, ‘herded together to wait their turn to be examined, not for their own sakes, but for the sake of men who resort to them, and for whose physical security their personal freedom, their sense of shame, and modesty which may still remain to them are ruthlessly sacriﬁced.’ By supporting prostitutes’ active resistance to the legislation, she and other repealers preferred that women ‘happily escape’ into the ‘ranks of clandestine prostitution’ where they might be accessible to rescue.⁴⁰ Another vital component of the repeal denunciation of the State was the co-operation between the magistracy, the special—and plain-clothes—police force or ‘spy-system’ that maintained surveillance over the subjected areas, and the War Ofﬁce. Not only was regulation based on the ‘continental system’, the British model was pioneered by colonial administrators who, many repealers argued, enjoyed ‘despotic powers’ that were incompatible with British liberties, a charge made repeatedly against Henry Storks, the former governor of Malta, where he had proposed the compulsory inspection of soldiers’ wives. In a ﬁerce electoral contest at Colchester, repealers successfully opposed his candidacy, despite the backing of the War Ofﬁce, and also denounced the corrosive effects of standing armies, the restrictions on marriage for enlisted men, and their exemption from bastardy payments, all of which, repealers argued, eroded men’s sense of familial responsibility and encouraged prostitution.⁴¹ While repealers always insisted that their cause was not limited to ‘the Woman Question’ and that abolition required the co-operation of women and men, the introduction and operation of the Acts by men fuelled the perception of a class war and a sex war, in which powerful ³⁸ Pall Mall Gazette, 3 and 18 March 1870, reprinted as Justina’s Letters in Reply to Miss Garrett’s Defence of the Contagious Diseases Acts (London, 1870), 18. ³⁹ Evidence of Mill, PP (1871), QQ20,080. For debates over the examination of men, see Trustram, Women of the Regiment, 126–31. ⁴⁰ Justina, 29. ⁴¹ See Mrs E. M. King’s letter ‘To the Electors of the Borough of Colchester’, in The Shield, 5 November 1870, 285–6. For the electoral contests against War Ofﬁce and regulationist candidates see Rogers, Women and the People, 197–240. For the exemption of servicemen from obligation to support legitimate as well as illegitimate children, see Trustram, Women of the Regiment, 50–67.

Women and Liberty

139

‘aristocratic’ men were allied against all women. Butler would repeat ‘the bitter complaint’ of one woman subjected to the Acts: ‘It is men, men, only men, from the ﬁrst to the last, that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at ﬁrst, then I was ﬂung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored . . . In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die!’ And as she spoke I thought, ‘And it was a Parliament of men only who made this law which treats you as an outlaw. Men alone met in committee over it. Men alone are the executives. When men, of all ranks, thus band together for an end deeply concerning women, and place themselves like a thick, impenetrable wall between women and women, and forbid one class of women entrance into the presence of the other, the weak, outraged class, it is time that women should arise and demand their most sacred rights in regard to their sisters.’⁴²

In response, repealers claimed that womanhood was united as a sex, in defending the rights of their defenceless sisters. It was as ‘Englishwomen’ that some of the most eminent women of the day ignited the national campaign by signing the Ladies’ Protest in January 1870, signifying identiﬁcation with a history of noble campaigns where patriotic Christian women protested against the oppression of the weak and helpless, as in the abolition of slavery, and defended liberty from British misgovernment and Continental—especially French—tyranny.⁴³ While the mobilization of women against the Acts across the social classes was certainly impressive, it is impossible to gauge how widely women endorsed the movement, partly because the exclusively male extension movement actively discouraged and even denounced women’s participation in discussion of such a delicate issue.⁴⁴ There are only very occasional and anonymous letters in the press from women in favour of the legislation. However, testimony from those who worked in the treatment and care of prostitutes, either in hospitals or in rescue homes, indicates a broad range of opinions about the merits of voluntarism and compulsion, state and private provision, the rights of individuals and the protection of the community, women’s liberty and social discipline. The Acts seem to have been endorsed, though not in public, by the small group of prospective women doctors, led by Sophia Jex-Blake, who ⁴² The Shield, 9 May 1870. ⁴³ The Shield, 14 March 1870, 9–11. ⁴⁴ The British Medical Journal approved Garrett’s pamphlet, arguing that she had professional knowledge through her medical training, but regretted the ‘Ladies’ Protest’ and the intervention of women, including Nightingale; see 29 January 1870, 112–13.

140

Helen Rogers

spearheaded the contemporaneous campaign to admit women for medical training at Edinburgh University. She had contributed the essay on ‘Women in the Medical Profession’ to Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture and Butler regretted having to end their correspondence because of disagreement over the Acts. The degree to which support for abolitionism quickly became a litmus test of feminist allegiance is suggested by the embarrassed treatment accorded the women medics in feminist historiography, where their support for regulation is explained in terms of the need to conform to medical orthodoxy while ﬁghting professional exclusion.⁴⁵ However, in the only public defence of the Acts made by a woman, Elizabeth Garrett gave a number of compelling arguments in favour of regulation by answering the charge that the Acts were a draconian attack on liberty. While presenting herself as an ‘Englishwoman’, Garrett insisted that regulation was ‘strictly a professional question’ and that public opinion should defer to ‘trust-worthy medical witnesses’. As a practitioner she claimed that disease was communicated largely by fallen women but that ‘innocent women and children’ were also its principal victims with between a third and a ﬁfth of hospital admissions in London infected. The State had no place in seeking to protect those who voluntarily endangered themselves but it should restrict personal liberty to protect the public, especially those ‘powerless to defend themselves’. The sexes were not treated unequally by the Act, she claimed, for it was not women who were their target but only those who ‘publicly practiced’ their vice ‘as a trade’, for whom there was no ‘parallel class among men’; neither extensionists nor repealers acknowledged the existence of male prostitution. Unlike Martineau and Nightingale, Garrett dismissed repressive measures, arguing that the State had no place to ‘make a crime of prostitution’ or to interfere in the affairs of individuals (though she suggested the criminalization of street soliciting), but it had a duty of care for the sick, no matter how morally reprehensible, and for its servants— servicemen—incapacitated by disease.⁴⁶ While repealers scoffed at claims that regulation could foster rescue work, Garrett sought to show how State provision could incorporate moral treatment and dismissed the melodramatic claims of repealers. She ⁴⁵ Ray Strachey, ‘The Cause’: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London, 1928), 197; Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson 1836–1917 (London, 1939), 127–8. ⁴⁶ Pall Mall Gazette, 25 January 1870, reprinted as Elizabeth Garrett, An Enquiry into the Character of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866–1869 (London, 1870), 3, 6, 8, 9, 14, 9, 13, 16.

Women and Liberty

141

denied that ‘innocent’ women would be cajoled into declaring themselves prostitutes, challenging repeal depictions of the defencelessness of the sex, a view that seemed to endorse conventional ideas about women’s passivity that women activists and professionals sought to challenge: ‘It is difﬁcult to believe that any one can seriously credit women with such a degree of helplessness.’ Indeed, the Act would deter young girls susceptible to prostitution since the ‘prospective loss of liberty’ would be much greater than fear of disease. Without any compulsory element, voluntary provision, though well intentioned, would never be able to address the gravity of the sanitary problem, and, as she pointed out, entry to voluntary reformatories was conditional on examination, which had never been considered demeaning. Medical examination might aid reform even if shaming, especially if lock hospitals offered refuges for ‘the slow difﬁcult work of restoration’, guided by ‘wise and sympathetic women’. The ‘distinctly merciful and Christian’ tenor of the Act reﬂected the medical profession’s awareness of the ‘urgent bodily suffering’ of the prostitute class invariably turned away by hospitals.⁴⁷ As a leader of the campaign to admit women to the profession, Garrett aligned herself with what she saw as a modern, interventionist, pragmatic sanitary practice based on specialist knowledge and disinterested expertise. The voluntary status of homes and reformatories may not have been as apparent to their inmates as to their benefactors and entry, for many women, could have been more an act of desperation than choice. Given the lack of sanctuaries for destitute women, the medical examination conducted on admission may scarcely have seemed ‘voluntary’, and those deemed diseased or physically unﬁt were usually referred to the workhouse or a lock hospital.⁴⁸ Some reformatories worked closely with police, magistrates, and prison services, offering to take in penitents as an alternative to custody. Often women were required to wear a uniform and, though under no statutory compulsion to stay, they may not have known of their right to leave. Entrance into a reformatory was invariably conditional upon the inmate agreeing to remain for a required period; two years was generally thought necessary to ensure redemption and to prepare penitents for ‘ﬁt work’, usually in domestic service.⁴⁹ ⁴⁷ Garrett, Enquiry, 9, 13, 16, 11. ⁴⁸ The Bristol Penitentiary sent infected girls to the lock ward of the workhouse, even if they showed signs of repentance; see Evidence of Miss Farrow, PP (1871), Q12,032. ⁴⁹ Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London, 2000), 36–41.

142

Helen Rogers

While repealers presented the case against the Acts as a clear-cut choice between state compulsion and freedom of the individual, their alternative proposals for medical and moral treatment frequently betrayed a disciplinary attitude towards the poor and class-based conceptions of liberty. Martineau’s contention that workhouse hospitals catered for diseased women revealed an ignorance of poor-law provision. Under the Prison Act of 1865, female felons were liable to compulsory inspection. Similarly, Martineau’s claim that the workhouse provided for diseased paupers overlooked the compulsory aspects of their examination and treatment, permitted by statute from 1867, though some extensionists proposed that doctors be empowered to send syphilitic cases to lock hospitals.⁵⁰ A long-standing advocate of the deterrence principle, Martineau was unlikely to acknowledge the widespread antipathy of working-class communities to the ‘Bastille’ for depriving the poor of human dignity and freedom. Prostitutes in Portsmouth pledged they ‘would rather die than go to the union’, and before the opening of the Admiralty-funded lock wards, those who refused to seek treatment in the poorhouse were often found collapsed in the streets, utterly incapacitated and chronically incurable.⁵¹ The challenges faced by both the government-supported and the voluntary sectors, their inadequacies and relative merits in meeting the physical and moral needs of women, were examined by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Acts of 1871. Among those giving evidence were women working in and alongside the administration of the Acts, as nursing staff on lock wards or managers of homes connected with hospitals. While some refused to acknowledge any problem with the legislation and may have been schooled in their evidence, most had experience and criticisms of the voluntary and compulsory systems, for many of the nursing staff on the lock wards had worked in homes or penitentiaries.⁵² Though expressing ﬁrm views, their testimony contrasts with the emphatic and often dogmatic claims made by extensionists and abolitionists, reﬂecting perhaps the pragmatic and less ideologically driven approach of those employed in a difﬁcult and poorly-funded area of work. Moreover, their ⁵⁰ Evidence of Dr Row, Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals based at the Royal Naval Hospital, Portsmouth, Royal Commission upon the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts, PP (1871), QQ1993–9. ⁵¹ Evidence of Mrs Colebrook, manager of the Southsea Home, and Augustus Howell, town councillor, PP (1871), QQ12,147; 12,185; 12,223–7. ⁵² For an uncritical supporter of the Acts whose evidence and character were condemned by repealers, see evidence of Sarah Gale, nurse at the examining room of the Royal Albert Hospital, Devonport, PP (1871), QQ8919–9106.

Women and Liberty

143

evidence testiﬁed to battles within the wards with male administrators, patients, and inmates, as nursing staff asserted their professional and philanthropic authority. Most employees on the lock wards believed compulsory treatment was necessary for, although patients welcomed health care, they lacked selfdiscipline and were easily tempted back to the streets when a ship or regiment entered town. Matrons and superintendents interpreted their role as combining the guidance and rescue of ‘fallen women’ with their physical care. As one voluntary worker contended, ‘All healing must elevate; they are more degraded by their diseases than by anything else’; it was not for her to distinguish between the moral and physical causes of disease but only ‘the fact of individual suffering’.⁵³ By contrast, some repealers were reluctant to acknowledge the severity of the disease, or the necessity of its cure. A ‘healthier race of girls . . . you could hardly ﬁnd’, declared one abolitionist, and even were registration abandoned, the State should not provide treatment since ‘the morally and physically diseased . . . should be left to the consequences of their iniquity’.⁵⁴ While most nurses supported the Acts, they were often critical of their administration. Miss Farrow, a former penitentiary worker and superintendent of the Portsmouth lock department, was ‘disgusted’ by the inadequate accommodation which left young girls mixing with hardened prostitutes—a common complaint—and the lack of discipline: ‘There is not one rule through the whole hospital.’ Unlike the Bristol Home, where only ‘nice instructive literature’ with a moral and religious tone was permitted, patients sat around gossiping and reading the Police News and sensation novels. Farrow’s disciplinary attitude to patients contrasts with that of the surgeon of the Lock Hospital in Liverpool and secretary of the city’s Extension Society who advised Refuges and Penitentiaries against giving inmates menial labour such as laundry since this was precisely the kind of work that they had always ‘scrupulously avoided’. Rather, he suggested, many had ‘good voices and a talent for music’, the civilizing inﬂuence of which could be cultivated by the institutions ‘with great advantage’.⁵⁵ Farrow preferred the voluntary sector, therefore, precisely because it provided a disciplined rather than a liberal regime for its inmates and she recommended the integration of the voluntary and ⁵³ Evidence of Mrs Meredith of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, PP (1871), QQ16,041–43. ⁵⁴ Evidence of the LNA member and wife of Unitarian minister, Mrs Kell, PP (1871), Q16,937 and note following Q17,033. ⁵⁵ Frederick Lowndes, The Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts to Liverpool and Other Seaports, Practically Considered (Liverpool, 1876), 75.

144

Helen Rogers

compulsory systems, with homes attached to, but quite separate from, the wards.⁵⁶ Many nursing staff insisted the regulatory system should recognize their expertise and dedication and that they should be free to administer as they thought ﬁt: ‘They have not liberty of action,’ complained Farrow, ‘they are tied in every way.’ Allowed autonomy, staff should be held accountable within a centralized system and hospitals should be under government inspection.⁵⁷ Mrs Ball, matron of the Royal Albert Hospital in Devonport where the Admiralty pioneered the regulatory scheme, experienced the hospital’s transition from charitable to government status and, while acknowledging deﬁciencies in voluntary provision, she contended that reclamation rates had fallen as the regulatory system was tightened. Ball’s responsibility for the women’s moral reclamation was usurped by the resident chaplain and her removal from moral supervision seems to have been part of a concerted attempt by the Acts’ administrators to minimize interference from women who were critical of their authority; repealers protested that lady visitors had been denied access to the wards and their ministrations ‘superseded’ by the chaplain. Like them, Ball asserted the superiority of women’s work in this ﬁeld; they were qualiﬁed for every position but those of chaplain and surgeon; ‘a woman’s inﬂuence is greater than a man’s’.⁵⁸ What dismayed critics of the Acts was precisely the attachment of ‘demoralized’ prostitutes to the wrong kind of liberty. As the matron of the Colchester ward, and critic of compulsion, claimed, the Acts ‘hardened the girls very much, they used to have a delicacy at ﬁrst . . . but . . . they went quite freely latterly and without any feeling’ (my italics).⁵⁹ Such women were too easy in their ways, their love of showy dress and drink, while their ‘free talk’ shattered the peace and order of the streets and challenged the authority of the respectable classes. The matron of the Chatham Lock Hospital and former penitentiary worker believed most ladies approved the Acts, since it was much more agreeable walking the streets now they were free from groups of ‘rude and loud’ girls.⁶⁰ Extensionists and abolitionists tended to differentiate between hardened prostitutes—especially the higher-paid girls who arrived for examination in their fancy clothes ⁵⁶ Evidence of Miss Farrow, PP (1871), QQ11,771–12,059. ⁵⁷ Evidence of Miss Farrow, PP (1871), Q11,847. ⁵⁸ Evidence of Mrs Ball, PP (1871), QQ 7842 and 7794. For lady visitors and the Royal Albert see The Shield, 14 March 1870, 13. ⁵⁹ Evidence of Miss Brown, PP (1871), Q17,965. ⁶⁰ Evidence of Miss Webb, PP (1871), QQ15,276–15,382; Q15,349.

Women and Liberty

145

and carriages, and departed ﬂouting their clean status—with impoverished ‘fallen women’ who might be redeemed. While repealers were keen to present prostitutes as forlorn victims, driven on to the town by lack of employment, low wages, domestic violence, or seduction, any vociferous defence of their trade was taken as evidence of the degrading effects of registration. As one rescue worker reported: We have several hardened to the streets who consider the Act a very good Act, and who tell me with courage and freedom that would honour a better cause, that it is the best thing that could be for them, because there is a hospital to go to . . . and plenty of good food, wine, spirits, and beer given them, and nurses to wait on them, and a doctor to attend them, and a chaplain to read prayers to them, and they ask me very tauntingly what better can I offer than that [my emphasis].⁶¹

‘Hardened’ prostitutes offended in their refusal to observe their place as outcasts. Calling themselves ‘Queen’s Women’, they viewed their certiﬁcates as government licences of their trade and retorted they had ‘as much right to ply their trade in the street as a soldier to wear his uniform’.⁶² For Butler, such outward pride and deﬁance could only mask inward ‘shame and misery’. Subjected women had internalized the ‘cold ofﬁcial manner’ of ‘male ofﬁcial persons’ that made them impervious to feminine benevolence: ‘I belong to the Government; you do not; I have nothing to say to you’, they retorted.⁶³ Likewise, prostitute petitions to Parliament supporting the Acts were seized by repealers as damning evidence of the coercive techniques of the regulationists—alleged to have obtained signatures under duress—and of the presumption of wilful prostitutes. According to nursing staff, prostitutes backed the Acts mainly because they feared that without the wards they ‘would be left to die’, but abolitionists ignored such concerns and, paradoxically, condemned the right of petitioning by the very women whose constitutional liberties they claimed to defend.⁶⁴ Women subjected to the Acts were not questioned by the Commission, but some of their attitudes to social discipline and personal freedom are suggested by the testimony of Mrs Ball, matron of the Lock ⁶¹ Evidence of Mrs Lewis, PP (1871), QQ12,532–Q12,622; QQ12,620–2. ⁶² Evidence of home missionary Mrs Lewis, PP (1871), Q12,621–2. ⁶³ Butler’s testimony to Select Committee of the House of Commons, 5 May 1882; see The Shield, 22 July 1882, 139–42. ⁶⁴ Evidence of Miss Green, PP (1871), QQ10,462–10,466; 10,499; and 10,521. According to Farrow, it was primarily for their curative effects that the Portsmouth women supported the Acts; ibid. Q11,841. For repeal responses to prostitute petitions see The Shield, 6 July 1872, 999–1000; 13 July 1872, 1007; 20 July 1872, 1012.

146

Helen Rogers

ward at the Royal Albert, who offered a more nuanced assessment of working girls than other witnesses. Presenting the inmates neither as suffering victims nor as grateful patients, she suggested they neither fully accepted nor rebelled outright against medical or moral treatment. Typically, they wanted carefulness and cleanliness and tended towards ‘mere insubordination’ but ‘not of a grave character’, though ‘they do not conform to the rules’. Most submitted willingly to medical treatment but were anxious to leave and frequently believed they were detained ‘unnecessarily’. Generally from the lowest class, most ended up in prostitution because of poverty, lack of employment, and poor upbringings, and while they thought little of religion, most could read and write and listened to advice, grateful for the beneﬁts they received. Nevertheless, Ball believed, the disciplinary regimes of hospitals and reformatories clashed with women’s desire for liberty and independence. Few were happy to sign up for two years in a reformatory where work—usually laundry or needlework—was not remunerated but used to support the institution. ‘[A]nxious to earn something for themselves’, the women ‘dislike[d] the restriction of a home’. When asked how the State or society might act to diminish prostitution, Ball stated, ‘If some means could be provided which they could obtain their living without going into a home I believe it would be the means of saving many.’⁶⁵ In her critique of the disciplinary nature of reformatories and emphasis on the need to foster women’s economic independence, Ball shared much in common with Butler. Of all the proposals Butler could recommend to the Commission—punishment for seduction, reform of bastardy legislation to make fathers as well as mothers responsible for illegitimate children, suppression of brothels—the creation of industrial pursuits for women was the most important but, committed to the laissez-faire principle, she believed this lay beyond the scope of government.⁶⁶ Butler refused any circumstances in which the State might legitimately take a role in the rescue, reform, or health care of prostitutes: it would be ‘decidedly better’ if the lock hospitals undertook no religious teaching since any spiritual ministration from that quarter ‘was a mockery of God’.⁶⁷ All provision should be undertaken by private individuals or funded by charitable subscription, for, in giving aid, government ‘would always ⁶⁵ Evidence of Miss Ball, PP (1871), QQ7716–7941; 7857–63; 7894–6; 7725–54; 7775; 7914. ⁶⁶ Evidence of Butler, PP (1871), Q12,878. ⁶⁷ Butler’s testimony to Select Committee of the House of Commons, 5 May 1882; see The Shield, 22 July 1882, 139–42.

Women and Liberty

147

assume a right to control’. While most witnesses before the Commission acknowledged the duty of the State to protect girls under the age of 16 from parental neglect and prostitution by placing them in industrial schools or homes, Butler insisted ‘there should be nothing penal or legislative’. Neither could the State play a part in the moral and physical care of children diseased through their parents: ‘It is the law of nature that children should suffer for the sins of their parents’ and, therefore, moral inﬂuences alone should be brought to bear on such children, though she grudgingly admitted that the State might intervene in cases of pauperism.⁶⁸ Butler’s antipathy to State regulation was part of a wider opposition to intrusive government that robbed the poor of independence and selfrespect. In 1879 she denounced the ‘busy over-legislation of liberal administrations’ in the management of sanitation, the streets, and the workplace, by which the ‘spy-system’, pioneered under the Contagious Diseases Acts, was inﬁltrating every aspect of the social sphere. Everywhere, the freedom and independence of the poor, and especially women, were jeopardized by their subjection to licensing laws, Factory Acts, and regulations governing habitual offenders and drunkards, bringing them under ‘the constant espionage and watchful guardianship of the ever present policeman’. Such ‘domestic legislation’ robbed the poor of self-respect and led to their criminalization through ‘the rapid creation of new offences’. While the hygienic aims of sanitary legislation might be laudable, Butler insisted they could only be achieved by education and consent: ‘The forcible doctoring of the people . . . is . . . a most dangerous experiment: the magisterial powers now granted to State doctors, and the amount of domiciliary visitation and control already legalized for the sanitary police, to which the families of the poor have to submit, are not likely to make the people in love with the laws, or to induce in them a readiness to help their operation.’⁶⁹

III While Butler decried ‘domestic legislation’ in the lives of the poor, paradoxically the pressure for increased interference often came from outside, rather than inside government—including from women. The ⁶⁸ Evidence of Butler, PP (1871), QQ12,860; 12,964–7; 12,052; 13,107–13. ⁶⁹ Butler, Government by Police (1879), repr. in Jordan and Sharp, eds., Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns, iii. 71–111; 71, 104, 103, 105.

148

Helen Rogers

1871 Commission’s focus on the ‘protection’ of minors—and how the period of minority should be deﬁned—marked a growing area of public concern in the remainder of the century that led to a realignment between State and civil society, and the increasing willingness of voluntary associations to work with State bodies. If new forms of citizenship were to be based on the freedom of the morally autonomous individual, then what was the duty of the State to those who were not ready for or capable of free agency, especially young women and children? Even Mill sanctioned State intervention in this area; as he told the Commission, the State might place girls at risk from prostitution in an industrial home since ‘the objection to the interference with personal liberty begins when the age of education properly so called ceases’.⁷⁰ In the 1870s and 1880s the protection of minors became the focus of a broad alliance of religious purity workers and philanthropists, especially women, many of whom actively worked against State regulation. At the forefront of this movement were the Ladies’ Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls, of which there were 106 societies by 1885, led by the purity campaigner Ellice Hopkins. As Paula Bartley has shown, the movement sought statutory powers to support voluntary preventative work. Its ﬁrst success was in the Industrial Schools Amendment Act of 1880, based on Hopkins’s proposal that police be empowered to remove children living in dwellings considered to be brothels and to commit them to an Industrial School. The Act was denounced by libertarian repealers in the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights who feared it would be used to break up working-class families by ‘the wholesale kidnapping of little girls who may not have perfect domestic surroundings and their consignment to large prison schools’. However, prominent LNA members joined the Ladies’ Associations (a number were on the executive committee), which even pressed for the prosecution of young women who associated with known prostitutes.⁷¹ Hopkins’s approach to protection and prevention was symptomatic of a new move in feminist social action. While challenging women’s exclusion from national institutions of government, activists advocated women’s participation in the management of local government bodies, with their election to School Boards and Poor Law Boards of Guardians, on the grounds that women had particular understanding of the ⁷⁰ Evidence of Mill, PP (1871), Q20,084. ⁷¹ Journal of the Vigilance Association, 15 November 1882, 90. Bartley, Prostitution, 73–93 and n. 18 for LNA and LA links. M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Feminism and the State in Later Victorian England’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 85–110, at 108–9 and 96–7.

Women and Liberty

149

importance of domestic and family welfare and especially the needs of poor women and children.⁷² Thus, social activists aimed not only at inclusion in the existing polity but at the creation of a new ‘social sphere’ mediating between civil society and formal government: ‘a reformed and “feminised” democracy’, suggests Sandra Holton, where society would be reconstructed ‘in accordance with female values and needs’.⁷³ The sense of responsibility for the welfare of the poor was frequently based on the assumption that working-class women lacked the training and facilities to achieve domestic and familial order that were essential to social order. As Hopkins told her less fortunate ‘dear sisters’: ‘our large houses, our separate bedrooms, our greater education make us . . . more particular than you—make us feel the importance of little things, little decent ways, little safeguards . . . which the terrible struggle for existence . . . too often make you forget and grow careless about.’⁷⁴ Claiming a rigorous, scientiﬁc approach to charity and social work, women activists would play a major part in mapping, patrolling, and seeking the reintegration of ‘outcast society’, with the protection and regulation of the working-class family.⁷⁵ The willingness of feminists to co-operate with State bodies in the promotion of domestic order and moral purity is illustrated by Elizabeth Blackwell, the most senior practising doctor in the country and opponent of State regulation from the outset of the repeal campaign. In contrast to Butler’s condemnation of the architects of regulation, Blackwell contended that the ‘injustice and immorality’ caused by the Acts had not been foreseen or intended by its original proponents. She carved a mid-way position between the libertarian voluntaryism of Butler and the protectionism of social purists like Hopkins by arguing that individual responsibility had to be fostered by social discipline: ‘The principle of regulating sexual intercourse for the good of society, has always been recognised, and must necessarily be developed with the growth of society.’ As a doctor, she insisted on the medical profession’s duty to treat the infected and protect the community from the ravages of venereal disease, but its eradication ⁷² Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987). ⁷³ Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1897–1918 (Cambridge, 1986), 18. ⁷⁴ Hopkins, Work in Brighton (1877), 86, cited by Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 124. ⁷⁵ Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between the Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1984); Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Woman’ in History (Basingstoke, 1988); Eileen Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Class and Gender (London, 1996).

150

Helen Rogers

depended on the removal of its source—prostitution—which required legislation and education: ‘it should be checked by legislative enactment, and destroyed by social opinion’. Arguing that sexual desire was susceptible to self-control, Blackwell recommended that schools and Churches, as well as the family, should teach the young in self-restraint and this required instruction in the physiological laws of sex as well as moral education, a role the State could take on through Board Schools. Future legislation had to be based on ‘equal justice, and respect for individual rights’ and absolute adherence to the ‘natural right of sovereignty over our own bodies’, without which ‘[w]e should uproot our whole national life and destroy the characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race’. Instead of compulsory examination, she proposed making communication of disease a legal offence and grounds for divorce. Such a law, ‘wisely enforced’ and imposed equally on men and women, ‘would place this necessary check on brutal appetite’, though its viability depended on the availability of treatment in general hospitals and dispensaries where patients would be free from the stigma of the lock hospital that led to concealment of disease.⁷⁶ While Blackwell hoped to diminish disease by encouraging voluntary admission and opposed compulsory treatment, she acknowledged the need for social discipline and in consequence advised the feminization of policing, at least as it affected women. Though ‘[t]he tenderest compassion may be shown to the poor creature who ceases to be a prostitute’, like many feminist social purists she believed these reclaimable women had to be distinguished from recalcitrant prostitutes who, as ‘human tigers who delight in destruction and torture’, required ﬁrm control.⁷⁷ Her proposals for rescue work included ‘the introduction of a certain number of superior women into the police organisation . . . as heads of stations where women offenders are brought’. It was essential that such women be of the higher classes, for ‘the introduction of ordinary women corresponding to the common policeman, or in any way subordinate to lower ofﬁcials, would be out of the question, and extremely mischievous’.⁷⁸ Moral regulation for Blackwell, as for so many purity workers, was ⁷⁶ Elizabeth Blackwell, Rescue Work in Relation to Prostitution and Disease (1881), repr. in Jeffreys, ed., Sexuality Debates, 100–11, 106–7. Many hospitals were still reluctant to establish specialist wards for fear of offending patients and subscribers, including Garrett Anderson’s Hospital for Women; see Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their Circle (London, 2002), 72–3. ⁷⁷ Blackwell, Purchase of Women: The Great Economic Blunder (1887), cited by Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (Harmondsworth, 1995), 116. ⁷⁸ Blackwell, Rescue Work, 109.

Women and Liberty

151

implicitly a form of class regulation and increasingly they looked to actively participate in the policing of sexual conduct. With the revelations of the international trafﬁcking in child prostitution, highlighted by W. T. Stead’s sensational reports on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ in 1885, many moral reformers became convinced of the urgency of direct citizen action in co-operation with the police. Butler had always argued that human virtue was fostered best by the example of Christian and human sympathy. In 1873, she had speculated before the Vigilance Association about whether if women were given ‘power to make laws for men’ they could ‘compel men not to drink and smoke, and gamble’ and even ‘check male unchastity’, but having ‘no faith whatever in such compulsion’ she dismissed such a possibility, for ‘man’s cleverest manipulations of society can never usurp the place of the free and glorious inﬂuences of the Spirit of God’.⁷⁹ Now, caught up in the popular wave of revulsion against child prostitution, she joined with Stead and Hopkins in a new National Vigilance Association, which denied, as its secretary William Cootes proclaimed, ‘a very popular cant phrase that you cannot make men good by Act of Parliament. It is false to say so . . . you can, and do, chain the devil of impurity in a large number of men and women by fear of the law.’⁸⁰ Under intense popular pressure, government passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) which purportedly attacked the trade in vice by raising the age of consent to 16 and making procurement for prostitution a misdemeanour as part of a package of concessions to social purists, repealers, and feminists that included repeal of the CDA in 1886. Despite her long-standing antipathy to the police, Butler welcomed the CLAA on the grounds ‘that it calls in citizen action’ in the suppression of vice ‘and gives no increased powers to the police’.⁸¹ As Frank Mort and Paula Bartley have demonstrated, in comparison with a reluctant ofﬁcialdom, the vigilance associations proved much the more enthusiastic partner in initiating prosecutions for procurement, brothel-keeping, soliciting, and obscenity under the Act.⁸² The combined effects of the CLAA and repeal of the CDA worked to clarify differences of opinion within feminism over whether social ⁷⁹ Speech of Mrs Butler at the annual meeting of the Vigilance Association, Vigilance Association, Report No. 3 (London, 1873), 3. ⁸⁰ Coote, ‘Law and Morality’, in J. Marchant, ed., Public Morals (1902), 45, cited by Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 105. ⁸¹ Butler, The Revival and Extension of the Abolitionist Cause: A Letter to the Members of the Ladies’ National Association (London, 1887), in Jordan and Sharp, eds., Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns, v. 13–64, 49. ⁸² Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 130–6, 155–77, and Bartley, Prostitution, 155–97.

152

Helen Rogers

intimacy or social discipline provided the best means of securing individual and collective liberty and protection, differences which had long existed but rarely been confronted. For many, the policing of the streets was no longer the preserve of male ofﬁcials, who had sought to sanitize rather than eradicate prostitution, but of an army of crusaders who would protect the liberties of law-abiding and respectable citizens by ridding the streets of delinquency and nuisance. ‘Woman’s mission’ was no longer conﬁned to the rescue of the helpless and fallen but, infusing the new agencies of citizen power, would attack directly the sources of national degeneracy. Mrs Creighton told the National Union of Women Workers that ‘[t]he fallen woman who lives on her miserable trade is a pest to society. Pity her, reform her by all means, but do not feel bound to give her liberty to ply her harmful trade any more than you give liberty to any other corrupters of society.’⁸³ A former LNA member and leading purity campaigner, Laura Chant, who led metropolitan campaigns to close not only brothels but less formal sites of illicit sexual congress like the music hall, chastised those who bewailed the ‘ “liberty of the subject”, whenever there is . . . effort to clear the streets . . . forgetting that vice is in itself a colossal injustice, an infringement of the liberty of the subject’.⁸⁴ Such carelessness towards individual liberties, especially towards vulnerable women, appalled libertarian repealers who pointed to the class iniquities of repressive legislation. The ominously named ‘Cassandra’ warned that ‘[t]he Criminal Law Amendment Act machinery is the dogging of poor women by police’, driving them onto the streets to be imprisoned as vagrants and subjected to examination by ‘the State-paid surgeon’ under the provisions of the Prison Act of 1865. Reminding readers that their only duty ‘is to interfere solely with acts of cruelty and oppression’, she urged them to join the Personal Rights Association.⁸⁵ The feminist repealer Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy condemned social purists who by ‘violent repression, involving gross injustice and wrong to women’ would ‘produce a race or nation of hypocrites or, at best of fanatical ascetics’ rather than seeking ‘by the promotion of a profounder social justice, by the inspiration of a tenderer human sympathy, the creation of a nobler ideal of life and action, to call into being that healthy human virtue’.⁸⁶ Butler increasingly saw the obsession with enforcing ⁸³ Mrs Creighton, ‘What Woman Can Do for Purity’, NUWW Conference 1894, 9, cited by Bartley, Prostitution, 157. ⁸⁴ Cited by Bland, Banishing the Beast, 120–1; see also 122–3. ⁸⁵ ‘A Word of Warning’, The Shield, 20 July 1886, 102–3. ⁸⁶ Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy, ‘English and French Morality’, Vigilance Association Journal (1886), 25, cited by Roberts, ‘Feminism and the State’, 102.

Women and Liberty

153

purity as a worrying diversion from her continuing campaign against the international trafﬁc in prostitution and State regulation in the colonies as well as on the Continent and soon regretted her brief enthusiasm for repressive measures: ‘There is nothing so delicate as the moral relations of the sexes. Legislation on that subject cannot be carried into effect by men in Government livery, with sticks in their hands, whom we call policemen: the power of the State must be exceedingly restricted in this domain.’⁸⁷ Experience had shown, she concluded in 1896, that compulsory measures ‘fall almost exclusively on women, because, it is difﬁcult, they say, to get at men. It is dangerous work, in reference to personal liberty, but few people care for liberty or personal rights now.’⁸⁸ The consequences of feminist support for repressive purity campaigns have been the subject of considerable discussion. Judith Walkowitz argues that women’s objections to male sexual licence and sex-biased legislation were ‘rechanneled into repressive antivice campaigns’ that mufﬂed feminist demands for equal laws for men and women.⁸⁹ This view understates the extent to which women’s preventative and protection work since the 1870s had insisted—and continued to insist—on the necessity of an equal standard of morality and treatment before the law. By bringing into the public domain questions of sexual exploitation and violence, moral reformers had stimulated public opprobrium against rape, incest, and domestic violence and secured a number of protections for their victims.⁹⁰ Repeal of the CDA did little to bolster women’s faith in the capacity of an exclusively male Parliament to legislate in their interests and women’s organizations vigilantly monitored any proposals that smacked of State regulation. For the late-Victorian and Edwardian women’s suffrage movement, prostitution continued to be seen as emblematic of the double standard evinced by men in both the public and the private spheres, uniting the political interests of women of all classes in the demand for women’s enfranchisement. But while the women’s movement moved towards greater social inclusion in its political campaigns, within the expanded ‘social sphere’ of civil society, middleand upper-class women continued to adopt a stance of what Lucy Bland ⁸⁷ ‘Truth Before Everything’, Sentinel (Aug. 1897), in Jordan and Sharp, eds., Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns, v. 520. ⁸⁸ Butler to Anon, 5 November 1896, London Metropolitan University, Women’s Library, Josephine Butler Collection. ⁸⁹ Walkowitz, Prostitution, 7. ⁹⁰ For changing attitudes towards domestic violence see A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conﬂict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1995), and Shani d’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London, 1998).

154

Helen Rogers

terms ‘protective surveillance’ towards working-class women.⁹¹ This ﬁeld drew on a well-established female tradition of philanthropy, galvanized by newer practices both feminist and professional, that aimed at disciplining the poor. As Mort contends, feminist purity campaigns played a leading role in thwarting the State regulation of prostitution but replaced a misogynist model of sexual regulation with an ‘even more strongly state-orientated approach’ based on a ‘longer history of middleclass women’s involvement in social regulation and class disciplining’.⁹² However, despite such continuities with older strands of women’s moral activism, for the ﬁrst time, and as a result of their bitter battle with the ‘state-regulators’ of prostitution, feminists had moved the State to the centre of their analysis of the position of women. This marked a major development in the history of feminist political thought. Feminists could now interrogate the State as a source of gender oppression while, conversely, they could begin to imagine how the State might be used to enhance women’s rights and welfare, and to achieve gender equality: a subject that would lead to much debate and disagreement within the women’s movements of the twentieth century.⁹³ Women’s understandings of liberty and authority were reformulated, therefore, in the context of their anomalous but changing position in relation to the State—as citizens, subjects, professionals, and activists—in the course of its uneven development.

FURTHER READING Bartley, Paula, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London, 2000). Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (London, 1994). Caine, Barbara, English Feminism: 1780–1980 (Oxford, 1997). Kent, Susan Kingsley, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (London, 1990). ⁹¹ Bland, Banishing the Beast, 122. For the disciplinary intervention of middle-class activists in social science and in cross-class women’s movements see Yeo, Contest for Social Science and Gerry Holloway, ‘ “Let the women be alive!” The Construction of the Married Working Woman in the Industrial Women’s Movement, 1890–1914’, in Yeo, ed., Radical Femininity, 172–95. ⁹² Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 149–50. ⁹³ The possibilities—and the dangers—of pressing for welfare reform directed speciﬁcally at women became the source of ﬁerce debate among so-called ‘equality’ and ‘new’ feminists in the 1920s, particularly over Eleanor Rathbone’s campaign for family endowments; see especially Johanna Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (London, 1996); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1994), and Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, 2004).

Women and Liberty

155

McHugh, Paul, Prostitution and Social Reform (London, 1980). Mort, Frank, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987). Roberts, M. J. D., Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004). —— ‘Feminism and the State in Later Victorian England’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 85–110. Rogers, Helen, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 2000). Shanley, Mary, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (London, 1989). Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980).

This page intentionally left blank

AUTHORITIES

This page intentionally left blank

7 The Authority of the Law Margot C. Finn

Two dominant paradigms structure the history of Victorian law. The ﬁrst of these two models celebrates the mid-Victorian triumph of contractual individualism and ﬁnds its most famous expression in Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law, published in 1861. ‘There are few general propositions concerning the age to which we belong which seem at ﬁrst sight likely to be received with readier concurrence than the assertion that the society of our own day is mainly distinguished from that of preceding generations by the largeness of the sphere which is occupied in it by Contract’, Maine opined in this classic text. ‘The movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract’, he concluded with evident satisfaction.¹ Maine’s fear that the sanctity of contract was increasingly at risk in the later Victorian period—a fear shared by his contemporary James Fitzjames Stephen and later elaborated by such legal commentators as A. V. Dicey—leads us to the second dominant paradigm of Victorian law, the argument that the later Victorian decades saw the eclipse of legal individualism by a reassertion of collective values and social rights with the emergence of the early welfare state. In this interpretation, which was powerfully restated in the later twentieth century by P. S. Atiyah, the Victorian period experienced both the rise and the fall of freedom of contract, both the triumph and the demise of legal individualism mediated by the changing legal structures of State authority.² In this chapter, I re-examine the transition from status to contract and from contractual individualism to legal collectivism by scrutinizing the authority of the law from three successive vantage points. I begin by ¹ Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London, 1861), 304. ² P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1979).

160

Margot C. Finn

surveying English criminal law reform, proceed next to consider English civil law reform, and conclude by exploring the evolution of ‘British’ law in the empire. In the short compass of this essay, my approach is necessarily schematic and selective. The intention is not to offer a comprehensive survey of the authority of Victorian criminal, civil, and imperial law. Rather, I wish to suggest ways in which attention to place, personnel, and process can illuminate the broad patterns of legal change in the Victorian era in new ways. My interpretation is framed by the overarching question, ‘Where should we look to ﬁnd the authority of the Victorian law?’. That is, where should we seek the Victorian law in terms of its physical and administrative locations—inside English territorial borders or outside them, inside criminal or civil tribunals, within the superior or within the inferior court systems? Place mattered fundamentally in the Victorian law, not least because the location of legal authority exerted a decisive impact upon the personnel who administered the law, the persons who had access to (or suffered from) legal disciplines, and the processes through which legality itself was asserted, interpreted, and maintained. These geographical and procedural locations in turn imply competing historiographical positions that shift the terrain mapped by legal change and legal power in the Victorian period. By attending more systematically to place, personnel, and process, we can rethink the rise and fall of freedom of contract in ways that reﬂect the great distance that legal history has travelled since the era of Maine, Stephen, and Dicey.

I Conventional historical wisdom has long held that the most conspicuous characteristic of criminal law in the Victorian period was the demise of the so-called Bloody Code of capital statutes, and the corresponding salience of the prison as the primary site of criminal retribution. The Hanoverian era had, notoriously, seen a dramatic rise in the number of capital statutes and the number of convicted criminals; the Victorian age, in contrast, witnessed a dramatic contraction of the capital code and (in 1868) the end of public executions. A few statistics help to establish the basic parameters of this decisive transformation. In the period from 1805 to 1820, capital prosecutions in England and Wales rose by nearly 300 per cent and death sentences became more than three-and-a-half times more frequent. Only the wholesale exercise of judicial and royal discretion, Vic Gatrell has argued, allowed this horriﬁc system to be

The Authority of the Law

161

sustained into the early nineteenth century. Pardon rates for capital convicts nearly doubled in the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, subjecting criminal defendants to the full terrors of the law only to snatch them from the gallows upon conviction. In the decade that followed the Reform Act of 1832, however, the legal landscape experienced a seismic shift. Successive capital crimes involving property enacted in the era of the Bloody Code were now struck from the statute books. From 1837 the death penalty applied only to crimes against the physical or political body such as murder, rape, sodomy, violent theft, and high treason; from 1841 onwards, the English death penalty was effectively restricted to the crime of murder. Both capital prosecutions and hangings dropped precipitously in this context. In the ﬁrst two years of the Victorian era, the number of persons sentenced to death fell from 438 to 56; the number of actual hangings shrank by 90 per cent in the ﬁrst decade of Victoria’s reign.³ Whereas the Hanoverian criminal law had relied on the deterrent powers of legal authority exercised over the crowd at the public scaffold, the Victorian criminal law shifted attention to the criminal’s personal responsibility for his or her own behaviour. Prisons, not scaffolds, served as the central locations of legal authority in this new Victorian context. Permitting (if only in legal theory) the precise allocation of punishment according to the individual’s speciﬁc crime, reformed penal regimes ﬁt comfortably with the paradigm which interprets Victorian law according to a transition from status to contract. As Martin Wiener has argued, Victorian ‘punishment was reconstructed so that its discretionary, public, and violent character yielded to forms more calculated to promote the development of inner behavioral controls. . . . At all levels, prosecution was made easier, punishment more certain, and penalties more predictable, impersonal, and uniform’, he concludes.⁴ Changes in criminal process mirrored and helped to underpin the emergence of the responsible, contractual individual. With the passage of the Prisoners’ Counsel Act of 1836, defence advocacy in felony trials worked to promote perceptions of legal efﬁciency. By allowing defendants’ counsel to address the jury in felony trials, the Act was intended to undercut the need for judicial discretion. Jurors, assured that the defendant’s guilt had been accurately ³ V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1996), 19–23. ⁴ Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), 11.

162

Margot C. Finn

determined and would be punished by appropriate increments of considered punishment, would willingly convict felons, rather than dispatching them (as had their Hanoverian forebears) indiscriminately to the judicial Scylla of transportation or the Charybdis of the gallows.⁵ If we look, then, for the Victorian criminal law at the Assizes, at the scaffold, or in the ambitious policy agendas of penal reformers, we arguably ﬁnd conﬁrmation for Maine’s ‘progressive’ transition from status to contract.⁶ But as research by historians such as Jennifer Davis, Lucia Zedner, Seán McConville, and George Behlmer has suggested, if we attend to misdemeanours rather than felonies and look for the criminal law instead in the inferior court system and in the local prisons, the contractual paradigm is rendered highly suspect. Whereas attention to capital offences focuses analysis of the law on the 10 per cent of Victorian crimes that were crimes against the body, attention to the 90 per cent of crimes that were crimes against property shifts the location of the law instead overwhelmingly to Justices of the Peace. From the 1820s, magistrates and police courts became responsible for trying an increasing spectrum of petty crimes. Previously concerned with ‘victimless’ offences such as drunkenness, disorder, and vagrancy, magistrates came to adjudicate a range of indictable crimes that encompassed petty larceny but also extended to spousal abuse.⁷ Criminal process was fundamentally transformed in this context, for magisterial justice was summary justice—trial by jury was progressively undermined as magistrates assumed ever-increasing authority within the Victorian law. By 1860, three-quarters of all non-violent larcenies were tried summarily by magistrates rather than at Assizes or Quarter Sessions; by 1900, this ﬁgure had risen to 88 per cent. Although most were amateur jurists who lacked formal legal training, magistrates were the day-to-day face of the criminal law in the Victorian era. Far from adhering to the letter of the law to impose well-deﬁned, individuated sentences on convicted offenders, magistrates persistently exercised judicial discretion in their dealings with the labouring men and women who formed their ⁵ See esp. David J. A. Cairns, Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800–1865 (Oxford, 1998). ⁶ Even at this level within the legal system, however, the evidence that legal practice largely conformed to reformers’ contractual agendas is questionable. Discretionary rulings are, for example, conspicuous in the legal proceedings detailed in Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991). ⁷ The pioneering study of Victorian magisterial justice is Jennifer Davis, ‘A Poor Man’s System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 309–35.

The Authority of the Law

163

primary constituency, bending (and at times breaking) the letter of the law in their legal decisions.⁸ Nor were petty criminals convicted in their courts typically subjected to individuated, reformative regimes in penitential prisons. By committing convicted offenders to local rather than national prisons, the summary justices of Victorian England consigned unsuccessful defendants to institutions in which rapid turnover and limited ﬁnancial resources militated against the imposition of disciplinary regimes of incarceration. In convict prisons, ‘sentences of ﬁve, six, and seven years effectively cut inmates off from the outside world and endowed the convict prison with many of the attributes of a so-called “total institution” ’, Lucia Zedner has argued. ‘In contrast, local prison inmates, knowing they would be free at the end of the week or month, could usually maintain their previous life and, above all, keep up contacts with friends and family . . . outside.’⁹ For female defendants, the Victorian trend away from superior court jury trials toward summary process in inferior courts was especially signiﬁcant. Whereas women ﬁgured primarily—and increasingly over time—as victims rather than as active agents of capital crimes against the body,¹⁰ they boasted a robust engagement with the criminal law as perpetrators of petty crime. Consistently responsible for 17 per cent of all Victorian summary convictions, women were especially prominent in the two most prevalent categories of crime brought before summary justices, accounting for over 20 per cent of all convicted drunken and disorderly behaviour and over 20 per cent of all common assaults. Signiﬁcantly, 98 per cent of all women sentenced by the criminal courts were committed to local (not national) prisons, ensuring that their experience of judicial discretion in the courts was matched by their experience of discretionary conﬁnement in the prison. ‘Far from being deterred from crime’ by the local prison, Zedner has argued, ‘many women deliberately sought access to their local prison as a welfare agency, preferable . . . to the workhouse’.¹¹ Failing to reﬂect the mid-Victorian transition from status to contract, labouring women’s experience of the criminal law also ⁸ Magisterial justice and discretion did not invariably operate to the advantage of defendants, as Robert J. Steinﬁeld’s analysis of judicial enforcement of labour contracts makes abundantly clear. See his Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001). ⁹ Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991), 152. See also Seán McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death (London, 1994). ¹⁰ See esp. Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004). ¹¹ Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 171.

164

Margot C. Finn

departed in signiﬁcant ways from the late-Victorian mitigation of contractual individualism posited by Dicey and Atiyah. For it was precisely from the 1870s, with the passage of the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1895 Summary Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act, that working-class wives began to assume individual agency in the summary criminal court. Local magistrates, empowered to issue orders of non-cohabitation and maintenance to wives whose husbands had been convicted of aggravated assault upon them, were among the ﬁrst representatives of the Victorian criminal law to confer limited legal autonomy on that most long-lived legal and contractual nonentity, the married woman.¹² Viewed from this female perspective, the Victorian era saw not the rise and fall of freedom of contract, but rather an unprecedented and sustained access of new contractual freedoms.¹³

II In the civil law, changing levels of litigation worked to propel legal innovation along pathways familiar from the history of criminal law reform. The civil law witnessed what Christopher Brooks has dubbed the ‘Great Litigation Decline’ in the eighteenth century, only to experience dramatic increases in the Victorian period. Where civil litigation had, by the mid-eighteenth century, reached a nadir, the Victorian period saw sustained resort to the law to adjudicate contractual disputes. In 1830, there were fewer than 3,000 civil actions per 100,000 of total population in England and Wales, but by 1901 there were over 4,000 civil suits per 100,000 of population. In the years from 1847 to 1871 alone, the rate of civil litigation in England and Wales rose by 40 per cent.¹⁴ Fed by commercial and industrial growth and fostered by Whig and utilitarian ideas of legal reform, the litigation of contracts came to dominate the landscape of the English law in the Victorian period. Bankruptcy, ¹² George Behlmer, ‘Summary Justice and Working-Class Marriage in England, 1870–1940’, Law & History Review, 12 (1994), 229–75. Already by the 1790s some magistrates had begun, in deﬁance of common-law procedure, to accept wives’ uncorroborated evidence in cases of marital assault. See Wiener, Men of Blood, 171–2. ¹³ This trend toward the recognition of female legal agency in criminal tribunals was however crosscut by competing developments in the superior courts, as evidenced by Victorian unease with the prosecution of murderous mothers for infanticide. See esp. Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), ch. 6. ¹⁴ Christopher W. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (London, 1998), 66–69, 106–8.

The Authority of the Law

165

insolvency, breach of promise, and divorce were the stuff not only of constant parliamentary debate and legislation, but also of endless fascination and comment in newspapers, periodicals, and novels, a circumstance that worked to disseminate knowledge of contractual complexity widely throughout Victorian society and culture.¹⁵ The substance of civil law reform in the Victorian period mirrors criminal reform in many of its signal places and processes. Just as the Victorian criminal law was characterized by increasing reliance on summary inferior courts, so too the signiﬁcant increase of civil litigation derived from the expansion of petty tribunals and summary justice. The business of the superior courts—Queen’s Bench, Chancery, and Common Pleas—ﬁrst declined and then stagnated in the Victorian decades, but litigation in the inferior county-court system established in 1846 increased apace, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The high courts entertained roughly 130,000 causes in England and Wales in 1858 and rather less than that number in 1898; the county courts entertained 730,000 actions in 1858 and over a million forty years later in 1898.¹⁶ Each decade after their creation brought the county courts new powers: initially established to hear only small debt suits, they soon came to boast jurisdiction over causes relating to bankruptcy, workmen’s compensation, equity, and in some instances admiralty cases.¹⁷ Eschewing jury trails for summary process, the county courts diverged from the petty criminal court system in their personnel, relying on barristers rather than extra-legal amateurs for their judges. But as the work of many scholars has now clearly demonstrated, legal training did little to limit county-court judges’ willingness to exercise forms of judicial discretion that removed their courts’ proceedings from the letter of the common law. The salience of discretion in county-court judicial processes derived in considerable measure from their institutional genealogy: the local small claims courts, known as courts of conscience or courts of requests, which the Victorian county-court system supplanted, had been directed by statute to arbitrate contractual disputes ¹⁵ These developments are documented and analysed in, for example, V. Markham Lester, Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt, and Company Winding-Up in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1995); Ginger S. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, N. C., 1995); A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conﬂict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992); and Randall Craig, Promising Language: Betrothal in Victorian Law and Fiction (Albany, 2000). ¹⁶ Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society, 106. ¹⁷ For a comprehensive history of the Victorian county courts, see Patrick Polden, A History of the County Court, 1846–1971 (Cambridge, 1999).

166

Margot C. Finn

by ‘Equity and Good Conscience . . . not tying themselves to the exact Forms and Methods of the Common Law’.¹⁸ Carried over into the county courts, this brand of equitable discretion rendered Victorian contractual disputes highly contentious. Christopher Brooks has noted that many county-court judges ‘exercised their ofﬁces with a nearly tyrannical disregard for traditional common law principles of due process’, and Patrick Polden describes these summary judges as ‘judicial selkirks’.¹⁹ Only belatedly rendered responsible to the high courts through the processes of appeal, these legal arbiters could display remarkable hostility to the law they were appointed to represent. The diatribe delivered by county-court judge Josiah William Smith in the 1870s is a case in point. Outraged that one of his judgments was to be reconsidered in the high court, Smith described the process of appeal to the superior common-law courts as ‘a lottery; a disgraceful state of things . . . the proliﬁc source of a mass of reﬁned trash and learned rubbish which strains the brains, occupies the public time and exhausts the bodily and mental powers of the judges, to no purpose but to defeat morality and . . . expediency’.²⁰ The limited presence of legal professionals in the county courtroom further bolstered judges’ tendency to stray from the received wisdom of established case law. The use of barristers and solicitors as counsel was hardly unknown in county-court litigation, but neither was it ubiquitous or normative. Plaintiffs and defendants of the county court who were loath to pay for professional representation relied instead upon the argumentative acumen of informal paid agents or (above all) the rhetorical skills of their own wives.²¹ If summary process in the petty criminal courts had, through magistrates’ separation and maintenance orders, assisted the tentative recognition of married women’s legal individualism from the 1870s onwards, county-court litigation at once rejected and reiﬁed the maintenance of status for married women in the halcyon days of Victorian contract. At the level of procedure, petty small claims courts were at the very forefront of legal recognition of wives’ contractual activities. From at least the eighteenth century, small claims courts had departed from the common-law tradition of the superior courts in allowing married women ¹⁸ Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 203–7, 252–4, citation at 205, quoting the statute creating Bristol and Gloucester’s court in 1689. ¹⁹ Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society, 107; Patrick Polden, ‘Judicial Selkirks: The County Court Judges and the Press, 1847–80’, in Christopher W. Brooks and Michael Lobban, eds., Communities and Courts in Britain 1150–1900 (London, 1997), 245–62. ²⁰ Polden, ‘Judicial Selkirks’, 252. ²¹ Finn, Character of Credit, 255–8.

The Authority of the Law

167

to testify in court on behalf (and indeed in lieu) of their husbands. In this manner, inferior civil courts conferred a degree of legal agency on wives well before the statutory recognition of wives’ legal individualism conferred by the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870, 1882, and 1893. But this innovation in legal process was countered by county-court judges’ reluctance to enforce wives’ new contractual liability. Particularly (but not exclusively) in suits that involved working-class defendants, county-court judges tended to emphasize the salience of the family unit, discounting the autonomy of individual members within it. In this they were often supported by the commercial community itself. When a Lancashire county-court judge ruled in 1874 that husbands could no longer be held liable for debts contracted by their wives, local tradesmen were outraged and convened an indignation meeting in Manchester. Supporting their protest, a trade publication reiterated to its readers that shopkeepers were ‘fully entitled . . . from the practical guarantees afforded by the habits of our social life, to suppose that husband and wife are acting in concert, and the liability incurred by one is accepted by the other’.²² Well before the welfarist transition away from legal individualism toward legal collectivism in the 1870s, small claims court judges in summary hearings had questioned the contractual utility of the concept of the autonomous individual for working-class families. Higher up on the social scale, individuals’ liabilities for their personal contracts were similarly subjected to conﬂicting trends toward and away from autonomous agency. Legislation such as the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 worked to secure the personal wealth of propertied wives against their husbands’ ﬁnancial depredations.²³ Yet the 1860s had seen the enactment of bankruptcy and insolvency legislation that liberated propertied debtors from the full burden of their contractual liabilities. Legislation of these years enabled those debtors who could afford to pay a £10 fee to ﬁle for personal bankruptcy, and thus to escape imprisonment for their unpaid debts. If legal theorists trumpeted uniform punishments meted out regardless of status distinctions as the safeguards of modern contractual freedom, English legislators were reluctant to subject persons of the propertied classes to these new legal disciplines.²⁴ ²² See ibid., chs. 6–7 (citation at 268), and, for middle-class women, Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000), ch. 2. ²³ For the success in this regard of the 1870 Act, see Mary Beth Combs, ‘Wives and Household Wealth: The Impact of the 1870 British Married Women’s Property Act on WealthHolding and Share of Household Resources’, Continuity and Change, 19 (2004), 141–63. ²⁴ See esp. Paul Johnson, ‘Class Law in Victorian England’, Past & Present, 141 (1993), 147–69.

168

Margot C. Finn

III In turning to Victorian manifestations of legal authority in the empire, place, process, and personnel retain their central importance. Like English law in this period, imperial legal structures were often championed by their architects as stepping stones toward the full contractual autonomy of colonized indigenous Others, who they perceived to be mired in archaic collective social groups by the trammels of native custom.²⁵ As in England, however, the implementation of legal reformers’ envisioned contractual regimes was repeatedly undercut by considerations of cost, by shortages of trained professionals, by distinctions among different litigant constituencies, and by canny litigants’ ability to bend metropolitan legal dictates to suit the particularistic claims and needs of local cultures and contexts. In consequence, the development of colonial legal structures displayed a worrying tendency to amplify the ﬂuidity and hybridity already characteristic of English legal traditions. ‘The colonial legal order was by its very nature a plural legal order’, Lauren Benton justly observes. ‘Multiple legal authorities were created out of the imposition of colonial law and the persistence, protection, and invention of indigenous legal practices.’²⁶ Viewed from the safety of the metropolis, the colonies appeared to afford legal reformers myriad prime sites for experimentation and rationalization. The Australian continent, declared terra nullius (or no man’s land) by eighteenth-century British legal theorists, ostensibly offered proponents of legal innovation an especially blank slate, but less distant colonial outposts likewise provided opportunities for novel modernizing reforms. As the development of the police constabulary in Ireland prior to its introduction in England demonstrated early in the nineteenth century, the empire was a proving ground on which reforms ultimately intended for the metropole could ﬁrst be pioneered and then ﬁne-tuned.²⁷ But, as the history of the codiﬁcation of criminal law suggests, the growth of the empire also offered frustrated British legislators convenient sites for ²⁵ For an especially powerful (and inﬂuential) exposition of this view, see Bernard S. Cohn, ‘From Indian Status to British Contract’, Journal of Economic History, 21 (1961), 613–28; and id., ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’, in his Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), 57–75. ²⁶ Lauren Benton, ‘Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999), 563. ²⁷ See esp. Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988).

The Authority of the Law

169

the introduction of reforms thwarted at home by the entrenched opposition of the legal community. Codiﬁcation, the effort to bring order to the common law by substituting modern legal codes for the accreted wisdom of case law and precedent, appealed to reformers both as a means of rendering legal discipline more uniform and as a mechanism for reducing the legal profession’s stranglehold on interpretation of the law. Inspired both by Benthamite utilitarianism and by the growing incoherence of the common-law tradition, efforts to systematize the English criminal law through codiﬁcation surfaced persistently from the 1830s only to be ‘fatally undermined’ by judicial opposition in 1854. ‘The judges’ hostility was speciﬁcally to codiﬁcation and to the repeal of the common law’, Michael Lobban argues. ‘Any codiﬁcation project was bound to present problems for the common law mind’, thus illustrating ‘the very “Englishness” of the failure’ of utilitarian reform.²⁸ Outside the metropole, in sharp contrast, codiﬁcation rapidly secured political support and was successfully translated into legislation in the mid- and later-Victorian decades. Empowered by the British Parliament in 1834 to draft a criminal code for India, Thomas Babington Macaulay sought to reduce the welter of legal authorities recognized on the subcontinent—some British, some Muslim, and some Hindu—by unifying disparate legal systems and limiting the sway of judicial discretion.²⁹ Decades in the making, the resulting legislation had widespread ramiﬁcations throughout the British empire, most notably in Africa and the Caribbean. Under the guidance of imported legal pundits such as Sir Henry Maine, the Indian Penal Code of 1862 set the agenda for legal reforms which, by the early Edwardian years, would bring criminal codes to all of British Africa save Sierra Leone. In Zanzibar, the Indian Penal Code applied to criminal charges already in 1867; in the East African Protectorate that was to become Kenya, it applied from 1897 and in Uganda from 1902. The subjugation of English nationals who resided beyond English borders to criminal codes designed for Indian and African populations exposed to view yet again the formidable cultural barriers that had thwarted (and continued to block) legal codiﬁcation in the metropole. White settlers in East Africa were appalled by this ²⁸ Michael Lobban, ‘How Benthamic was the Criminal Law Commission?’, Law and History Review, 18 (2000), 432. See also id., ‘Henry Brougham and Law Reform’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 1184–1215. ²⁹ The rationale and components of this reform are detailed by David Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The Myth of the Inherent Superiority and Modernity of the English Legal System Compared to India’s Legal System in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 32 (1998), 513–57.

170

Margot C. Finn

violation of their perceived legal privileges, arguing that the Englishman’s common law extended to the full geographical reach of the sovereign’s domains. As the Colonists’ Association of East Africa argued in response to the imposition of the Indian Criminal Code, this development placed ‘white men under laws intended for a coloured population, despotically governed’. As Englishmen they claimed to retain the right, ‘to have the English common law, [for] by the law of England every Englishman carries the common law of England into every new country settled by him over which the king has proclaimed sovereignty’.³⁰ Unsurprisingly, the Colonial Ofﬁce’s emphatic rejection of this argument rested on the imperative need for law in the empire to be administered by persons other than lawyers. Codiﬁcation, in this view as in Bentham’s formulation, was essential to empire on the cheap. For only a sweeping rationalization of the criminal law through the creation of comprehensive codes would render complex legal principles accessible to inexpensive lay magistrates located in sites far from proper judicial oversight. Tested in England in courts in which plebeian defendants were predominant, summary criminal process administered by magistrates with limited legal learning was to expand rapidly throughout the nineteenth-century empire. Ireland, so often a testing ground of legal innovations, played a signiﬁcant part in this expansion of legal authority. Prior to the passage of the Constabulary (Ireland) Act of 1836, Irish stipendiary magistrates had been required to be qualiﬁed barristers. The Resident Magistrates empowered by this Act—who were later to wield exceptional coercive powers during the Land War and its nationalist aftermath—lay under no such requirement. When one hapless RM faced suspension from ofﬁce for exceeding his authority by imposing sentences of hard labour at an impromptu court convened on a Sunday at a police barrack, his counsel pleaded in mitigation that as a retired military ofﬁcer the magistrate could not reasonably be expected to exhibit a close familiarity with the law. In 1880, only a third of Irish RMs possessed legal qualiﬁcations, and few of even these professionals had chosen to practise law upon being called to the Bar.³¹ Outside the British Isles, the colonial judiciary diverged signiﬁcantly in its personnel from the English Bar. Its practitioners characteristically combined judicial and administrative functions, and cycled through a ³⁰ H. F. Morris, ‘A History of the Adoption of Codes of Criminal Law and Procedure in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of African Law, 18 (1977), 6–23, citation at 13. ³¹ Penny Bonsall, The Irish RMs: The Resident Magistrates in the British Administration of Ireland (Dublin, 1997), 16, 28.

The Authority of the Law

171

succession of colonial territories rather than developing close ties to the population they governed on local county circuits. As Martin Chanock has argued, ‘One of the most marked features of East and Central Africa’s experience is that the legal profession was simply absent from the legal experiences of most Africans in the colonial system.’³² In Africa, the creation of Native African courts presided over by chiefs or elders who were bound not by rules of evidence and common-law procedures but rather by local custom further consolidated this trend within the law away from the traditions of the common law. Lawyers were prohibited from practising in these local native courts, and were only infrequently at hand to assist litigants who appeared in superior criminal jurisdictions. In their stead, local magistrates—drawn both from the settler populations and from the ranks of colonial ofﬁcialdom—exercised the lion’s share of judicial authority. In Chanock’s estimation, in these colonial circumstances ‘the rules of English common law, when invoked, were simpliﬁed and misconstrued by ofﬁcials with little more than rudimentary recollections of textbooks’.³³ Afﬁrming contractual obligations with the one hand by elaborating precise criminal codes characterized by their uniformity, Victorian imperial law promptly extended its other hand to place litigants within customary and magisterial tribunals whose judges boasted only limited formal legal training. The powers of coercion with which the law endowed imperial magistrates were substantial, but so too were local variations in their ability and willingness to impose the letter of the law. The enforcement of labour contracts illustrates this aspect of colonial legal discipline with particular clarity. Coercive labour regulations played a vital role in promoting economic development in England: from the mid-fourteenth century until the passage of the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875, English labourers could be (and were) compelled by local magistrates to fulﬁl their contractual obligations to employers or to suffer ﬁnes, imprisonment, or corporal punishment.³⁴ Colonial expansion saw these measures transplanted to new British territories, even as opponents of the slave system and proponents of market discipline triumphantly championed free labour ideology. But if workers in colonial Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, and New Zealand were all constrained by coercive labour ³² Martin Chanock, ‘The Law Market: The Legal Encounter in British East and Central Africa’, in W. J. Mommsen and J. A. DeMoor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford, 1992), 303. ³³ Chanock, ‘Law Market’, 303–4. ³⁴ See esp. Steinﬁeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor.

172

Margot C. Finn

contracts inspired by English Master and Servant legislation, their experience of employment law was shaped fundamentally by the divergent political, demographic, cultural, and racial parameters that distinguished the component territories of the empire from each other and from Britain. In the white colonies of settlement, labourers of British origin continued to be restricted by the stipulations of Master and Servant legislation until the early twentieth century. Magistrates in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand could thus compel disaffected apprentices, shepherds, sailors, indentured servants, and the like to return to work or to face imprisonment and additional periods of service if they remained recalcitrant. Peter Karsten’s sweeping survey of colonial legal practice has however revealed that magistrates and judges in these colonial territories were generally less punitive in enforcing labour contracts than their English peers, and correspondingly more distant in their rulings from the letter of the common law than were English justices. A dearth of labourers combined with a deﬁcit of lawyers to mitigate legal discipline in the market throughout these territories. Employment relations on a day-to-day basis were coloured by labour scarcity in ways that granted white colonial workers considerable informal leverage despite their formal legal disabilities. Like resort to the local magistrate, the beating, cufﬁng, and insulting of servants by their masters was reduced by factors of demand. Mrs George Grifﬁn of Moreton Bay thus suffered repeated insolence from her servants in the 1840s without retaliation. A female housemaid instructed to keep her own family’s laundry separate from that of the Grifﬁn family spoke eloquently to her understanding of the freedom of her labour contracts. Replying to her mistress in ‘the most abusive Language’, she informed Mrs Grifﬁn that ‘she was Quite as Good as herself ’ and refused to work ‘another stroke if made to separate the wash’.³⁵ If white settlers enjoyed a signiﬁcant degree of immunity from coercive British employment laws, the experiences of those indigenous workers whose introduction to the labour market was mediated by the colonization process were considerably more onerous. For while the mid- and late-Victorian decades witnessed the repeal or relaxation of Master and Servant regulations in Britain, the Antipodes, and North America, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras were to see the introduction of Master ³⁵ Peter Karsten, Between Law and Custom: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 6, citation at 343.

The Authority of the Law

173

and Servant ordinances in, among other territories, the Transvaal (1880), the Gold Coast (1893), and the East African Protectorate (beginning in 1898). In East Africa, the Regulations of 1898 subjected porters in the Protectorate to ﬁnes, up to six months of imprisonment, and twenty-ﬁve lashes if they failed to honour their labour contracts. Expanded in 1902 with the Native Porters and Labour Regulations, these measures placed local magistrates at the centre of labour market discipline. In 1906, white settlers eager to gain access to ‘free’ African labourers succeeded in wresting the Master and Servant Ordinance from ofﬁcials in London, who reluctantly acknowledged that such outdated measures were required ‘to obtain reasonable service from the natives who are unused to the beneﬁts and obligations of continuous labour’. A hybrid judicial measure in which breaches of contract were adjudicated by civil process but punished by criminal penalties (which were authorized by the Indian Penal Code), the Master and Servant Ordinance as it developed in the early twentieth century was far from uniform in its discipline. Rather, penalties for violations of labour contracts were assigned to defendants according to their perceived status within the progression of mankind from ‘primitive’ to commercial societies. The bulk of Europeans found in breach of the ordinance in Kenya were bound over to keep the peace; Asian defendants were typically subjected to monetary ﬁnes; Africans who fell foul of the regulations were most often punished by imprisonment or ﬂogging.³⁶ Despite the legislative success of codiﬁcation in the British colonies, criminal law in Britain’s empire was clearly marked by a series of discontinuities—both between English and imperial norms, and among the disparate colonial populations. Civil law in the colonies was far less inﬂuenced by the codifying impulse, and it presents in consequence a yet more conﬂicted example of legal evolution and legal pluralism in the Victorian period. The dissonance that marked colonial property law, with particular reference to land, helps to illustrate this point, for this aspect of legal authority was characterized by internal contradictions that thwarted the transition from status to contract under British rule. In India in the era of the East India Company, the multiple jurisdictions in which the civil law operated included superior courts in the Presidency cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, which provided European litigants with access to the common law, as well as diverse up-country courts in which Company ofﬁcials (assisted by indigenous ³⁶ David M. Anderson, ‘Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939’, Journal of African History, 41 (2000), 459–85, citation at 461.

174

Margot C. Finn

experts) applied Hindu law to Hindu litigants and Muslim law to Muslims, alongside the principles of ‘justice, equity and good conscience’ where judicial discretion appeared to be merited by the circumstances of the particular case.³⁷ Such institutional incoherence contributed to a fundamental bifurcation in the principles of the rule of law in British India. On the one hand, a desire to secure individual private property rights informed the evolution of civil courts in the wake of the Permanent Settlement of 1793. The conventions of public law that developed in this context were designed to promote the principles of possessive individualism: the civil law accordingly promised to guarantee the proprietor’s control of his land and to enforce debt and service contracts. But, as David Washbrook has persuasively argued, these tendencies within the public law were opposed by countervailing inﬂuences within the civil law as it pertained to domestic life. Here (as in England itself ), the law privileged social groups over the contractual individual. ‘From its very beginnings, then, the Anglo-Indian legal system was distinctly Janus-faced and rested on two contradictory principles with different social implications’, Washbrook concludes. ‘If the public side of the law sought to subordinate the rule of “Indian status” to that of “British contract” and to free the individual in a world of amoral market relations, the personal side entrenched ascriptive (caste, religious and familial) status as the basis of individual right.’³⁸ The parallels between these Indian developments and evolving legal practice in England are intriguing. In the early Victorian years, the Company’s civil courts were palpably inadequate to the task of protecting Indian contracts. Prolix and expensive, their proceedings were overseen by ‘civil servants largely ignorant of the law but too incompetent to be given other duties, or past retirement age and too impecunious to live on their pensions’. As in England, however, the mid-nineteenth century saw signiﬁcant revision of the legal institutions that regulated property relations. Reform rendered the litigation of Indian contracts more rapid and less expensive, and litigation levels rose sharply in consequence. Intended to accelerate the rule of market disciplines on the subcontinent, these civil law reforms foundered instead on collective family interests and equitable ³⁷ For a general overview, see M. Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Oxford, 1989). For resort to equitable principles—which exhibits interesting resonances with the evolution of the English county-court system—see D. Derrett, ‘Justice, Equity, and Good Conscience’, in J. N. D. Anderson, ed., Changing Law in Developing Counties (London, 1963), 113–53. ³⁸ D. A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981), 653–4.

The Authority of the Law

175

legal reasoning. Far from liberating litigants from the claims of kin and caste, a succession of British judges used these civil courts to defend the entitlements of the Hindu joint-family. Nor did creditors in these courts ﬁnd British judges to be zealous champions of their contracts. Instead, Indian civil courts proved willing to effect equitable reductions, based on nebulous principles of the ‘fairness’ of debtors’ liabilities for their contracts. In some regions, indeed, civil-court judges in these years explicitly proscribed creditors of speciﬁc castes from seizing debtors’ assets to meet their contractual obligations.³⁹ Where Sir Henry Maine viewed historical ‘progress’ as a trajectory from status to contract, his contemporaries on the civil side of the law in India appear instead to have understood the modernization of Indian law to demand a constantly shifting balance between status and contract within the law of obligations. The development of property law in India under British rule was signiﬁcantly affected by pre-existing legal institutions and personnel. It was by cannibalizing the court systems of the Mughal empire, rather than by establishing novel jurisdictions, that the British State ﬁrst ﬂexed its authority over the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent. In substantial swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, British legal imperialism confronted a different challenge, the need to create indigenous courts where none had existed prior to colonization, and the need to uphold white settlers’ private property rights to land while maintaining communal tenure for Africans. The creation of Native courts, administered by Africans but amenable to British magisterial and administrative oversight, and the elaboration of customary law were instrumental to the achievement of these goals. Reducing the cost of colonial administration substantially, these methods elevated ‘traditional’ chiefs into fonts of executive and judicial authority with a broad remit that included taxation, labour dues, and women’s wealth. Like Indian civil law, African customary law was Janus-faced. Chiefs participated actively in the creation of market cultures by coercing labour and taxes from younger men, even as they legitimated their authority by claims to represent timeless African traditions. The result, in Thomas Spear’s apt description, was a system of law larded in equal measure with ‘indigenous, colonial and common law, administrative regulations and Christian injunctions that came to comprise customary law’.⁴⁰ If these conditions did not preclude the emergence of ³⁹ Ibid. 658, 670, 674–5. ⁴⁰ Thomas Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 13.

176

Margot C. Finn

new contractual freedoms, neither did they consistently guarantee their evolution. The tenuous nature of property rights in African and Indian colonial contexts was clearly linked to British perceptions of racial difference, but race alone cannot explain the reluctance of legal authorities to apply the tenets of the rule of law uniformly to land rights throughout the empire. In both North America and the Antipodes, imperial expansion saw indigenous peoples lose their entitlements to ancestral lands as grasping settlers claimed alternative rights based on sales of questionable legality and forcible expropriation. But these white colonists in turn (and the Crown itself ) were often to ﬁnd their own property rights overturned by subsequent waves of white British settlers, a violation of their contractual rights that judges and legislators were surprisingly reluctant to challenge. Squatters in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand evinced a Lockean understanding of property at variance with common-law precedent, but their claims to have legitimated their ownership rights to ‘empty’ lands by mixing their labour with the soil proved difﬁcult to reject out of hand. As was the case with servants’ labour contracts in these territories, endemic shortages of labour, population, and legal personnel undermined both the willingness and the ability of colonial and metropolitan governments to deny these squatters’ extra-legal entitlements. Peter Karsten’s comprehensive survey of land rights in these diasporic settlements leads to conclusions that resonate with wider trends in British imperial law. ‘[S]quatters often received generous treatment at the hands of equity judges with regard to their improvements, and settlers with imperfect titles often beneﬁtted as well from such proceedings’, he observes. ‘The Crown, its “Great Proprietors,” and especially the Aboriginal people lost at least as often as they won whatever legal contest might ensue from these “bold frontiersmen”.’⁴¹

IV Having outlined the lineaments of Victorian legal authority with these broad brushstrokes, let me conclude very brieﬂy with a few ﬁnal observations about the nature of the relation between status and contract in the Victorian period. To legal theorists such as Maine and Dicey, the nineteenth century appeared to be marked by ﬁrst the replacement of ⁴¹ Karsten, Between Law and Custom, 186–7.

The Authority of the Law

177

traditional status obligations with individualized contracts, and then the supplanting of this new contractual individualism by the collective obligations of the welfare state. The picture sketched here is rather different. To be sure, contractual visions were of central importance to early and mid-Victorian legal developments such as the codiﬁcation movement and the creation of the county-court system. But these developments were constantly undercut by the countervailing inﬂuences exerted by judicial discretion and the inherent pluralism of the English national and British imperial legal systems. The geographical expansion of the law— whether into the rookeries of London or across the myriad territories of the empire—relied fundamentally on the extension of summary process and the use of lay magistrates. The tribunals that dispensed much Victorian civil and criminal justice at home and abroad were, in consequence, cheap and relatively simple to administer, even when they were instituted in new colonial domains bereft of established judicial practices and fully trained legal personnel. But because both the reduced resort to jury trials and the extension of magisterial forms of justice to new territories increased the potential for judicial discretion, the institution of these petty courts often served to distance the day-to-day practice of Victorian law from dominant legal paradigms, from the common-law tradition, and from contemporary statutory law itself. The ascendancy of these expedient forms of justice suggests that if we are to ﬁnd the authority of the Victorian law, we must often seek it outside the company of statesmen and lawyers. The concept of ‘the common-law tradition’ has exercised a fundamental sway within British legal history, encouraging historians to highlight the coherence and continuity of English legal principles over time and place. Consideration of English legal developments within a wider imperial framework suggests instead that the common law is best understood as a carapace that enclosed a tangled mélange not only of competing institutions but also of contradictory local practices. Appeals to the common-law tradition were, indeed, pervasive in Victorian legal culture, extending from the English heartland to the Australian outback and the white settlements of the East African Protectorate. But the common-law tradition was itself subject to many of the inﬂuences that rendered petty justice susceptible to localism and particularism, and its practitioners of necessity routinely accommodated prevailing legal principles and precedents to dominant social precepts and practices. A magistrate in Victorian Kent articulated the pervasive antagonism to legal formalism that characterized much of the State’s legal personnel in this period. When

178

Margot C. Finn

a lawyer sought to bolster a client’s case in his court by adducing a technical point of law, this justice warned him smartly that ‘we do not want any Old Bailey sharp practices here’.⁴² Responding only reluctantly to the rationalizing inﬂuences that emanated from Parliament and reform-minded sections of the judiciary, Victorian legal practice was constantly subject to reinvention by the wayward legal personnel and ﬂuid conceptions of equitable justice that permeated the exercise of legal authority on a day-to-day basis at home as in the empire.

FURTHER READING Atiyah, P. S., The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1979). Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002). Brooks, Christopher W., Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (London, 1998). Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1996). Karsten, Peter, Between Law and Custom: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2002). Mommsen, W. J., and DeMoor, J. A., eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Africa and Asia (Oxford, 1992). Polden, Patrick, A History of the County Court, 1846–1971 (Cambridge, 1999). Steinﬁeld, Robert J., Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001). Wiener, Martin, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990). Zedner, Lucia, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991).

⁴² Cited by Conley, Unwritten Law, 202.

8 The Authority of the Church Arthur Burns

Victoria’s reign saw the authority of the Church of England diminish. This was not a consequence of secularization, but of the increasing public presence and status of Protestant Nonconformity. It also reﬂected the pandenominational consequences of the evangelical turn in British religion of the late eighteenth century, which promoted a more individualistic understanding of religious experience, and so a weaker relationship with institutions.¹This diminution contributed to what some characterize as a crisis for the Church, a verdict endorsed by much contemporary testimony. In 1832 Thomas Arnold famously opined that ‘The Church of England as it now stands, no human power can save’; ﬁfty years later Bishop Christopher Wordsworth declared that the Burials Act of 1880 was ‘an act for the burial of the Church of England’, while Arnold’s successor as headmaster of Rugby, Archie Tait (b. 1811), by now archbishop of Canterbury, observed that ‘Ever since I was a boy, I have heard that the Church of England has been passing through a crisis, and I believe it has’.² Tait’s comment nevertheless highlights the danger of casting the Victorian era as one of acute crisis for the Church; he went on to assert that ‘It has got out of all these crises, and it will get out of all others’. One important characteristic of the decline of Church authority, indeed, was that much of it occurred with the acquiescence, if sometimes weary, of the leadership of the Church itself.³ For comments on earlier drafts of this essay I would like to thank Boyd Hilton, Peter Mandler, Jon Parry, Paul Readman, and Sarah Stockwell. ¹ On this see, for example, Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (London and New York, 2001), ch. 3. ² A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 2 vols. (London, 1844), i. 287 (Arnold to J. E. Tyler, 10 June 1832); R. T. Davidson and W. Benham, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, 2 vols. (London, 1891), ii. 394 (Wordsworth), 486 (Tait). ³ A point made for the twentieth century by S. J. D. Green, ‘Survival and Autonomy: On the Strange Fortunes and Peculiar Legacy of Ecclesiastical Establishment in the

180

Arthur Burns

Mid-Victorian clerical jeremiads usually reﬂected an overly pessimistic and naïve reading of the results of the religious census conducted in 1851, and in particular of its implication that less than half of the 35 per cent of the population worshipping in England and Wales on census Sunday had done so in Anglican churches. But even without taking account of the highly problematic nature of the ﬁgures and interpretations cast into the public domain by the publication of the census in 1854,⁴ it is clear that much Anglican discomfort arose from unrealistic assumptions concerning historic levels of church attendance or an aspiration to a future in which the whole population might be [re]captured for the established Church. More sober sociological reﬂection, not least a contrast between the extent of voluntary association with the Church implied in the ﬁgures for attendance and those for any other contemporary form of association (especially any one individual dissenting denomination), would have encouraged less doomladen readings. Historians have also been too quick to dismiss as unreﬂective complacency contemporary expressions of clerical conﬁdence. Alongside the census results such historians cite evidence suggesting that Anglican church attendance declined as a proportion of the population from the 1850s, the attrition accelerating in the 1880s. But clerical optimists could have taken solace from a different roster of statistics: the sustained growth until the 1920s in the number of baptisms, conﬁrmations, and Easter communicants (the latter peaking as late as 1927, and leaving a higher proportion of the adult population communicant Anglicans in 1901 than in 1831); an increase in the number of Anglican clergy from 14,613 in 1841 to 25,363 in 1901, which despite the growth of the population of England and Wales over the same period from 15.9 million to 32.5 million prevented the ratio of clergy to national population falling more than from 1: 1098 to 1: 1288, and which before the 1860s had outpaced population growth; a growth in the number of Anglican church buildings from 11,883 in 1831 to 17,468 in 1901.⁵ Modern British State, c. 1920 to the Present Day’, in S. J. D. Green and R. Whiting, eds., The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), 304. ⁴ From a wide literature, see e.g. K. D. M. Snell and P. S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1. ⁵ See J. Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York and Oxford, 1982), 7, 23–5 (for comparison with other forms of voluntary association); R. Currie, A. Gilbert, and L. Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), 128–9, 167–8; A. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London and New York, 1976), 28; R. Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church (London, 1993), chs. 6–7 (measures of afﬁliation); A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy (London and Sydney, 1984), 3 (clergy numbers).

The Authority of the Church

181

Similarly, any discussion of the ‘authority’ of the Victorian Church must take account of the fact that at certain points, and in certain respects, and with regard to certain sections of the population, it grew rather than diminished. It should also acknowledge that, despite the post-Foucauldian tendency to equate authority with the power to ‘Discipline and Punish’, authority importantly also serves to authorize— to add legitimacy to actions, as we will see when we come to consider rites of passage. Expressions of the authority of the Church of England permeated State and society throughout Victorian England and Wales. In contemplating the authority of the Church of England as manifest on the eve of Victoria’s accession it is all too easy to focus exclusively on legislative and constitutional elements, highlighted as they were by controversy in the late 1820s and early 1830s. But the authority of the Church had many other roots and took many other forms, which could be enforced or challenged, either directly or symbolically, in quite different ways. Just as for historians, for contemporaries none the less the clearest manifestation lay in the dynamics of the Church’s intimate relationship with the State. But, as the nature of many issues that fuelled controversy over this relationship— debates over church rates, burials, education—reminds us, this authority was also powerfully apparent at the local level. At the outset of Victoria’s reign there were some 6,000 active magistrates in England;⁶ at the same date there were well over 10,000 Anglican clergy. In 1802, long before the great Victorian church-building enterprise commenced, William Cobbett suggested a visual index of this dimension of ecclesiastical authority: The clergy are less powerful from their rank and industry than from their locality . . . and their aggregate inﬂuence is astonishingly great. When from the top of any high hill, one looks around the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one . . . ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained. It is the equal distribution of the clergy, their being in every corner of the kingdom that makes them a powerful and formidable corps.⁷ ⁶ D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government, 1780–1840 (Oxford, 1994), 77. ⁷ L. Melville, ed., The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America, 2 vols. (London, 1913), i. 156–7: W. Cobbett to W. Wyndham, 27 May 1802. Quoted in J. Gregory and J. S. Chamberlain, ‘National and Local Perspectives on the Church of England in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Gregory and Chamberlain, eds., The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 (Woodbridge, 2002), 1.

182

Arthur Burns

Much of the story of the diminution of Church authority is familiar, while an exhaustive account would need to range widely over the relations of religion, gender, science, and the arts. This brief essay affords an opportunity to focus on a number of important aspects of Church authority, some of them perhaps less familiar, and many deserving extensive future investigation. It will conclude by considering the authority of the Church at the national level, after examining its expression in relation both to the individual, and to the local community. But we should not ignore the ways in which it was negotiated and expressed within the massive institutional presence of the Church itself, and it is with developments here we begin, not least because these were not without wider consequences for the authority of the institutional Church.

I Three developments in the Victorian Church’s internal economy of power stand out for their wider ramiﬁcations. First, the authority of the clerical hierarchy over the parochial rank-and-ﬁle increased. This was partly the work of the hierarchy itself, as diocesan authorities maintained the momentum of a ‘diocesan revival’ that among other things provided essential infrastructure such as the newly revived ofﬁces of the rural dean and the suffragan bishop. But it also reﬂected the contribution of the State as, partly inspired by the diocesan revival, early Victorian legislation empowered bishops, archdeacons, and rural deans as agents of reform. The Pluralities Act (1838) and Clergy Discipline Act (1840) both increased bishops’ disciplinary power over parochial clergy. Under the Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Act (1840) they were awarded a carrot to dangle alongside the disciplinary stick in the form of much patronage formerly in the hands of cathedral chapters; moreover the ‘Peel districts’ created under legislation of 1843 were normally alternately in the gift of bishop and crown (usually the prime minister acting on episcopal advice). The geographical and jurisdictional recasting of the Church of England dioceses and archdeaconries under the Established Church Act (1836) created rationalized jurisdictions, in theory more susceptible to effective oversight (although Francis Jeune thought that the ‘rationalized’ diocese of Peterborough ‘was in the shape of a pear, and that he lived at the end of the stalk’).⁸ Later it became politically ⁸ Much of this is charted in A. Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c.1800 to 1970 (Oxford, 1999), esp. ch. 6.

The Authority of the Church

183

possible to add signiﬁcantly to the number of diocesan bishops, with the earlier creations of Ripon (1836) and Manchester (1847), both intended to be balanced by amalgamations, now joined by St Albans, Truro (both 1877), Liverpool (1880), Newcastle (1882), Southwell (1884), and Wakeﬁeld (1888). The mid-Victorian bishop emerged from these developments with his authority signiﬁcantly enhanced, although this change was partly obscured by the fact that theological and ecclesiological differences among the clergy, manifest in the growth of factionalism associated with the rise of Church party, saw this authority subject to more direct challenge by disaffected rank-and-ﬁle over matters of doctrine and liturgical practice than had previously been the case. That the bishop otherwise became a more effective authority did not just matter to clerics. It also increased the impact of the Church on the parish community. Clergy (with or without the assistance of parish ofﬁcers) were required to do things, and their efforts closely monitored. They might be instructed to recover neglected tithe or glebe, enforce church rates, restore dilapidated buildings, or increase church accommodation; to provide additional services; to reside if absentee, or to ensure adequate pastoral cover. Abuses in the exercise of lay patronage rights were identiﬁed and corrected. The reinforcement of episcopal authority fostered and in part relied upon the second development to be considered: a new role for the lower clergy in Church government. This was further encouraged by other factors, including the bundle of trends usually labelled clerical ‘professionalization’, the spread of Tractarian principles emphasizing clerical distinctiveness, and the ramiﬁcations of a perceived failure of State support in the context of the challenge of dissent and inﬁdelity. It began with the development of diocesan consultative meetings.⁹ Like the revival of provincial Convocations of the clergy from the early 1850s, this is often characterized as a ritualist or Anglo-Catholic-inspired exercise in Church defence.¹⁰ But such an interpretation neglects the inﬂuence of the contemporaneous democratization of the Victorian ‘secular’ polity. Some campaigners for synodical government based their case not on the ancient privileges of a clerical caste, but on an Englishman’s constitutional birthright or whiggish expectation. Thus William Pound argued, ‘Synodal action [is] only one form of our popular constitution’; William Scott that ‘The marked tendency of our age is towards representation. . . . getting rid ⁹ See ibid., esp. chs. 2, 4, 5, 9. ¹⁰ See M. A. Crowther, Church Embattled: Religious Controversy in Mid-Victorian England (Newton Abbot, 1970), esp. 205.

184

Arthur Burns

of the old feeling which was once characteristic of European society—that of centralization and despotism, and autocracy in Church and State.’¹¹ It might be going too far to describe this as the ‘liberal turn’ in the internal constitution of the Church. But the integration of such patriotic/nationalist discourses into the Church’s internal constitutional discussions would have signiﬁcant consequences.¹² The most immediate result of the integration of the lower clergy into Church government, however, was to encourage a third adjustment: lay involvement. Evangelicals and others reacted against the perceived clericalism of the developments discussed above, while many clergy of all hues wished to extend them to embrace the committed laity. There was also a desire to compensate for Parliament’s partial abdication of responsibility for Anglican affairs by securing laymen a place in Church government. One contribution came through pressure-group and associational activity in which laity combined with like-minded clergy. The Church of England Protection Society (later the ritualist English Church Union) was founded in 1859, and the evangelical Church Association in 1865. The Church (Defence) Institution of 1859 was more inclusive, as was the Church Congress founded in 1860, an ecclesiastical equivalent of the Social Science Association.¹³ But from the 1860s communicant laymen were also being associated with the diocesan consultative structures of the Church, ﬁrst in rural deaneries under the auspices of the Church Institution, and then in diocesan conferences, starting with those summoned in Ely and Lichﬁeld.¹⁴ From 1886 houses of laymen chosen by the diocesan conferences were added to the provincial Convocations. Throughout, the authority of these lay elements in Church government remained strictly circumscribed, and suspect to many high churchmen for being too representative, and to anticlerical Protestants for not being representative enough.¹⁵This development ¹¹ See Burns, Diocesan Revival, 236–8. ¹² See below, p. 197. ¹³ See M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Pressure-Group Politics and the Church of England: The Church Defence Institution 1859–1896’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (1984), 560–82; J. P. Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism and “Englishness”: The United Kingdom’, in C. Clark and W. Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conﬂict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003), 172–3. See also Roberts’s doctoral thesis, ‘The Role of the Laity in the Church of England, c. 1850–1885’ (Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1974), for what follows more generally. ¹⁴ See Burns, Diocesan Revival, 101, 250–9. ¹⁵ C. T. Porter counselled Sir William Harcourt against trusting Church government to a Convocation ‘packed with sacerdotal ecclesiastics and “Houses of Laymen” packed with laymen of the Lord Halifax type’: Bodleian Library, Oxford, Harcourt Papers, dep. 238, fos. 17–18, quoted without date by P. Nicholls, Khaki and the Confessional: A Study of a Religious Issue at the 1900 General Election in England (Melbourne, 2000), 81.

The Authority of the Church

185

nonetheless represented a remarkable transformation from the situation at the opening of the reign. It also further encouraged the liberalization of the Church’s understanding of authority. As importantly, it favoured the identiﬁcation of and distinction between a core of committed churchgoers and the non-churchgoing laity in the parishes and beyond, thus reinforcing an increasingly signiﬁcant caesura in relations between Church and community.

II We now turn from the institutional Church’s internal economy of power to consider its relations with the wider population. How did Church authority impact on the individual? Victoria’s reign saw the continuation of the drawn-out process by which identiﬁcation with the Anglican Church ceased to be a crucial component in civic, political, or social legitimacy. The Church’s power to punish moral transgression through its courts had waned during the eighteenth century, and although occasional instances of public penance involving the wearing of white sheets can be traced to the 1850s, those high churchmen bold enough to advocate reinvigoration of jurisdiction over lay morals were dismissed by contemporaries as eccentric fantasists.¹⁶ Formal change followed changing practice: in 1855 defamation was placed under the purview of the civil courts; brawling by laymen followed in 1860; and in a related development the responsibilities of the ecclesiastical courts for marriage and probate were eliminated in 1857. Times of economic distress such as those at the outset of the reign highlighted the Church’s power to impose ﬁnancial demands on reluctant or dissenting parishioners, and the pressure from above for efﬁcient ﬁnancial management within the Church served to increase the burdens represented by tithe and church rates. By the end of Victoria’s reign the abolition of compulsory church rates (1868), commutation of tithes ¹⁶ For late instances see O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part I, 3rd edn. (London, 1971), 489; advocates of a restored discipline included Henry Manning, G. A. Denison, and Robert Wilberforce. Of course any consideration of the Church as a moral authority cannot neglect the Victorian sermon, the teaching of which reached far beyond the congregation through publication. However, the uniformity of the core moral teaching of the various Victorian denominations makes it difﬁcult to use the prevalence of the moral codes contained in such teaching as an independent measure of the authority of the establishment in comparison with other Christian Churches.

186

Arthur Burns

(from 1836), and an Act of 1891 shifting the burden of the rentcharge from the farmer to the landowner combined to render these exactions less onerous and contentious. But when agriculture was under strain tithes could still provoke, and on the eve of a further Tithe Act of 1936 it provided Mosley’s blackshirts with a useful point of access to the politics of the rural community.¹⁷ The protracted death-throes of compulsory church rates, moreover, with their court cases and local stand-offs, provided the chief fuel with which the Liberation Society stoked the ﬁres of the campaign for disestablishment.¹⁸ The constitutional adjustments of 1828–32 inevitably pointed the way to further diminution of the links between the Church and civic identity, and in 1836 the introduction of civil registration ended the role of the Anglican Church as the keeper of the national record of births, marriages, and deaths. In the last case, of course, burial rather than death proved the source of contention. Before the relief afforded by the Burials Act of 1880, the growing tensions between Church and Chapel rendered local manifestations of the controversy both more numerous and more painful as militant clergy asserted the authority of the Church in refusing to bury—or omitting the more comforting passages of the funeral service while burying—those lacking unequivocal Anglican credentials. The bitterness of the controversy also reﬂected the continuing signiﬁcance of the churchyard memorial as a marker of an individual family’s stake in the community, a theme which historians are only now beginning to explore.¹⁹ The cases of baptism and marriage are more interesting. The State no longer demanded that individuals had recourse to Anglican rites. But at the same time, as with burial, it assisted those whom some clergy would have preferred not to have such access, for in 1857 the Divorce Act insisted that while a cleric could refuse to remarry the adulterous party to a divorce, he must allow into his church to perform the ceremony another cleric with a less tender conscience.²⁰ Clergy were more successful in tightening the terms of access to baptism, widely putting an end to the ¹⁷ E. J. Evans, The Contentious Tithe: The Tithe Problem and English Agriculture, 1750–1850 (1976); C. A. Twinch, Tithe War, 1918–1939: The Countryside in Revolt (Norwich, 2001), ch. 5. ¹⁸ See J. P. Ellens, Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conﬂict in England and Wales, 1832–1868 (University Park, Pa., 1994). ¹⁹ See K. D. M. Snell, ‘Gravestones, Belonging and Local Attachment in England 1700–2000’, Past & Present, 179 (May 2003), 97–134. ²⁰ R. Rodes, Jr., Law and Modernization in the Church of England: Charles II to the Welfare State (Notre Dame, Ind. and London, 1991), 292.

The Authority of the Church

187

elite laity’s preferred private ceremony and insisting on a public and more expensive rite in the parish church.²¹ Yet voluntary recourse and more demanding terms of admission did not prevent what recent studies have identiﬁed as the persistence of ‘a general addiction’ to the authority afforded by Anglican rites of passage.²² In 1851, when roughly 17 per cent of the population worshipped in Anglican churches on census Sunday, 85 per cent of marriages occurred there (and only just over 6 per cent in the dissenting chapels which had attracted an equal share of worshippers, while only 4.5 per cent opted for civil marriage). In many regions the number opting for civil marriage was falling in absolute terms by the 1880s.²³ Rates of baptisms in relation to live births rose in the 1880s and 1890s, settling at around two-thirds in the early twentieth century.²⁴ Clergy grumbled at their inability to win more support for the Church’s interpretation of its own rite of passage, conﬁrmation, but this did not prevent numbers of conﬁrmands among the population rising to a peak of some 38 per cent of 15 year olds in 1911.²⁵ As this indicates, it was not only ceremonies related to civic identity that prospered, and the puriﬁcation rite of churching newly-delivered mothers remained highly signiﬁcant into the twentieth century, despite the active distaste of many clergy. In her perceptive account of the place of these rites in popular culture, Sarah Williams rightly emphasizes that this attachment represented more than a concern for social status. The orthodox theological interpretation of the rites was not shared in full by those seeking them out, but aspects of this ‘orthodox’ understanding formed an authentic part of a complex blend with ‘folk’ and pagan elements in a largely undenominational popular religious culture.²⁶ In explaining the growing popularity of these rites in which individuals sought the sanction of Church authority for key moments in their lives, education is a key factor. This was certainly a sphere in which the authority of the Church diminished, with the opening up of higher education to dissenters even within the Anglican citadels of Oxford and Cambridge (as undergraduates in 1854–6, and as fellows in 1871), state funding for non-denominational and then Nonconformist elementary education ²¹ See F. Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995), 86–9. ²² Cox, English Churches in a Secular Society, 104. ²³ Rodes, Law and Modernization, 121; O. Anderson, ‘The Incidence of Civil Marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past & Present, 69 (Nov. 1975), 50–87. ²⁴ H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), 73. ²⁵ Gill, Myth of the Empty Church, 217. ²⁶ S. C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999), esp. chs. 1, 3.

188

Arthur Burns

(1836 and 1839), and later the creation of the non-denominational board schools (1870). But Anglicans retained a signiﬁcant lead in the provision of voluntary schools, and in the Victorian expansion of the Sunday school movement, with the peak enrolment (at around 50 per cent of the population under 15 years of age) coming in the thirty years after 1880,²⁷ we can identify an inﬂuence favouring both the social and doctrinal valuation of the Church’s rites, and one which could operate to the advantage of the legitimatory authority of the Anglican Church even within families where the parents were Nonconformist or of a secular cast of mind. Finally, before leaving the theme of the authority of the Church and the individual, we should mention the impact of Anglo-Catholicism. It is easy to characterize the rise of ritualism as the self-assertion of a priestly caste. But it would have ﬂoundered without the support of committed gathered congregations of Anglo-Catholic laity. This significant minority demonstrated a keen desire to place themselves more intimately under the authority of the Church, whether through undertaking regular auricular confession, or in joining a communicant guild or an Anglican sisterhood, of which ninety had been founded by the end of the nineteenth century. The issue of authority here was complicated, for undoubtedly many used the religious life to escape a more immediate and oppressive patriarchal authority that in other contexts the Church eagerly endorsed.²⁸ But it remains the case that such religious communities, inconceivable in the English context before Victoria’s accession, represented one of those nodules of increased ecclesiastical authority of which other, if less intense, manifestations can be identiﬁed in the relations of Church and community, to which we will now turn.

III One manifestation of Church authority in a community calculated to generate a hostile response on the eve of Victoria’s reign was the clerical magistrate. At Peterloo in 1819 this potent incarnation of the nexus of ‘Old Corruption’ provoked one of the most sustained and virulent ²⁷ McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 79. ²⁸ For a sensitive appraisal of the lay culture of Anglo-Catholicism, see J. S. Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, Tenn., 1996), esp. chs. 8–11.

The Authority of the Church

189

outbursts of anticlerical politics in nineteenth-century Britain.²⁹ At the end of the century Canon William Greenwell of Durham retained a notorious fondness for lashing of violent criminals, and desired to extend similar punishment to the ‘crime’ of motorcycling.³⁰ But as a result not least of popular revulsion at such excesses of zeal, as in the clerical imprisonment of women engaged in intimidating blackleg labour in Chipping Norton in 1873, he was representative of a dying breed. In Oxfordshire in 1816, clergy provided no less than 36.8 per cent of the magistracy; by Victoria’s accession it was 27 per cent, and by 1851 only 21 per cent. By then the idea that the roles were incompatible had largely won the day among the clerical authorities, and the decline continued. In 1887 only some 6 per cent of county magistracy were clergy, and possibly those that continued to serve were drawn increasingly from less elevated backgrounds, lacking the social authority of their predecessors.³¹ The controversial status of the clerical magistrate has perhaps served to obscure the fact that this was not the only secular position in which the clergyman assumed a signiﬁcant role in local affairs. To take just one example, many served as poor-law guardians. Robert Lee’s researches into the relations between the clergy and the labouring community in rural Norfolk suggest that in this instance the number of clergy involved increased rather than diminished in Victoria’s reign, representing some 16.7 per cent of guardians in 1910 in contrast to 8.3 per cent in 1850. This no doubt reﬂected the shift in the local signiﬁcance of the poor law itself as a factor in the labour market and its increased association with welfare provision; nor should it be forgotten that clergy were often amongst the foremost critics of the New Poor Law both nationally and in the local context. However, Lee is surely correct to attribute much of the smouldering anticlericalism apparent in late nineteenth-century Norfolk to the combination of signiﬁcant involvement in and tacit acceptance of what was widely perceived to be an oppressive system.³² ²⁹ A. Burns, ‘English “Church Reform” Revisited’, in A. Burns and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), 147. ³⁰ J. C. Hodgson, ‘Memoir of the Rev. William Greenwell, DCL, FRS, FSA’, Archaeologia aeliana, 3rd ser., 15 (1918), 11. ³¹ D. McClatchey, Oxfordshire Clergy,1777–1869 (Oxford, 1960), 179; C. H. E. Zangerl, ‘The Social Composition of the County Magistracy in England and Wales, 1831–87’, Journal of British Studies, 11 (1971), 113–25; R. J. Lee, ‘Encountering and Managing the Poor: Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy in Norfolk 1815–1914’ (Univ. of Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 2003), 234. ³² Lee, ‘Encountering and Managing the Poor’, 177–8.

190

Arthur Burns

Another embodiment of ecclesiastical authority was multiplying: the church itself. What in this respect was the impact of the more than 6,000 additional Anglican churches erected between 1830 and 1901, often accompanied by ancillary structures? That churches, mission halls, and schools were central to the mental maps of parishioners is beyond doubt, as the ‘lucky’ or ‘family’ churches identiﬁed by Williams in Southwark testify. Moreover, neither the new buildings nor the widespread programme of enlargement and repair of existing churches was a straightforward response to population growth; as Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint demonstrated in the contrasting environments of rural Devon and fashionable Kensington, it was more often an articulation of a conception of the social or moral order it was desired to impose on, or that was sought by, a community.³³ However, the physical impact of church buildings in the community may have been diluted over the course of Victoria’s reign despite Cobbett’s faith in their number as an index of Anglican authority. For Anglican church extension occurred in the context of ambitious—in some cases, as Robin Gill and Simon Green have emphasized, ﬁnancially suicidal—church-building by all denominations. In Halifax, the seven religious buildings extant in 1801 had increased to 99 by 1901.³⁴ Moreover, the physical distinctiveness of the exterior of Anglican structures was diminishing, thanks both to Anglican penny-pinching and the growing ubiquity of assimilationist Nonconformist gothic. This may even have encouraged the rather indiscriminate pan-denominationalism of the occasional attenders Williams interviewed. For similar reasons one needs to be cautious about assessing the implications of Church-inspired voluntary philanthropy for the authority of the Church, for while parishioners engaged with this in a less instrumental manner than has often been argued, its impact on denominational allegiance and exclusiveness is unclear. Once we move from the exterior to the interior of Anglican churches, however, we encounter another location where Church authority was being forcefully asserted. Contemporary alarm centred on the AngloCatholic preference for a more sacramentally focused liturgy that saw the ³³ Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture, 96–8; Chris Brooks, ‘Building the Rural Church: Money Power and the Country Parish’, in C. Brooks and A. Saint, eds., The Victorian Church: Architecture and Society (Manchester, 1995), 51–77; A. Saint, ‘Anglican ChurchBuilding in London, 1790–1890: From State Subsidy to the Free Market’, ibid. 30–50. ³⁴ S. J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996), 90; Gill, Myth of the Empty Church, 186–7.

The Authority of the Church

191

priest turn his back on the congregation to face the altar. But clergy of all hues took up arms (sometimes literally, as in the case of the axe-wielding broad churchman, Julius Hare) against the citadels of squirearchical authority represented by box-pews, with their screening walls and dominant position.³⁵ If the war on pews challenged the authority of the upper reaches of the parish community, the battle for control of Church music saw the clergy assert their authority over a more popular element. The village band and singers traditionally positioned in the heart of the ‘lay’ end of the church, the west end gallery, who all too often deﬁed clerical power in confrontations over the length and nature of their contributions to services, were now displaced by the organ and the surpliced and predominantly juvenile choir removed to the ‘clerical’ chancel. The bands retired to the pub, pausing only to lob stones at their submissive successors.³⁶ If the village band were exiting the Anglican church building, if not the Anglican tradition, the same may have been true of a signiﬁcant proportion of the parish community. There remained some rural parishes, like John Keble and William Heathcote’s Hursley, where squire and parson sought to maintain a denominationally closed parish, and, even where box-pews were gone, seating patterns in churches still generally reproduced the hierarchies of parish society. But while denominational allegiance (and its electoral expression) could certainly matter to employment prospects in both town and countryside, increasingly this was a matter of competing patronage systems organized around particular industrial or agricultural concerns with a denominational association, rather than hegemonic Anglican control. Thus in Oakworth, Yorkshire, the Haggas Mill was a focus for Anglican employment and the Clough Mill for Wesleyans; in 1870s Blackburn denominational employment and political demographies clearly reﬂected the impact of employer preferences; and when after the 1900 general election Lord Hastings, ‘anxious to have a tenant who would act on more friendly terms with his landlord, and also one not so hostile to the clergy and everything connected with the Church of England’, gave the Nonconformist Burrell Hammond notice to quit his Melton Constable estate, he was condemned in the Eastern Daily Press as an anachronism.³⁷ ³⁵ N. M. Distad, Guessing at Truth: The Life of J. C. Hare, 1795–1855 (Shepherdstown, 1979), 146; the best account of the war of squire and parson in this period is O. Chadwick, Victorian Miniature (London, 1960). ³⁶ See e.g. P. C. Hammond, The Parson and the Victorian Parish (London, 1977), 82–7. ³⁷ P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), 173, 175; Lee, ‘Encountering and Managing the Poor’, 137–8.

192

Arthur Burns

Moreover, although Anglican churches maintained or increased their signiﬁcance for occasional attenders, it is likely that the gulf separating such people and habitual absentees from a core of committed regular churchgoers (whether for devotional or social reasons) increased. First, committed religious observance became less pan-denominational, which reﬂected the impact of the intensiﬁed public competition between Church and Dissent, as both sides aimed to consolidate and discipline their lay rank and ﬁle. But another factor promoting this development was a narrowing conception of the clergyman’s role which blended with tendencies in some varieties of both evangelical and Anglo-Catholic theology to focus clerical attention on the ‘gathered Church’, whether of the converted or the communicant, who were expected to attend the everincreasing number of, and religiously more demanding, services. As Frances Knight has observed, ‘the Church became a resort for the devout, rather than a resource for the community’.³⁸ Here again was an intensiﬁcation of authority over a minority in the context of a wider diminution.

IV One might anticipate a similar pattern in the experience of the nation of the authority of the Church, but in fact this relationship had its own distinct dynamics. The story of the at times dramatic and at times barely perceptible erosion of much of the substance of the Anglican Church’s position as the established Church during the Victorian period has been told too often and too well to necessitate a full recapitulation here.³⁹ This process was manifest not merely in the cumulative impact of the various legislative reforms already encountered in earlier sections, but in the changing relationship of the Church and the institutions of the Victorian State.⁴⁰ ³⁸ Knight, Nineteenth-Century Church, 71, and ch. 3 passim. ³⁹ See among others G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868 (Oxford 1977) and id., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869 to 1921 (Oxford, 1987); P. M. H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969); P. T. Marsh, The Victorian Church in Decline: Archbishop Tait and the Church of England 1868–1882 (London, 1969); E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Oxford, 1976); Chadwick, Victorian Church: Part I and id., The Victorian Church: Part II, 2nd edn. (London, 1972). ⁴⁰ It is important to note in passing, however, that many aspects of the decay of the substance of establishment were more signiﬁcant in diminishing the extent to which the State apparatus took the opportunity to avail itself of the authority of the Church for its own purposes than in reducing the authority of the Church in itself.

The Authority of the Church

193

However one chooses to interpret the origins, nature, and consequences of the constitutional revolution of 1828–32, there can be no question that it served to weaken the position of the established Church both by making it more vulnerable to hostile political attack and by discouraging its supporters from extravagant exploitation of the advantages of State support. After 1832 it became much more difﬁcult for the Church leadership to rally an effective ‘Church party’ to promote its own interests in the House of Commons, and hereafter the Church became ever more reliant on the increasingly unpredictable active co-operation of governments to advance even the most uncontentious ecclesiastical legislation.⁴¹ When it came to contentious bills, the sorry history of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 presented an unhappy contrast with the active support afforded the Church by Tory ministries of the 1810s and 1820s, or even the more conditional programme of State-sponsored reform implemented under the Whigs in the 1830s and 1840s. As Roundell Palmer informed the episcopate as early as 1858, the majority in the House of Commons ‘would take care that no bill favourable to Episcopal authority became law’.⁴² In the Lords, too, bishops found their legislative initiatives challenged by the hostility of many secular peers and the shift in even well-disposed statesmen’s priorities. It was clear to politicians by the 1840s that attempts to enhance the social authority of the Church could no longer be effectively presented as disinterested exercises in the cause of promoting the public good; by the 1860s it was equally apparent that it offered only a shaky basis for more partisan political mobilization. Disraeli soon abandoned efforts to mount a conservative revival on the basis of an Anglican rather than Protestant ticket in the face of the Church’s internal party divisions.⁴³ Of course the most striking manifestation of the loss of Anglican authority through association with the State was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, but the causes, context, and consequences of this were sufﬁciently different from the dynamics affecting the status of the Church in England and Wales to preclude detailed consideration here. The remainder of this essay will instead focus on one comparatively neglected but important aspect of the Church’s authority in the national ⁴¹ A. Burns, ‘The Costs and Beneﬁts of Establishment: Clergy-Discipline Legislation in Parliament c. 1830–1870’, in J. P. Parry and S. J. C. Taylor, eds., Parliament and the Church (Edinburgh, 2000), 81–95. ⁴² Bodleian Library, Oxford, Wilberforce Papers, MS Wilb. c. 12, fo. 97: Palmer to Samuel Wilberforce, 8 Apr. 1858. ⁴³ A. Warren, ‘Disraeli, the Conservatives and the National Church, 1837–1881’, in Parry and Taylor, eds., Parliament and the Church, 102–10.

194

Arthur Burns

context: changes in the way in which the Victorian Church articulated the legitimacy of its authority as an established Church, and their consequences. A good place to commence consideration of this issue is with the reaction of late Victorians to the relentless erosion of the legal and practical manifestations of the Church’s established status that followed the constitutional revolution of 1828–32. As the campaign for organized ‘Church defence’ indicates, after 1850 the Church had effectively acknowledged the need to fall back on its own resources in competition with Dissent, Roman Catholicism, and inﬁdelity, and to act on the assumption that it must in future operate in what was effectively a denominationally pluralistic State, withdrawing where necessary from dangerously exposed positions. It was not just the cumulative impact of the reforms and concessions already considered which encouraged such recognition among both critics and supporters of the Anglican Church. Before Victoria’s accession, and especially in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, a powerful utilitarian (small ‘u’) case for establishment had been advanced by those who saw a Church operating with the committed backing of the State as the only effective means of combating the cultural and intellectual trends identiﬁed as the sources of political and social unrest. Despite Thomas Chalmers’s bold and inﬂuential effort at the outset of Victoria’s reign to insist on the non-applicability of the voluntaryist approach to matters of morality,⁴⁴ however, in most respects the intellectual climate of mid-Victorian England, with laissez-faire in the ascendant, sat ill with such a defence of Anglican privileges. Moreover, some contemporaries were swayed not by intellectual fashion but what appeared to be telling empirical evidence: the results of the 1851 religious census encouraged many Nonconformists to anticipate the inevitable triumph of the voluntaryist vision. If with hindsight we can identify the waning of the threat of formal disestablishment in England by the turn of the century, this was certainly not the case in Wales. More generally disestablishment occupied a position in the ﬁn-de-siècle Liberal party akin to that a century later of a prospective ban on hunting with dogs within New Labour: an issue on which the reluctance of the leadership to act could often prove decisive, but which still remained sufﬁciently close to the core beliefs of a substantial proportion of rank-and-ﬁle activists to require the party hierarchy to hold out the ⁴⁴ T. Chalmers, Lectures on the Establishment and Extension of National Churches (Glasgow, 1838).

The Authority of the Church

195

prospect of future action. It thus remained a source of continued anxiety to friends of the established Church.⁴⁵ The logic of the voluntaryist position was to campaign vigorously for disestablishment while high-mindedly spurning the opportunity provided by the Anglican Church’s established status to interfere in those matters which voluntaryism considered no business of the State. Tim Larsen’s work on mid-Victorian political dissent indeed provides signiﬁcant examples of such high-mindedness conquering more sectarian considerations when it came to issues such as Irish disestablishment and even temperance.⁴⁶ One consequence of the rise of disestablishment as a focus for Nonconformist political activity after 1840 was certainly to help prevent the materialization of the hostile Church-reform initiatives pessimistic churchmen envisaged as an inevitable consequence of the political muscle afforded the dissenting laity in 1832.⁴⁷ The last thirty years of Victoria’s reign, however, when save for disestablishment so much of the political agenda of Nonconformity had either been realized or was in the process of being realized, witnessed a sustained intervention by Nonconformists in the protracted and wearying debate on the question of how to deal with Anglo-Catholic Ritualism, a problem conﬁned within the Anglican Church. The Annual Register judged this issue of second importance only to the South African War in the Khaki election of 1900, with, as Paul Nicholls has shown, pan-denominational Protestant pressure groups mobilizing to press candidates on the issue in many constituencies.⁴⁸ Why was it that voluntaryist Nonconformists were apparently so comfortable about intervening in what ought by 1900 to have increasingly ⁴⁵ The signiﬁcance of the issue is apparent from election addresses: in 1895 only the local veto, reform of the House of Lords, and Home Rule received more attention in Liberal addresses, prompting Unionists to give it more prominence than any issue save Home Rule; in Wales it was top of the agenda for both parties. See P. A. Readman, ‘The 1895 General Election and Political Change in Late Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 492–3. ⁴⁶ T. Larsen, Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (Woodbridge, 1999). ⁴⁷ Burns, ‘English “Church Reform” Revisited’, 158–61; Burns, ‘Costs and Beneﬁts of Establishment’, 81–2. ⁴⁸ Nicholls, Khaki and the Confessional; see also Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869 to 1921, 234–55. It is important to note that Nicholls is much more successful in demonstrating mobilization on the issue than in illustrating that it proved decisive in determining the result in many constituencies. The Annual Register’s judgement was also no doubt more a reﬂection of the vociferous nature of the protest than of a psephological analysis of its impact.

196

Arthur Burns

appeared the internal affairs of another denomination? Why indeed did they strive to combat a phenomenon that if left to run its course might well have been anticipated to operate entirely in favour of the cause of disestablishment? And why did they do so in support of a demand for the statutory removal of an episcopal veto on ritual prosecutions that would have increased the subjection of a Church to the authority of the State, and in effect strengthened a linkage that they had had so much success in weakening over the previous seventy years? Why, in other words, had the retreat of the Anglican Church from much of its position of authority in the State not yielded more dividends to those Anglicans who had hoped that such a tactical withdrawal would spare them from such attentions? Of course to some extent these interventions reﬂected Nonconformist concern that the battle against the privileges of establishment could suffer a reverse if dissent dropped its guard, with the most immediate danger lying in the ﬁeld of education, where Conservative support for voluntary schools would be a powerful factor mobilizing the Nonconformist vote in the Liberal election triumph of 1906.⁴⁹ The visceral aspect of popular anti-Catholicism also ensured that it was no respecter of political or ecclesiastical logic, while the general European context of the success of clericalist parties encouraged an unnecessary nervousness among liberal Nonconformists. The cultural politics of Anglo-Catholicism, moreover, generated concerns related to key cultural anxieties of late nineteenthcentury Britain, notably with reference to gender and ‘manliness’.⁵⁰ None the less, the continued willingness of Nonconformists to interfere in Anglicanism’s internal affairs also reﬂected changes in the way in which the Church legitimated its own claim to national authority. In the ﬁrst third of the nineteenth century, when addressing those beyond its core constituency, the Church, as we have observed, had justiﬁed its established status predominantly in a utilitarian argument that the Church represented a guarantor of the social order and providential fortune of the British State, the importance of which had been demonstrated in the proving ground of the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s and the French Wars. Such rhetoric matched that prevalent in much contemporary political debate; and inevitably, as the political context changed, so did the discursive practices of those seeking to position the Church within the polity. ⁴⁹ For useful discussions of some of the themes that follow, see Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism and “Englishness” ’; Nicholls, Khaki and the Confessional, chs. 1–4. ⁵⁰ See Reed, Glorious Battle, ch. 11; D. Hilliard, ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly: AngloCatholicism and Homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), 181–210.

The Authority of the Church

197

By 1880 churchmen increasingly spoke of the Church’s claims in terms of its organic national identity, as an emanation, guarantor, and incarnation of national character and destiny, encapsulated neatly in Archdeacon William Emery’s coinage of 1885, ‘the grand old national church of England’.⁵¹ Such rhetoric was to remain a staple of justiﬁcations of the authority of the Church to intervene in national affairs over the following seventy years. A number of factors favoured this development. Clergymen coming to hold positions of authority in the later nineteenth century belonged to a generation whose theological, ecclesiological, and social thought was profoundly marked by the inﬂuence of German Idealism and Liberal Anglicanism in the writings of S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Arnold, and the incarnationalist theology and ecclesiology of F. D. Maurice. Through a variety of routes communitarian and organicist notions of the relationship of Church and State and the place of the clergy as a clerisy within it came to prominence across the Anglican spectrum, from the acknowledged inheritors of the Arnoldian Broad Church tradition such as Frederick Temple to the Anglo-Catholic circles of Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland.⁵² But there were also less rareﬁed inﬂuences. As Jonathan Parry has argued, by the 1870s Nonconformists increasingly asserted their own claims to be ‘the true National Churches of England’, and the Church answered the implied challenge in kind.⁵³ Second, associating the Church with the State apparatus narrowly conceived rather than the nation no longer provided a basis for rallying the support of the whole of the clergy, let alone the laity, whereas a muddier and more diffuse rhetoric of national identity could accommodate not only Liberal Anglicans who had pioneered it in the 1830s, but evangelicals seeking to emphasize the Church’s Protestantism, or Anglo-Catholics trufﬂe-hunting improbably named saints from the annals of the early English Church. Third, it sat easily alongside the liberalization of the discourse of the Church’s internal economy of authority outlined in the opening pages of this essay, which with its borrowings from popular liberalism permitted the Church to present itself as adjusting to the preferred national constitutional ⁵¹ Proceedings of Church Congress: 1885, 479. ⁵² For a useful summary account with especial reference to the relation of Church and State, see M. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), 26–50. See also B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Inﬂuence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), Part III. ⁵³ See Parry, ‘Nonconformity, Clericalism and “Englishness” ’, 157 (quoting A. M. Fairburn in 1881), 170.

198

Arthur Burns

model. It also chimed neatly with another secular political response to the post-1867 world, Tory populism, with its increasing resort to notions of English character and national assertion.⁵⁴ Once the Church claimed to be an organic national institution, however, it became harder to resist the claims of those outside its denominational boundaries who thought it their duty to ensure that this aspect of the national heritage maintained its Protestant character. The increasing visibility and clerical strength of the ritualist party within the late Victorian Church seemed likely to threaten it. And thus, while as voluntaryists they could not but object to State interference with a Christian Church, it was as Englishmen that Nonconformists demanded that the state act to safeguard the Protestant character of a national institution. The shift to a legitimatory rhetoric of the ‘nation’ thus came at a price for the Church of England. But it had important long-term and beneﬁcial consequences. In the twentieth century not only did much of the formal structure of establishment persist, but it was not merely an empty shell, with the Anglican Church remaining a prominent and effective participant both corporately and through the individual interventions of its leading spokesmen (and indeed spokeswomen) in the broader national culture.⁵⁵ Without question, in certain quarters such interventions were more unwelcome than in the past, and self-consciously secular elements of the British intelligentsia might resist them with a vehemence born of their own mythologizing of the conﬂict of science and religion in the nineteenth century.⁵⁶ But the wider culture was more receptive, and the Church of England remained a central institution in what was in effect a new kind of national life, made possible by democratization, the rise of the mass media, and increasing speed of communications, the development of which would early in the twentieth century be decisively accelerated ⁵⁴ See, for example, M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985); J. Lawrence, ‘Popular Politics and the Limitations of Party: Wolverhampton, 1867–1900’, in E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), 65–85. ⁵⁵ A theme brought out well in Green, ‘Survival and Autonomy’. The wider argument of Green’s article, addressing the post-Victorian standing of the Church of England from a different perspective to that adopted here, offers an illuminating further exploration of a number of the themes discussed in this section. See also Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England. ⁵⁶ For this dimension of the authority of the Victorian Church and its historiographical afterlife, and for useful explorations of its cultural authority more generally, see the work of F. M. Turner, esp. Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 1.

The Authority of the Church

199

by the psychological and social demands of total war.⁵⁷ All of these developments encouraged forms of cultural expression emphasizing inclusiveness, collective national identity, and a rootedness in national tradition. The fuzzy rhetoric of the ‘grand old national church of England’ would speak clearly to Stanley Baldwin’s Britain.⁵⁸ It could be articulated in a national culture that could more readily bypass the tensions and problems of the local community that had fuelled so much of the national interdenominational conﬂict of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the main rival to the established Church as a source of religiously inﬂected political and social discourses (including those linking national identity to speciﬁc denominational traditions), political dissent, entered into a period of decline, perhaps in part precisely because it was so closely associated with provincial locality. By 1927 Ralph Inge could believe that ‘the Church of England may have another opportunity of leading and representing the religion of the English people’.⁵⁹ The Church’s ability to command a signiﬁcant authority in this culture would be demonstrated in the interwar national missions of Woodbine Willie, the ubiquitous newspaper ruminations of Inge (the ‘gloomy dean’), the radio musings of the often equally if differently gloomy Cosmo Gordon Lang, and the Penguin specials of the cheerful ‘obese’ archbishop, William Temple; and even in the nineteenth century hints of this future were apparent in the cultural reach of such ﬁgures as Dean Richard Church of St Paul’s. It would also be demonstrated in the central place the Church assumed in the handling of the nation’s mourning not only of the dead of the First World War, above all the unknown soldier laid to rest in the national pantheon of Westminster Abbey, but also in the mediation to the nation of the passing of the great and good.⁶⁰

⁵⁷ Well captured in one of its key dimensions in J. Harris, ‘Political Thought and the State’, in Green and Whiting, eds., Boundaries of the State, 16–17. ⁵⁸ For a useful entry-point to the Baldwin worldview, see P. Williamson, ‘The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in M. Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1993), 181–203; also id., Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999). ⁵⁹ W. R. Inge, The Church in the World (London, 1927), 23; Green, ‘Survival and Autonomy’, 307. ⁶⁰ For such themes see the work of John Wolffe, esp. God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London and New York, 1994), ch. 9; id., Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000); id., ‘National Occasions at St Paul’s since 1800’, in D. Keene, A. Burns, and A. Saint, eds., St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604–2004 (New Haven and London, 2004), 381–91.

200

Arthur Burns

No doubt this was a pretty thin kind of authority in comparison with that the leaders of the early Victorian Church would have envisaged their successors enjoying. But in the national sphere at least, the Church of England retained considerable authority and a guaranteed role in what might be called the national conversation. This authority was signiﬁcant enough to ensure that it could punch way above its apparent congregational weight as late in the post-Victorian era as the 1980s, the decade both of the controversial state service at St Paul’s in the wake of the Falklands conﬂict and the publication of Faith in the City. And that this was the case owed a great deal to developments that had taken shape while Victoria still occupied the throne.

FURTHER READING Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (London and New York, 2001). Burns, Arthur, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c. 1800 to 1870 (Oxford, 1999). Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth Century Church and English Society (Cambridge 1995). Larsen, Timothy, Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in MidVictorian England (Woodbridge, 1999). Lee, R. J., Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815–1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor (Woodbridge, 2006). Machin, G. I. T., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977). —— Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869 to 1921 (Oxford, 1987). McLeod, Hugh, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996). Williams, S. C., Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999). Wolffe, J., God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London and New York, 1994).

DISCIPLINES

This page intentionally left blank

9 Market Disciplines Paul Johnson

The Victorian economy was a market economy like no other—bigger, faster, richer, and more encompassing than man had previously seen. The tentacles of the market spread to every town and village, to every shop, to every place of work, binding buyers and sellers in a relationship of mutual exchange. This market offered opportunity for all-round beneﬁt—as Adam Smith had remarked, it was not benevolence, but self-interest, that drove the buyer to buy and the seller to sell.¹ And self-interest required no prompting or guidance: for Smith and his Classical Economics successors, this individual quest for betterment was the driving force of the economy. The buyer would seek the lowest price, the seller would seek the highest, and they would each weigh up the other’s propensity to honour the contract. Although these buyers and sellers, in their totality, constituted the market and so were economically sovereign (for without them there could be no trade), individually they were subject to the authority of the market. Deviation from the righteous path of the market price would lead to exclusion from trade, and a loss of well-being. This Smithian view of the market as a kind of natural wonder was an axiom of political economy at the start of Victoria’s reign, and it survived in some form throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1880s Herbert Spencer continued to marvel at the dynamism and natural equilibrium of the market: The world-wide transactions conducted in merchants’ ofﬁces, the rush of trafﬁc ﬁlling our streets, the retail distributing system which brings everything in easy reach and delivers the necessaries of daily life to our doors, are not of government origin. All these are the results of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or grouped.² ¹ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1st edn. 1776 (Oxford, 1976), 27 [Book I, ch. 2]. ² Herbert Spencer, The Man versus The State, 1st edn. 1884 (Harmondsworth, 1964), 134.

204

Paul Johnson

But by this date the centre ground had moved, and Spencer’s individualistic belief in the natural perfection of unguided market interactions seemed at odds with both mainstream economic thought and political reality. From the publication in 1848 of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, the last book of which itemized the circumstances in which the free market might fail to produce optimal outcomes, political economists had been struggling with the tension between the welfare implications of market freedom and market control. And simultaneously, governments had been doing likewise, giving consideration not so much as to whether intervention in the market could be legitimate, but rather to the circumstances under which it was legitimate. In this brief chapter I can do no more than touch on some of these shifting attitudes towards market efﬁciency and effectiveness, and, of course, my selection of a small number of examples will produce a reading that is necessarily partial. My approach is to look at a number of the dilemmas about the working of their market system that exercised the thoughts of Victorians. What did they say, and what did they do, when the discipline of the market appeared too harsh or too lax, and how, and in whose interests, did they attempt to restrain or redirect this discipline? In three separate sections I will look in turn at cases of market discipline, of market indiscipline, and at ways in which the market itself was disciplined from outside.

I There were two incidents in the 1840s which almost simultaneously challenged and tested the market’s ability appropriately to reward and discipline the behaviour of economic actors—the ‘railway mania’ of 1844–5 and the Irish famine. In each case, extreme circumstances led to fears that the automatic balancing mechanism of the market might fail; in each case market responses eventually resolved the problem, though at considerable cost to many people involved. There had been investment booms and bubbles before, and the requirement for company registration introduced by Gladstone’s Joint Stock Act of 1844 was designed to prevent fraudulent company promotion in the future, and thereby improve the working of the free market.³ ³ Ron Harris, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 10.

Market Disciplines

205

Registration in advance of ﬂotation was supposed to give investors the information they needed to distinguish sound companies from speculative ventures, and thereafter they would be free to make rational investment decisions on the basis of their individual reading of market prospects. So much for the intention: the practice was very different. A minor investment boom in the ﬁrst half of 1844—driven in part by the high returns from a string of good harvests—created rising demand for shares in established railway companies. As these share prices rose, new companies and railway lines were ﬂoated. In the ﬁrst 10 months of 1845, 1,400 companies were proposed, over 800 of which were registered in September and October. Demand was so intense that an active market developed in letters of allotment and scrip certiﬁcates, which required deposits of only a small fraction of the value of the (putative) paid-up share. As long as the market stayed buoyant a premium could be earned on these various types of railway paper, but when the bubble burst, with a rise of Bank Rate in the middle of October 1845, railway share prices plummeted. Three aspects of this railway mania raised questions about the capacity of the market to discipline wayward behaviour. First, the automatic balancing effect of the price mechanism appeared to have failed: as share prices rose, the buyers demanded more, not less. The precarious nature of railway investment had been fully appreciated by many experienced City ﬁnanciers well before the crash. In June 1845 the management committee of the private bank of Prescott, Grote and Co. noted: ‘the gambling taking place at present in Railway Shares in every part of the Country, and amongst every class of Society, is quite alarming, and . . . it ﬁlls us with apprehension of an impending crisis’.⁴ The following month The Times publicly warned against ‘rash speculation, against the folly and sin of railway gambling’, but to no great effect.⁵ Second, the ability of the market to sift and sort the good investments from the bad went into abeyance. Proposals to extend railway connections to major towns in Britain had real merit; others, such as to build a railway network on the 4-mile-wide Caribbean island of St Kitts, were preposterous, but they all received market support.⁶ The satirical journal Punch lampooned such fanciful projects with a spoof prospectus for a ‘Great North Pole Railway, forming a junction with the Equinoctial line, with a branch to the horizon’. The claim that a proﬁt of 65 per cent on capital ⁴ Quoted in David Kynaston, The City of London. Vol 1: A World of Its Own, 1815–1890 (London, 1994), 151. ⁵ D. M. Evans, The Commercial Crisis of 1847–1848 (London, 1848), 23. ⁶ H. R. Fox Bourne, The Romance of Trade (London, 1871), 329.

206

Paul Johnson

would be earned merely on ‘luggage trafﬁc bringing up ice from the North Pole to the London market’ was not so different from the wildly optimistic business plans contained in many of the genuine prospectuses issued in 1845, even though the rate of return on the most prosperous working railway at the time, the Stockton and Darlington, was no more than 15 per cent, while the largest company in terms of length of track, the Great Western Railway, produced a modest 6 per cent dividend.⁷ Thirdly, the capacity of the market to reward prudence and punish excess was muted. When, at the end of 1845, it became clear that many railway promoters had projected lines that they knew would never be established, there began a ‘hurricane of litigation’ as conﬂicting liabilities for losses were argued through the courts. These were not the losses of shareholders who had bought at the top of the market and seen their ‘investments’ dwindle, since they could do nothing other than wring their hands, but of the creditors who had supplied millions of pounds of goods and services to provisional railway companies which subsequently went into liquidation and defaulted on their debts. Kostal has shown that, after some legal prevarication, the courts privileged the position of the promoters and directors of provisional railway companies over that of their suppliers; it became virtually impossible to extract payment from those involved in even the most over-inﬂated of bubble companies.⁸ The experience of the 1844–5 ‘railway mania’ could have devastated both the railway industry and the stock market in Britain. In fact, it did neither. The collapse of railway share prices did lead to a short-term capital shortage in the later 1840s as many of the new railway projects turned to their shareholders for additional funds to complete their construction projects. Even a consistently proﬁtable company such as the Great Western Railway experienced a massive fall in share price—by the time the market had reached its low point in 1851 GWR shares were worth only one third of their value at the height of the boom in September 1845. Yet the railway system itself prospered. In 1844 the network consisted of around 2,000 miles of track; by the end of the ‘railway mania’ construction boom in the early 1850s, the network extended to over 7,000 miles, and virtually all the country’s mainline routes had been ⁷ Michael Freeman and Derek Aldcroft, The Atlas of British Railway History (London, 1985), 17, 19. ⁸ R. W. Kostal, Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2. See also T. L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London, 1998), ch. 7.

Market Disciplines

207

built. Over these same few years railway revenue tripled from £5 million to £15 million per annum.⁹ The stock market also prospered. In the immediate aftermath of the mania, many commentators lamented the way in which people from all walks of life had been drawn into the frenzy. In January 1846 one of the leading railway newspapers reﬂected that: The whole population of the empire was infected by the railway mania. No class, from the highest to the lowest, was exempt. Like a fever it spread through every rank. The statesman, the nobleman, the manufacturer, the man of independent property, the literary, the commercial man, peer, printer, clergyman, naval men, MPs, special pleaders, professors, cotton spinners, gentlemen’s cooks and attorneys, with their clerks . . . Bankers, beersellers, and butlers, domestic servants, footmen and mail guards—all have joined in the excitement.¹⁰

The ﬁnancial journalist D. Morier Evans noted that several hundred clergymen and 157 MPs had signed deeds of subscription for shares in newly projected railway schemes.¹¹ At the time this was seen as somehow shameful—an indicator of the triumph of greed over reason. But in the longer run, it can be seen as a crucial episode in the enormous expansion of the British capital market in the Victorian period. Prior to the 1840s, the principal destination for domestic investment was government stock. Although many investors had their ﬁngers burned during the mania, many others made handsome proﬁts, and the episode gave a massive stimulus to the development of the regional stock markets which were later to serve as a key source of capital for local joint-stock ﬁrms.¹² Just as the railway boom was reaching manic proportions in September 1845, news arrived that the Irish potato crop was affected by ‘blight’, and that yields were down by one third. The following year three-quarters of the crop was lost. Not until 1850 did the potato harvest return to something like normal, by which time excess mortality (mainly caused by fever and disease, rather than absolute starvation) had dispatched perhaps one million Irish souls, whilst emigration had removed another half million or more.¹³ There was widespread agreement that this was a disaster ⁹ H. G. Lewin, The Railway Mania and its Aftermath, 1845–1852 (London, 1936). ¹⁰ Railway Director, 9 Jan. 1846, quoted in Kostal, Law, 30. ¹¹ Evans, Crisis, 19. ¹² P. L. Cottrell, Industrial Finance 1830–1914 (London, 1980); J. R. Killick and W. A. Thomas, ‘The Provincial Stock Exchanges, 1830–1870’, Economic History Review, 23 (1970), 96–111; M. C. Reed, ‘Railways and the Growth of the Capital Market’, in M. C. Reed, ed., Railways in the Victorian Economy (Newton Abbot, 1969), 162–83. ¹³ Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), 178–87.

208

Paul Johnson

of epic proportions, and it prompted considerable public intervention in terms of food subsidies, public works for the poor, and ultimately soup kitchens, ﬁrst from Peel’s Conservative administration, and after June 1846 from the Whig government of Lord John Russell. But there was less agreement about the underlying cause. Crop failure had occurred in Ireland before—in 1800–1, in 1816–18, and in 1822—without causing death and distress on such a scale, and the move towards more modest tariffs on grain by the 1840s should have created greater scope for effective market reactions to supply problems in any part of the United Kingdom. Was the famine a sign that the market mechanism had lost its ability to maintain balance and equilibrium? After a visit to Ireland in 1817, Thomas Malthus had commented that ‘a population greatly in excess of the demand for labour . . . is the predominant evil of Ireland’.¹⁴ For committed Malthusians, therefore, the famine was simply the inevitable physical check to population which resulted from the people’s failure to adopt greater moral restraint over time. From this standpoint, any form of public relief was wrong, because it would only deepen and prolong the agony. The staunchly noninterventionist Economist was forthright in response to an appeal from the people of Cork for a living wage on the public works: to pay people ‘not what their labour is worth, not what their labour can be purchased for, but what is sufﬁcient for a comfortable subsistence for themselves and their family . . . would stimulate every man to marry and populate as fast as he could, like a rabbit in a warren’.¹⁵ For others, such as Thomas Chalmers, it was the backward nature of the Irish economy as much as the backward nature of the people that was to blame. In his view, many parts of Ireland lacked a private retailing sector, so even people with sufﬁcient money to buy food could not obtain it once the local supply had failed. In such primitive conditions, there was no effective competition and no free market.¹⁶ And a more fundamental economic problem in Ireland, in the eyes of many political economists, was the semi-feudal nature of landholding which prevented land being treated as a commodity that could be freely exchanged in the market. Thus smallholdings could not be readily consolidated to create larger, more efﬁcient, more capitalistic, farms, and indebted or bankrupt estates could not be freely sold, but instead had to ¹⁴ Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Malthus and the Pre-Famine Economy’, in A. E. Murphy, ed., Economists and the Irish Economy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (Dublin, 1984), 75–95. ¹⁵ Economist, Oct. 1846. ¹⁶ Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1988), 109. In fact pre-famine Ireland did not lack markets and traders. See Ó Gráda, Ireland, 265.

Market Disciplines

209

be transferred through slow, expensive, and complex legal processes administered by the Court of Chancery.¹⁷ Overall, public policy intervention was grudging, and occurred when political expediency or humanitarianism temporarily broke through the binding constraint of ofﬁcial economic thinking which held that free markets could achieve more than any government agency. The Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, and senior Treasury civil servant, Charles Trevelyan, both held to the view that government interference in the market for food would necessarily worsen rather than improve conditions for the poor in Ireland, and resisted pressure for price controls or regulation of corn merchants. For Trevelyan it was self-evident that ‘in the great institution of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturist in the free exercise of their respective employments, but not itself to carry on those employments’.¹⁸ The judgement of historians on the way in which Peel, Russell, and their ministers responded to the famine has generally been unfavourable, though the scale of the ofﬁcial response, however inadequate, should not be underestimated. At the height of the famine in the spring of 1847 the 700,000 people (mainly adult males) directly employed by the Irish Board of Works exceeded the paid workforce of Irish farmers.¹⁹ Did the extent of public-works employment, and subsequent use of soup kitchens to provide subsidized or free food to the needy, demonstrate the incapacity of the free market to respond in a period of crisis? There was never one view on this among political economists, let alone more broadly, but a strong current of opinion held that the primary responsibility for the crisis lay with Irish landlords who, over many years, had neglected the improvement of their estates, failed to reform a tenancy system which encouraged the exhaustion of the soil, and extracted excessive rent from their tenants in order to pay for extravagant, and unsustainable, lifestyles.²⁰ Once the short-term crisis was over, this free-market view ¹⁷ The standard work on political economists’ views about Ireland is R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960). Mill, for example, devoted two chapters of his Principles to the problem of peasant agriculture in Ireland. For details of attitudes and policy towards land in Ireland see Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850 (Dublin, 1999). ¹⁸ Trevelyan to Lord Monteagle, 9 October 1846, quoted in Noel Kissane, The Irish Famine: A Documentary History (Dublin, 1995), 51. ¹⁹ Ó Gráda, Ireland, 195. ²⁰ Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley, ‘ “A nation perishing of political economy”?’, in Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, eds., ‘Fearful Realities’: New Perspectives on the Famine (Dublin, 1996), 138–50.

210

Paul Johnson

appeared to be vindicated. From 1850 living standards in Ireland rose and poor-law expenditure fell. Emigration proved to be a powerful balancing mechanism, permitting millions of under-employed Irish men and women to seek work in the more dynamic labour markets of Britain and North America. Structural reforms—notably the 1849 Encumbered Estates Act which permitted the sale of bankrupt properties and instituted free trade in Irish land—moved the domestic economy towards a model of Smithian competition. And cultural changes such as the replacement of partible by impartible inheritance served to raise agricultural productivity and reduce the birth rate through a rise in rural celibacy.²¹ Ultimately, the market proved to be resilient to the potato blight, and provided the discipline required to re-establish labour market equilibrium, even if a million Irish men, women, and children died in the process. If the market could be seen ultimately to be responsive and resilient in periods of exceptional crisis and distress, then there could be little doubt that it would maintain rational order during less anxious times. The signs of this market order were everywhere apparent to mid-Victorians. Prices ﬂoated freely with supply and demand: not just corn prices after 1846, but prices for all goods and services throughout the economy. This was true equally for labour and capital. Wages were highest in the booming manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and some 30 per cent lower in stagnant Cornwall.²² Interest rates were lowest for government debt, and rose with the riskiness of the borrower. Effort and enterprise were rewarded with high wages and proﬁt; idleness and inattention punished with poverty and the bankruptcy court. The invisible hand could pat on the back or slap in the face according to the objective conditions of a competitive market. As government withdrew from interference with this market, the closer reality appeared to resemble the Smithian model, and the less scope there was for the exercise of aristocratic or elite privilege. Even the politically powerful could be bent by the retributive wind of market forces. Lord Palmerston was taken to court 20 times between 1811 and 1841 to enforce repayment of his debts; Disraeli was dealt with in a similar manner by his creditors, to whom he owed over £22,000 in 1841, and Gladstone was embroiled in a bankruptcy case in ²¹ K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), 573. ²² Paul Johnson, ‘Age, Gender, and the Wage in Britain, 1830–1930’, in P. Scholliers and L. Schwarz, eds., Experiencing Wages (Oxford, 2003), 229–49.

Market Disciplines

211

1848.²³ As Eugenio Biagini has noted, free trade ‘implied a relationship between the State and society based on “fair play”, impartiality, and the withdrawal of the State from the market’, and popular perceptions of this neutrality of governance played an important role in encouraging a formal alliance between the working classes and the Liberal party.²⁴

II Yet the market did not work perfectly and naturally in all circumstances. In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century a robust critique of market relations developed among High Tories. They used organicist metaphors of the economy as a palsied body to counter classical economic ideas of a natural, self-regulating market system.²⁵ And they argued that the manifest ailments and weaknesses of the economic system could be ameliorated only through positive action by the government to secure an unreformed, propertied constitution that would provide the foundation for a stable economic system.²⁶This challenge to classical political economy, which found its most signiﬁcant and contentious manifestation in the debate over agricultural protection and free trade in the 1840s, ﬁnally lost out within the Tory party to a liberal Peelite approach to tariff reform. This did not mean that conceptual and practical alternatives to freemarket capitalism disappeared. Christian political economists, romantic conservatives, working-class radicals, co-operators, and socialists continued to develop their own distinct critiques of laissez-faire ideas and policies.²⁷ Despite these several oppositional strands of economic ideology, the idea of a generally beneﬁcent free market continued to dominate public discourse in the mid-Victorian period. One reason for this was the selfevident (if somewhat casual) association between the withdrawal of government from explicit manipulation of the market by means of tariffs, ²³ Denis Judd, Palmerston (London, 1975), 27; Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1784–1841 (London, 1982), 256; Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (London, 1993), 195–7, 304; Jane Ridley, The Young Disraeli (London, 1995), 251, 262; H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1988), 88–9. ²⁴ Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992), 101. ²⁵ David Eastwood, ‘Tories and Markets, 1800–1850’, in Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, eds., Markets in Historical Contexts (Cambridge, 2004), 70–89. ²⁶ For a detailed discussion of Tory economic ideas see Anna Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge, 1999). ²⁷ G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998).

212

Paul Johnson

monopolies, apprenticeships, and the like, and the global economic and political dominance of Britain. In the 75 years between the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the Great Exhibition of 1851, Britain had shed almost all the legacy of mercantilist economic interventionism, and had simultaneously become the undisputed ‘workshop of the world’. But equally important was an intellectual shift in economic thought which, from the late 1840s, came explicitly to acknowledge that there were clearly deﬁned circumstances in which the discipline of the market could not be relied on to produce optimal outcomes. John Stuart Mill is the key ﬁgure in this re-casting of market ideology. He was far and away the most inﬂuential mid-Victorian political economist, and his Principles of Political Economy, ﬁrst published in 1848, dominated the professional study of economic affairs for over forty years, and continued to have a profound inﬂuence on popular economic discourse to the century’s end.²⁸The success and popularity of his Principles stemmed from the way it combined a clear re-statement of classical economic theory with a practical acknowledgement that this theory could not fully represent the complexity of actual economic behaviour: So far as rents, proﬁts, wages, prices are determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them. Assume competition to be their exclusive regulator, and principles of broad generality and scientiﬁc precision may be laid down, according to which they will be regulated. The political economist justly deems that his proper business: and as an abstract or hypothetical science political economy cannot be required to do, and indeed cannot do, anything more. But it would be a great misconception of the actual course of human affairs, to suppose that competition exercises in fact this unlimited sway.²⁹

Mill’s pragmatism came to the fore in his discussion of market activity. In a manner familiar since Adam Smith he ﬁrst set out a litany of the many erroneous arguments that had been advanced in support of government intervention in the market, and demonstrated why they were mistaken, and often counter-productive. He portrayed market competition as a mechanism for the attainment of harmonious stability, and famously stated that ‘Laisser-faire, in short, should be the general practice: every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.’³⁰ But he then went on to identify a number of circumstances in which the ²⁸ Neil De Marchi, ‘The Success of Mill’s Principles’, History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), 119–57. ²⁹ J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1848), Book II, ch. 4, s. 1. There have been many editions, and there is no consistent pagination, so references will be given to the speciﬁc book, chapter, and section. ³⁰ Ibid., Book V, ch. 11, s. 7.

Market Disciplines

213

market systematically failed to achieve efﬁciency and harmony. Mill identiﬁed three aspects of what today’s economists call ‘market failure’— the cases of natural monopoly, public goods, and externalities. These all related to issues of contemporary policy debate, and Mill quite consciously attempted to provide a coherent set of principles for analysing and correcting what he saw as inherent problems with unregulated competition. The issue of natural monopoly was already widely (if usually informally) recognized, and had received explicit attention from government.³¹ Mill noted that in most circumstances gas and water companies, and owners of roads, canals, and railways, were monopolists, because it was not economically feasible for multiple suppliers to construct exactly parallel networks. Water and gas were essential commodities and ‘the charge made for services which cannot be dispensed with, is, in substance, quite as much compulsory taxation as if imposed by law’. In these circumstances, he thought, provision could best be undertaken by municipal authorities, with expenses covered by a local rate (property tax). Transport services, particularly those provided for by canal and railway companies which had been granted a monopoly over a particular route by Act of Parliament, should have their charges regulated by government, or should be granted their operating right for a ﬁxed term only, after which the business should revert to the state.³² Here Mill was both drawing on, and systematizing, contemporary activity. As early as 1843, Mancunians were receiving their gas from a sole municipal supplier, and from 1847 Liverpudlians received their water from a similar source.³³ And in 1844 Gladstone, who is generally (and correctly) thought of as an advocate of free trade and minimal state involvement in the economy, introduced, in the Railway Act, one of the most interventionist pieces of economic legislation of Victoria’s reign. He argued that the normally beneﬁcent effects of competition did not apply to railways; rather than reduce prices, competition would produce ‘a mere multiplication of monopoly’.³⁴ To remedy this wrong, his Railway Act introduced compulsory price reductions on lines that consistently returned a proﬁt of over 10 per cent, compulsory workmen’s trains at low fares, and, most radical of all, the option for the government to purchase any new railway line after 21 years of operation. Mill provided a consistent ³¹ James Foreman-Peck and Robert Millward, Public and Private Ownership of British Industry, 1820–1990 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2. ³² Mill, Principles, Book V, ch. 11, s. 11. ³³ John Sheldrake, Municipal Socialism (Aldershot, 1989), ch. 3. ³⁴ Hansard, 5 February 1844, col. 237.

214

Paul Johnson

rationale for these market interventions by local and national government, thereby setting clear and logical limits to these deviations from the competitive ideal. The same was true in the second area of market failure—the provision of public goods. These were cases ‘in which important public services are to be performed, while yet there is no individual specially interested in performing them, nor would any adequate remuneration naturally or spontaneously attend their performance’. Scientiﬁc exploration and research, and the provision of lighthouses and navigational aids were two examples he gave in which government already intervened by means of subsidy and direct provision, but he was clear that such instances were strictly circumscribed, and that ‘before making the work their own, governments ought always to consider if there be any rational probability of its being done on what is called the voluntary principle’.³⁵ Mill’s third case of market failure related to what modern economists call externalities, when ‘acts done by individuals, though intended solely for their own beneﬁt, involve consequences extending indeﬁnitely beyond them, to interests of the nation or of posterity, for which society in its collective capacity is alone able, and alone bound, to provide’.³⁶ Mill had in mind the positive beneﬁts for ‘the future and permanent interests of civilisation itself ’ that could emerge from a process of colonization, but equally important, and equally deserving of public intervention, were the negative effects of individual action where one person, through infection or pollution, might adversely affect the health of a multitude. Mill’s analysis of market failures provided powerful intellectual support for the idea that harmonious equilibrium was the natural state of any market. He constructed a clear set of principles which identiﬁed deviation from this equilibrium, and which justiﬁed limited national or local government intervention—as facilitator, regulator, or provider.³⁷ In all other cases, he argued, the market provided, regulated and facilitated far more effectively than could the government. These principles for identifying the circumstances in which markets would be indisciplined, and ³⁵ Mill, Principles, Book V, ch. 11, s. 15. On lighthouses see James Taylor, ‘Private Property, Public Interest and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Case of Lighthouses’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 749–71. ³⁶ Mill, Principles, Book V, ch. 11, s. 14. ³⁷ Similar ideas about the merits of regulation were presented, using very different terminology, by Edwin Chadwick, who suggested that regulated monopolies should be sold to the highest bidder. See his ‘Results of Different Principles of Legislation and Administration in Europe, of Competition for the Field, as Compared with Competition within the Field, of Service’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 22 (1859), 381–420.

Market Disciplines

215

therefore in need of organization and control by government, proved to be sufﬁciently ﬂexible to accommodate signiﬁcant extension of public intervention in the second half of the nineteenth century. In housing, for example, the negative social and health externalities of the slum led to public action to facilitate improvement (the rebuilding clauses of the Torrens and Cross Acts), to regulate conditions (the development of sanitary by-laws setting minimum building standards), and ultimately to provide accommodation—in London through the building programme of the London County Council. However, it was the free market which continued to provide the great majority of accommodation, just as the forces of supply and demand set prices and the volume of trade in all other sectors of the economy.

III Mill’s idea of market discipline as a natural consequence of the interaction of supply and demand was reiterated by the ‘neo-classical’ economists who revolutionized the discipline from the 1880s. Marshall, Pigou, and others rejected Benthamite utilitarianism, and developed a much more sophisticated view of distribution and welfare which acknowledged that the market might not deliver socially optimal outcomes. Nevertheless, they continued to accept that in most circumstances competitive market pressures eradicated inefﬁciency and rewarded effort and enterprise (a belief which continues to underpin modern economic analysis). Throughout Victoria’s reign, therefore, economic philosophy presented an image of the market as efﬁcient, effective, fair, and natural—an image that was incorporated within the dominant political discourse of the period. Yet economists’ conception of the market was very different from the market in practice. Whereas economists saw a multitude of buyers and sellers all freely and frenetically competing, lawyers saw interactions between principals and agents, complex forms of contract, and overlapping and conﬂicting duties and liabilities. It was the economists’ perception that dominated contemporary thought, but the lawyers’ outlook was at least equally valid and relevant. The market in Victorian England was a constructed, not a natural phenomenon, and it was repeatedly reshaped over the course of the nineteenth century. Legal historians have noted that the Victorian market was a contested site, but, following Dicey, they have largely seen the reshaping in terms of a struggle between free-market ideals (which promoted the rise of freedom of contract) and a developing

216

Paul Johnson

New Liberal interventionism which curtailed market freedom in order to enhance the welfare of the majority.³⁸ I see the reshaping somewhat differently. It was not a neutral process—construction and reconstruction of market relationships involved bargaining and compromise between different vested interests, and the end result frequently reﬂected the relative power base of these groups. Perhaps the most politically self-conscious disciplining of market actors occurred in the area of consumption, where the law directly constrained the rights of some individuals to engage fully in market activity. Minors under the age of 21 were fully entitled to buy whatever goods they wished with cash, but they could not be held personally liable for debts incurred through the purchase of goods on credit. Furthermore, their fathers could be held liable only if it could be demonstrated that the goods were ‘necessaries’ and appropriate to the family’s station and condition of life.³⁹ But it was married women who were most directly affected by this legal structuring of market agency; the law of coverture subsumed a married woman’s legal and economic identity under that of her husband, and thus wives were unable legally to enter into credit contracts on their own behalf, other than for the purchase of necessaries.⁴⁰ This inferior position of married women as subservient economic agents in the market economy was not substantially changed until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, and full equality at law with their husbands was not achieved until 1935. Even such apparently progressive legislative developments as this were, according to Ben Grifﬁn, ‘part of an alternative strand of liberal discourse which was instrumental in legitimating a project to privilege the wealthy over the poor and men above women’.⁴¹ In circumstances where no clear interest group had a dominant political or economic position—for instance in the case of creditors and debtors involved in bankruptcy proceedings—the process by which market relationships were reconstructed could be both tortuous and unpredictable. Markham Lester has shown that the twists and turns of bankruptcy law and practice across the nineteenth century follow no simple linear path with respect either to legal formalism or to economic ideology. Instead they owe more to the effectiveness with which different interest groups ³⁸ A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England (London, 1905); P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1979). ³⁹ Margot Finn, The Character of Credit (Cambridge, 2003), 273–6. ⁴⁰ Margot Finn, ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 703–22. ⁴¹ Ben Grifﬁn, ‘Class, Gender and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868–1882: The Case of the Married Women’s Property Acts’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 62.

Market Disciplines

217

forged alliances and solicited parliamentary support.⁴² In other words, rather than the market disciplining the economic actors, it was the actors who, to a signiﬁcant degree, structured and disciplined the market. Nowhere was the disciplining of the market more important than in the two key areas of labour and capital, and here the vested interests were very clear. Established historical views of the nineteenth-century English labour market characterize it as a market based on free labour—that is, one in which individual workers were not subject to non-pecuniary coercion. Combinations of workers were, of course, discriminated against throughout the century, but individual workers were free to change jobs and move to new locations in response to wage incentives, and data on wage variation and migration have been cited in support of the idea of a fully ﬂexible labour market.⁴³ Yet in fact the labour market was signiﬁcantly structured by legal impediments, particularly by the law of Master and Servant. In their History of Trade Unionism the Webbs dismissed Master and Servant legislation as an archaic relic of feudalism, but recent research by Douglas Hay and others has begun to reveal just how extensive was the use of criminal sanctions against workers for breach of contract. The laws against combination have received the lion’s share of historical attention, but Hay and Craven have found that ‘in one English county, 130 men and women were imprisoned under master and servant for every one imprisoned under combination’.⁴⁴ English law gave employers the right to have workers imprisoned at hard labour for up to three months for the crime of failing or refusing to perform their labour agreements. By contrast, employers who were found to be in breach of contract with their workforce were subject only to the civil-law sanction of paying compensation. This ability of employers to criminalize individual workers was not a right that was used casually and occasionally. Between 1857 and 1875 there were, on average, over 10,000 prosecutions per annum in England under the Master and Servant Acts. For example, in 1860 there were 11,938 prosecutions and 7,059 convictions: 1,699 of the convicted served a sentence in a house of correction, 1,971 were ﬁned, 3,380 received other punishments (typically abatement of wages), and one person was ordered to be whipped. Furthermore, as Steinfeld has shown, these prosecutions varied inversely with the unemployment rate, which indicates that employers made greater use of the ⁴² V. Markham Lester, Victorian Insolvency (Oxford, 1995). ⁴³ J. G. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality? (London, 1985). ⁴⁴ D. Hay and P. Craven, ‘Master and Servant in England and the Empire: A Comparative Study’, Labour/Le Travail, 31 (1993), 176.

218

Paul Johnson

criminal law to enforce contracts against workers when the labour market was tight. And prosecutions were concentrated in the industrial districts of the country: Staffordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Durham all had prosecution rates at or above 1 per 1,000 of the population. Since almost all of those prosecuted were adult male manual workers, this suggests that perhaps 1 in every 200 working-class households in these counties experienced a prosecution each year for breach of contract—a sufﬁciently large number for this criminal sanction against workers to be well known and well understood in working-class communities.⁴⁵ This survival of coercive elements of the Statute of Artiﬁcers into the nineteenth century was not the accidental outcome of legislative inertia. In 1823 Parliament added new restrictions to the Master and Servant laws, and in 1843 the Worsted Embezzlement Act explicitly applied criminal sanction to breach of contract by domestic out-workers in seven speciﬁed trades. The following year a Bill was introduced which would have extended this criminal sanction to ‘all labourers and persons’, regardless of whether their trade had been speciﬁcally enumerated in any of the preceding Master and Servant Acts, and even when ‘the relations of Master and Servant may not actually subsist between such Labourers, or other persons, and their Employers’. The rationale for this extension of the Master and Servant provision to all forms of wage labour was uncertainty created by earlier legal judgments about what activities, in which contexts, were covered by the existing laws. Once the Bill was introduced to Parliament, the Chartist solicitor W. P. Roberts alerted the labour movement to the threat posed by the Bill, and the Potters’ Union was particularly active in organizing opposition throughout the Midlands. Over 200 petitions, said to represent over two million workmen, were received by the House of Commons. With forceful opposition from radical reformers, the Bill was defeated.⁴⁶ This did not mean, however, that the provisions of the Master and Servant Acts remained conﬁned to narrowly speciﬁed trades. Over the next twenty years a series of court judgments developed an expansive reading of the 1823 Act to cover an extremely broad range of waged work, regardless of whether the engagement was for a speciﬁed term or for a speciﬁed task. ⁴⁵ Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 72–84. ⁴⁶ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade Unionism (London, 1896), 167; Daphne Simon, ‘Master and Servant’, in J. Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London, 1954), 160–200.

Market Disciplines

219

Thus, by mid-century, time-work and piece-work were held equally to fall under the remit of the Master and Servant Acts.⁴⁷ The mid-Victorian labour market came to be regulated by an increasingly anachronistic reading of a sixteenth-century statute. The section of the 1563 Statute of Artiﬁcers which related to leaving work unﬁnished was framed in terms of the speciﬁc tasks undertaken and duties discharged by artiﬁcers and servants. This made sense in an economy in which virtually all production was ‘bespoke’, in the sense of individual workers manufacturing unique products. The nineteenth-century legislation preserved this language, yet the organization of production was by then very different. By the 1840s many working men and women in the textile, metal, and engineering trades literally never ﬁnished their work, because for them, as for the stylized worker in Adam Smith’s pin factory, their daily labour involved not the complete making and ﬁnishing of a good or object, but the performance of an intermediate process. Here we see very clearly the way in which the labour market was, until the repeal of the Master and Servant Acts in 1875, disciplined by the law, and by law that was extremely and deliberately partisan. The same holds for the capital market. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in the structure of commercial capital in the British economy. In 1844 there existed just 947 joint-stock companies in England; with the exception of a small number of mutual insurance societies, virtually all other businesses were organized as partnerships. After the passing of the 1844 Joint Stock Act, the number of joint-stock registrations rose slowly, and by 1885 they accounted for between 5 and 10 per cent of all business organizations in England.⁴⁸ The partnership form remained numerically dominant, but from the mid-1880s the limited liability joint-stock company became increasingly popular and economically signiﬁcant, with more than 62,000 registered by 1914. According to Jefferys, the period 1885–1914 witnessed ‘the triumph of the company in almost all spheres of economic life’.⁴⁹ Yet the triumph of the company had little effect on the operation of business. In 1914 over 48,000 of these limited companies—more than 75 per cent—were private companies: that is, they had not sought to raise capital from the ⁴⁷ Steinfeld, Coercion, 142–53. ⁴⁸ H. A. Shannon, ‘The Limited Companies of 1866–83’, reprinted in E. M. CarusWilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (London, 1954), 380–405; Harris, Industrializing English Law. ⁴⁹ J. B. Jefferys, ‘Trends in Business Organisation in Great Britain since 1856’ (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1938), 142.

220

Paul Johnson

public, and did not freely trade their shares. The majority of registered companies by 1914 were, essentially, partnerships which had converted their legal status, but which had not altered at all what they did or how they did it. Although the great majority of these private companies were small, by no means all of them were. Huntley and Palmer, Crosse and Blackwell, J&J Coleman, Harland and Wolff, Alfred Booth and Co., John Bibby and Sons, all converted from partnership to company form, but made no public issue of shares.⁵⁰ Why did so many proprietors choose to jump through legal hoops just to change the form, but not the function, of their businesses? The answer, I believe, is that it allowed them to shed signiﬁcant market liabilities, and shelter behind capital-friendly laws. When a partnership converts into a company the outright owners split ownership rights between themselves as shareholders and themselves as directors. The legal constitution of the share as an entirely autonomous form of property—a wholly nineteenthcentury conceptual development⁵¹—externalized the shareholder from the company, and provided the foundations of the modern legal doctrine of separate personality, whereby there is complete separation of company and members. The shareholder owns outright and can dispose of his shares, but it is the directors who own the company in terms of management. Yet in law these directors are mere agents of the company, just well-paid employees who can be hired and ﬁred like any other contractual party. By deﬁnition they cannot be principals, since it is the legal personality of the company to which they are contracted and which commands them, yet in practice the directors command a signiﬁcant number of the characteristics of ownership. On the other hand, the shareholders, who hold residual perpetual control over the company, have few powers to determine what the company actually does. Incorporation blurred the lines of responsibility for harmful actions— both legal harms (torts) and social harms such as cutting wages or laying off workers. In a wholly owned business or partnership, it is clear that the owners are directly responsible for decisions and actions of the business. In a corporation, it is neither the directors nor the shareholders who are responsible for actions—it is the corporation itself. Although directors may take the key decisions, they cannot be personally responsible for the action of the company. Indeed, nineteenth-century company law was so ⁵⁰ Jefferys, ‘Trends in Business Organisation’, 139. ⁵¹ P. Ireland, ‘Capitalism without the Capitalist: The Joint Stock Company Share and the Emergence of the Modern Doctrine of Separate Corporate Personality’, Journal of Legal History, 17 (1996), 41–73.

Market Disciplines

221

lax that it was difﬁcult to make directors responsible for anything: they were almost fully ‘Teﬂon-coated’. By converting from partnership to corporate status, owners could retain all the power of control, without carrying the full responsibility of ownership. They could shirk both the legal liabilities of ownership and the moral responsibilities of control and authority that rested directly on partners and sole proprietors. The law of incorporation and limited liability allowed business owners to avoid (or minimize) liability for debts, torts, and actions deemed by society to be unfair or unjust, without requiring them to forgo any element of control. The law gave business proprietors a one-way bet, and not surprisingly they took it in their thousands. In historical terms, this can be thought of as the ﬁnal removal of the vestiges of a ‘moral economy’ in which capital-owners were expected to take some responsibility for the welfare consequences of their actions. The legal foundations of the corporation that emerged during Victoria’s reign reﬂected a new form of ‘non-responsible’ capitalism; the ‘natural’ discipline of market competition that could reward or penalize individual economic actors was crimped and curtailed by company law in order to privilege capital-owning directors.

IV In his exemplary study of the decline of ‘Old Corruption’ in Britain, Philip Harling has noted that mid-Victorian radicals ‘continued to argue for more extensive parliamentary reform . . . . because they still believed that aristocrats and other insiders sought to use their disproportionate political power as a means of obtaining unjust and expensive privileges for themselves’.⁵² Yet they were hamstrung by their belief in the key tenet of political economy—that the free market generated natural, fair, and efﬁcient outcomes. In fact, no market is natural or free, and the market in Victorian England incorporated legal biases that operated in favour of different interest groups, particularly those owning capital. These biases did not emerge by chance: the detailed reform of multiple aspects of commercial and contract law between the 1830s and 1880s created a speciﬁcally Victorian form of market discipline which privileged the interests of ‘insiders’. This privilege was concealed, both by the technical ⁵² P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’ (Oxford, 1996), 256.

222

Paul Johnson

apparatus of the law and legal system, and by the ideological apparatus of political economy. Legal theorists such as Charles Addison purveyed the view that ‘the law of contracts may justly indeed be said to be a universal law adapted to all times and races, and all places and circumstances, being founded upon those great and fundamental principles of right and wrong deduced from natural reason which are immutable and eternal’.⁵³ Such equanimous readings of the legal system could scarcely be challenged in the early years of Victoria’s reign by a popular radicalism which was, according to Biagini and Reid, ‘predominantly legalistic and constitutional’ in outlook, or in the later years by a labour movement that was intently concerned with safeguarding and strengthening its own legal standing.⁵⁴ And political economists had been extremely successful in constructing a popular image of competitive exchange as a morally and politically neutral activity; as the Economist put it, ‘Mutual higgling, then, in perfect freedom seems the proper means of determining the rights and duties of all.’⁵⁵ Organized labour was again ill placed to counter this view, given the struggle to secure the legal right of unions to bargain on behalf of their members.⁵⁶ Although governments, both central and local, became increasingly interventionist in the later nineteenth century with respect to perceived market failures, and some of the activities of municipal socialism extended well beyond the limits conceived of by Mill, most economic transactions continued to occur solely within the marketplace, and were disciplined by what appeared to be the unregulated forces of supply and demand. The idea that the locus of these transactions—the market—was a legal and ideological construct, laden with value judgements and structured to promote or protect certain interests, was inconceivable to most Victorians, and remains so today. The market is still viewed as a largely neutral arena for competitive exchange; the ringmasters still sit on their gilded thrones and smile.

⁵³ C. G. Addison, A Treatise on the Law of Contacts and Parties to Actions ex contractu (London, 1845), p. v. ⁵⁴ Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, ‘Currents of Radicalism, 1850–1914’, in Biagini and Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge, 1991), 11. ⁵⁵ Economist, 9 August 1856, 868. ⁵⁶ Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy, 1860–1880’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 811–40.

Market Disciplines

223

FURTHER READING Finn, Margot, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003). Harris, Ron, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844 (Cambridge, 2000). Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Inﬂuence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). Kostal, R. W., Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1975 (Oxford, 1994). Searle, G. R., Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998). Steinfeld, Robert J., Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001).

10 Moral Disciplines Boyd Hilton

It is impossible to deﬁne Victorian morality or Victorian values with any precision, if only because the Queen’s reign was an extremely long one. This chapter focuses on the mid-Victorian period of the 1850s and 1860s when, correctly or otherwise, the State was perceived to operate at minimum strength, and individual citizens were (at least in theory) trusted to discipline themselves. However, in order to understand how this central tenet of public doctrine became so ﬁrmly established, it is necessary to point up the contrast with mainstream thought in the 1830s and 1840s, of which it was a decisive rejection. I have argued elsewhere that this development reﬂected a shift from an evangelically-based pessimism to a Broad Church optimism. Peter Mandler summarizes this claim in his Introduction, when he comments that elites had conﬁdence in free markets because they saw them as ‘Providentially-designed mechanisms for the cultivation of true morality—a conﬁdence that applied equally before the 1850s, when the operation of free markets appeared cruel and punitive, and after the 1850s, when the operation of free markets appeared more ameliorative and progressive’.¹ According to this formulation belief in liberty remained constant, but the philosophical underpinnings and expected outcome changed dramatically. However, this development alone would not have accounted for the widespread consensus of the 1850s and 1860s if there had not been a second and simultaneous shift. Here it is important to remember that there were also many moralists in the earlier period who had condemned the movement towards liberty and free markets, sometimes because they disliked the harsh philosophical underpinnings, more often because they did not believe in natural law ¹ See above, p. 5. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Impact of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988).

Moral Disciplines

225

mechanisms of any sort. Such people considered that sinful human beings had to be tamed by the strong discretionary arm of a State (though not necessarily a centralized State) that was itself—so many of them believed—divinely ordained. By the 1850s, however, these authoritarian and interventionist views were very much less evident. While a tiny proportion of individuals was acknowledged to be felonious, criminality was no longer supposed to taint the populace as a whole, most of whom were now thought to possess sufﬁcient moral ﬁbre to be allowed to make their own choices. With reference to this second shift in opinion, it will be argued below that the creation of consensus after c.1850, and the associated spread of cosmic optimism, can only be understood in the context of religious belief. Further, one effect of the development was to strengthen people’s faith in many cases, though it also forced some to reconceptualize their view as to how God operated in the world. By way of preliminary, it is worth asking what is meant by saying that there was a shift in mainstream opinion during a particular series of years. Most people do not change their minds as they grow older, and most of those that do fail to acknowledge as much. What happens is rather that a majority in the following generation thinks differently from its predecessors. Those (in whatever age group) who persist in a former way of thinking become increasingly defensive, which in turn might make them either more assertive or less. In such a scenario there is no precise moment at which the balance tips, no ‘conversion of the average man’ (to use Walter Bagehot’s somewhat lazy phrase),² but over a period of years it will become obvious that a shift has taken place. Because, by and large, the older opinions and the newer opinions are held by different people, the cause of the shift is often difﬁcult to pin down. Occasionally, however, the historian will come across an individual whose own mind changes, and when this happens it might provide a clue as to why the shift took place at all. This chapter therefore starts and ends with one such individual, in the hope that his odyssey can reveal something about the culture more generally.

I W. E. Gladstone was a politician who notoriously changed his mind. He changed it often in particular matters, but during his thirties and forties he changed it holus bolus, transforming himself in the process from the ² Walter Bagehot, ‘The Character of Sir Robert Peel’, in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St John-Stevas, 15 vols. (London, 1965–86), iii. 245.

226

Boyd Hilton

‘rising hope of stern and unbending Tories’, as depicted by T. B. Macaulay in 1839, to ‘the People’s William’ and semi-demagogic Liberal leader of the 1860s. The important point here was not the change of party allegiance, which was a long-drawn-out, tortuous process not necessarily indicative of personal inconsistency, but rather the underlying shift in political ideology, which was very sudden. Gladstone’s ﬁrst book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), can be read in part as an attack on Lord Melbourne’s government, whose philosophical basis was an uneasy combination of liberalism and whiggism. Liberalism was said to be ﬂawed because it was based on a ‘degraded system of ethics or individual morality, the injurious legacy of Locke, which received its full popular development from Paley, and was reduced to forms of greater accuracy by Bentham’.³ Since in Gladstone’s view there was no such thing as individual conscience, the citizens of a nation should be regarded, ‘not as individuals, but only as constituents of the active power of . . . the life of the state’, which was ‘the self-governing energy of the nation made objective’.⁴ Whigs did not fall into the individualist trap, being well aware that society could only be understood as an organic whole, but they too were fallible in Gladstone’s opinion because of their erastianism, meaning that they subordinated the Established Church to the control of Parliament, that is, the sacred to the secular. In choosing to call his book The State in its Relations with the Church (and not vice versa as was usually the case), Gladstone clearly signalled that the Church should dominate the partnership, advising on moral issues and, in effect, acting as the ultimate arbiter of the general will. ‘The Lawgiver then, that is, the legislative mind of the nation, must be ethically instructed; which implies that it must be enlightened by religion, upon the basis of which alone it is that moral science can be effectually reared.’⁵ Finally, in Gladstone’s view, both Whigs and Liberals (it was what they had in common) paid too much lip service to ideas of popular sovereignty. By so doing they effectively repudiated ‘national religion’, and instead gave ‘the freest scope to the exercise of private will; and a full representation to its results in the action of the governing body’. The effect will be to degrade the character of government from the moral sphere to that of a machine; and will leave it as the function of Sovereigns and their vainly-titled coadjutors to ascertain with accuracy, and to register with ﬁdelity, ³ W. E. Gladstone, The State in its Relations with the Church, 1st edn. 1838, 2 vols. (London, 1841), i. 149. ⁴ Ibid. i. 78. ⁵ Ibid. i. 88.

Moral Disciplines

227

a popular will, whose efﬁcacy shall be measured by number or quantity alone, as the index of a clock is set to represent the oscillations of its pendulum.⁶

In combating such doctrines, the younger Gladstone developed a theory that was paternalist in social terms, and High Tory politically, while ecclesiastically it was as much Arnoldian as High Church, but the most signiﬁcant inﬂuence was undoubtedly that of German idealism as mediated by Coleridge, and in particular by the latter’s seminal work of 1830, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each.⁷ This organic vision was widely regarded at the time as antediluvian, and it did not last. By 1848 Gladstone was saying (in private at least) the exact opposite of what he had published ten years earlier. He freely acknowledged that ‘the State cannot be said now to have a conscience . . . inasmuch as I think it acts . . . as no conscience—that is, no personal conscience (which is the only real form of one) can endure’.⁸ It was therefore necessary to engage in a ‘process of lowering the religious tone of the State; letting it down, demoralizing it—i.e. stripping it of its ethical character, and assisting its transition into one which is mechanical’.⁹ Evidently Gladstone had turned against his former theocratic paternalism. Just how decisively he had done so is clear from his ﬁrst signiﬁcant political achievement, the budget of 1853, which set the seal on the mid-Victorian minimal state. In it, inter alia, he expanded the scope of the income tax by lowering the point at which liability to pay began from those who earned £150 p.a. to those who earned just £100, an adjustment which might seem surprising given his often-expressed dislike of direct taxation. The reason appears to be that those men who earned £100 were thought to be approximately the same as those who occupied houses of £10 rental value, which was the basic qualiﬁcation for the franchise in borough constituencies. In other words, Gladstone’s budget was meant to establish (in the boroughs, at least) the mechanism of a taxpaying democracy, capable of expelling any government that wasted taxpayers’ money on unjust wars or political patronage.¹⁰ The change in his views since 1838 which this signalled will be obvious. Then the ‘people’ had been regarded as ⁶ Ibid. ii. 346–7. ⁷ H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 38–9; David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford, 2004), 58. ⁸ Gladstone to Newman, 19 April 1845, Gladstone, Correspondence on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, ed. D. C. Lathbury, 2 vols. (London, 1910), i. 72 (italics added). ⁹ Gladstone to Henry Manning, 19 April 1846, ibid. ii. 272 (italics added). ¹⁰ H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 626–30.

228

Boyd Hilton

amoral, and as requiring to be told what to think and do by the State. Now Gladstone seemed to regard all governments as potentially proﬂigate, and as needing to be kept on the morally straight and narrow by the ‘people’, meaning the respectable tax-paying electorate. From this point onwards his liberal rhetoric consistently emphasized the need for individual citizens to exercise free choice and individual conscience. Statesmen were still expected to offer a tentative lead, but should only continue in a course of action if the public was perceived to respond positively and to will them on. Put very crudely, and in the terms referred to at the beginning of this chapter, he had come to value liberty above authority instead of the other way round. The political reasons for this reversal of view have been extensively pondered.¹¹ They included Gladstone’s experience of ofﬁce under Peel, the collapse of the Oxford movement, the Maynooth crisis, the onset of the Irish famine, the Conservative party split, the debate on Jewish Disabilities, and the Gorham Judgement. What signiﬁes here is the intellectual adjustment, and the best place to start is with the gloss placed on it by Gladstone’s most distinguished interpreter. According to Colin Matthew, Gladstone’s earlier beliefs were a form of ‘political Tractarianism’, an allusion to the fact that Gladstone was close to many in the Oxford movement and shared their wish for the Church to become the determinant of national truth, secular as well as religious in so far as the two could ever be distinguished. Then, having abandoned this belief because it was impractical, he sought (according to Matthew) to put in its place ‘an alternative if less elevated synthesis’, which he ‘tried to construct . . . in three ways: colonial affairs, the morality of free trade and ﬁnance, and the morality of international affairs’. Now this claim is demonstrably true empirically, and it is as an empiricist that Matthew presents the reconstructed Gladstone, a man who now had a horror of abstract theories, and whose new policies constituted ‘a series of practical positions . . . which were not yet necessarily coherently interlocked’.¹² Yet although Gladstone seems not to have rationalized his change of stance at the time,¹³ it is hard to believe that someone so introspectively idealistic ¹¹ Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 59–102; Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 105–41; Hilton, Age of Atonement, 341–2, 350–4. ¹² Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 73, 81. ¹³ In the many memoranda written towards the end of his life, which he called Gleanings and which today would probably be called airbrushings, Gladstone rationalized his whole political development in terms of slow evolutionary progress towards a lateVictorian liberal telos.

Moral Disciplines

229

could simply have abandoned theory in favour of what Matthew calls a ‘feeling for the practical’. What Matthew is unable to explain is the equivalence between Gladstone’s earlier Tractarian paternalism and his later synthesis of ‘colonial affairs, the morality of free trade and ﬁnance, and the morality of international affairs’. What was the need that they both—successively and in different ways—satisﬁed? Or, as another quintessential Victorian mused (about nothing in particular), ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’. To resolve that conundrum it is necessary to recognize that not just Gladstone but Victorian thought and culture as a whole underwent a dramatic shift at the mid-century. Most historians would acknowledge a signiﬁcant discontinuity at around mid-century, when Britain left behind two or more decades of ﬁerce polarization and entered what has been called ‘the age of equipoise’. Today that phrase is mostly understood in political and social terms. Throughout Europe the 1840s were the ‘hungry forties’ and 1848 was ‘the year of revolutions’. In Britain there was a grave apprehension of class conﬂict, the deﬁning point being not the slight anti-climax at Kennington Common but the dangerously militant Chartism of Bishop Bonner’s Fields in London and in many parts of the industrial North. Almost immediately afterwards, however, social relations came to be viewed in a much more optimistic light (in contrast incidentally to Britain’s international standing, which suddenly seemed much gloomier).¹⁴ After sixty years during which tumbrils had never ceased to rattle in the subconscious of the upper classes, revolution suddenly seemed about as likely as ‘the falling of the moon’.¹⁵ Whether there was an actual turnabout in the attitudes and actions of the ‘perishing and dangerous classes’ is not the issue here, but the turn-about in elite perceptions was palpable. It had set in by 1850, and climaxed in the following year at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, which attracted many thousands of working-class visitors from those parts of the country that had recently been connected to the capital by railroad. The various exhibits on display were wondrous enough, but as much as anything the upper classes marvelled at the respectable appearance and decent behaviour of the workers in attendance, thereby prompting a Times reporter in October 1851 to comment that ‘the people have now become the exhibition’.¹⁶ It ¹⁴ For example, the invasion scare of 1852 was the ﬁrst for nearly ﬁfty years. ¹⁵ T. B. Macaulay’s diary, 1 May 1851, in G. O. Trevelyan, ed., The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London, 1876), ii. 293. ¹⁶ Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London, 1999), 158.

230

Boyd Hilton

all contributed to a sudden lightening of the national mood, summed up later by the historian G. M. Young in two memorable military metaphors: The difference, I have often thought, between the last Chartist demonstration in 1848 and the Great Exhibition of 1851, is like the difference in one’s own feelings at the beginning and end of a voyage in wartime through waters beset by enemy ships, or like the opening of the city gates after a long wintry siege. It was in that Maytime of youth recaptured that Gladstonian Liberalism was conceived. It was the only atmosphere in which it could have been conceived, an atmosphere composed in equal measure of progress, conﬁdence, and social union, from which the image of the Beleaguered City had faded—out of sight, and almost out of memory.¹⁷

‘Go on reading until you can hear people talking.’ G. M. Young was famously able to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of the Victorians, and in describing the mid-century as a glad conﬁdent morning he may well have had in his mind’s ear some celebrated lines of the new Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson. The ﬂying cloud, the frosty light: Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new . . . Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. . . . Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), CVI¹⁸ ¹⁷ G. M. Young, Today and Yesterday: Collected Essays and Addresses (London, 1948), 32–3. ¹⁸ These particular stanzas were written in November 1846 or later. See Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (Harlow, 1987), ii. 427n.

Moral Disciplines

231

There was unquestionably a whiff of epiphany in the air at the mid-century, a new breeze in favour of ‘liberal’ movements including free trade, paciﬁsm, education, civil and religious equality, and various types of moral reform. One manifestation of the new mood was Cobdenism— recently deﬁned by Anthony Howe as a ‘secular religion’ of ‘humanitarian cosmopolitanism’—which caught the hearts and minds of millions during the 1850s.¹⁹ But why did it do so? It would be possible to argue that the repeal of the Corn Laws was so important symbolically that by itself it changed the intellectual weather in favour of free trade, but this seems unlikely, if only because repeal was not one of those pieces of legislation that could not possibly have been reversed, like Catholic emancipation or Scottish devolution, for example. As Anna Gambles has recently demonstrated, protection and the policies associated with it— anti-bullionism, tax-and-spend welfare, imperial preference—had remained powerful and coherent forces within the Conservative party until 1849–50. Likewise David Roberts has argued that paternalism remained a ‘dominant attitude’ until about that date, while Peter Mandler has depicted the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and the Public Health Act of 1848 as representing the heyday of interventionist whiggism.²⁰ It was only at the mid-century with its new-found conﬁdence that the ﬁscally minimal state was suddenly sanctiﬁed, and enthusiasm for protection, paternalism, and interventionism suddenly dissipated. It led Dasent to conclude in 1851 that protection was ‘dead and buried’, and allowed Brougham to crow that protectionists had become as extinct as dinosaurs. The liberal breeze was just as evident at the grass roots. It was most pronounced among Dissenters and artisans, and in provincial manufacturing towns like John Bright’s Rochdale,²¹ where the denizens were adopting reformist politics and an assertive associational culture for the ﬁrst time. Nothing else can explain the outpouring of popular grief that greeted the sudden and tragic death of Robert Peel in 1850, the rash of statues erected in his memory, the parks named after him, and the cheap mugs thrown in his image.²² It was owing of course to his role in Corn Law repeal, which was represented as an attack on Aristocracy and as a means to ensure ‘the people’ cheap bread, but even so this enthusiasm for ‘the ¹⁹ Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), 28–37, 63–110. ²⁰ David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (1979), 25–63, 244–68; Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990), 236–82. ²¹ For a classic account see John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857–1868 (1966), 93–133. ²² Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987), 287–304.

232

Boyd Hilton

People’s Robert’ was incongruous in so far as Peel had always opposed popular causes, and had never previously been accorded an ounce of acclaim by working people. But if Peel only caught the liberal breeze posthumously, might that same breeze not explain Gladstone’s mid-century conversion to the view that popular will rather than national institutions should be the determinant of right and wrong? Young seemed to suggest as much when he wrote, ‘It was in that Maytime of youth recaptured that Gladstonian Liberalism was conceived’, and there was at least one tenuous link—the two Letters to Lord Aberdeen (1851), in which Gladstone denounced the conditions under which political prisoners were being held in the gaols of Naples. It was his ﬁrst declaration of overtly liberal principles, and was hailed by his ofﬁcial biographer John Morley as sounding ‘the golden trumpet-notes of a new time’.²³ On the other hand, Gladstone was to cast lingering looks behind him towards the Conservatives for at least another decade before he declared himself a Liberal and embarked on his celebrated speaking tours of the industrial districts. No doubt Young used the word ‘conceived’ in order to register the fact that Gladstonian liberalism, albeit germinated at mid-century, did not at once achieve parturition, but even this probably goes too far. In fact the Letters to Lord Aberdeen turn out to have been a distinctly premature ejaculation, since at this stage political liberalism was hardly so much as a twinkle in Gladstone’s eye. It may therefore be better to forget political and social context, and to consider instead what the historian who invented the term ‘the age of equipoise’ meant by it. In W. L. Burn’s formulation, it referred rather to a mid-Victorian ‘generation in which the old and the new, the elements of growth, survival and decay, achieved a balance which most contemporaries regarded as satisfactory’.²⁴ A cruder way of putting it might be to say that a climate of—not consensus exactly but balance and understanding—set in fairly suddenly after sixty or so years during which most norms and values had been ﬁercely contested. To say that norms and values had been ﬁercely contested is not to deny that there had been a majority value system—or mainstream of opinion— throughout the ﬁrst half of the century, a mixture of enlightenment rationalism, utilitarian philosophy, natural religion, and evangelicalism (the last term denoting a corpus of theological beliefs, not a category of churchmanship). These were the potions that fostered the notions—about ²³ John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols. (London, 1903), i. 385. ²⁴ W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London, 1964), 17.

Moral Disciplines

233

God, society, nature, and human nature—in which a high proportion of young men and women in the middle decades of the century had been reared, and against which some were now in a state of rebellion. But for all their majority status during the ﬁrst half of the century, they had also been essentially and emphatically contested. After about 1848 mainstream opinion began to shift quite suddenly, in the manner referred to at the beginning of this chapter, but something else happened as well: that is, in place of ﬁerce contestation there began to be a much greater swathe of agreement on fundamental issues, which in turn meant more complexity and nuance, and much less dogmatic conviction. One way of registering the change might be to contrast two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels. Mary Barton, published in 1848, was a blatant class polemic, a bitter exposure of employer brutality in the cotton textile districts, whereas six years later North and South (1854–5), despite its similar setting, was far more ambiguous. The difference was recognized by Gaskell herself, who wrote privately in 1850: ‘I long (weakly) for the old times where right and wrong did not seem such complicated matters.’²⁵ It might seem strange, but 1848 really did seem like the old times to folk in 1850. In Oxford the battle between right and wrong had revolved around theology rather than capitalism, but the sensation of moving very rapidly from a black-and-white situation to one with shades of grey was similar. Ever since 1833 Gladstone’s Tractarian friends had been attempting to redeﬁne Anglican theology in terms of the medieval Church. For almost as long, their enemies had predicted that the venture would lead them to embrace Roman Catholicism. The worst seemed to have happened when their most charismatic member, J. H. Newman, after many years of teetering, was ﬁnally received into the communion of Rome in October 1845. That event, so widely anticipated and widely dreaded, duly had an ‘enormous effect’, but according to Mark Pattison it was not the effect that had been expected. It was not consternation; it was a lull—a sense that the past agitation of twelve years was extinguished by this simple act . . . Theology was totally banished from Common Room, and even from private conversation. Very free opinions on all subjects were rife . . . If any Oxford man had gone to sleep in 1846 and had woke up again in 1850 he would have found himself in a totally new world . . . [a world] suddenly changed as if by the wand of a magician.²⁶ ²⁵ Elizabeth Gaskell to Eliza Fox, ?April 1850, in The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester, 1966), 109. ²⁶ Mark Pattison: Memoirs, ed. Jo Manton (Fontwell, 1969), 212–13, 244–5. The Romanizing tendency reached a climax following the Gorham Judgment of 1850. It was a devastating blow to Gladstone, but in retrospect A. J. P. Taylor’s comment on the 1848 Revolutions applies: ‘a turning point that did not turn’.

234

Boyd Hilton

It would be simplistic to depict this mid-century transition as wholly benign. As Mrs Gaskell’s comment suggests, the earlier war of ideas had sometimes brought comfort to those engaged in it, locked as they were in cosy self-justifying paradigms. Over the next two decades, as the old certitudes crumbled, intellectuals were forced to examine priorities more subtly, and this gave rise to ambiguities over policy and values which could be just as unsettling. Nevertheless, these later disputes took place within broadly accepted parameters as to what was civilized and proper. Instead of the old belligerent gladiatorials—Macaulay versus Croker, Macaulay versus Southey, Mackintosh versus Mill, Arnold versus Newman, and Carlyle contra mundum—higher journalism now adopted a more moderate tone, aptly described as ‘mildly detached and collusively self-satisﬁed’. The role of the public moralist . . . was a role predicated upon a degree of intimacy between critic and criticized . . . Such intimacy . . . could be expressed in a tone which was now didactic, now reproachful, now cajoling, but was always in some sense conﬁdent—conﬁdent of having the ear of the important audience, conﬁdent of addressing concerns and invoking values which were largely shared with that audience, conﬁdent of an easy, intimate, even convertible relationship with both Reason and History. There is a signiﬁcant difference in tone between defending one’s views and being defensive; [mid] Victorian moralists for the most part did not fall into the latter stance in their writings.²⁷

Bagehot described the third quarter of the nineteenth century as ‘the age of discussion’, implying a willingness to rethink and reﬁne one’s own ideas.²⁸ It really does seem as though, in place of the old ideologies, very free opinions were rife.

II Before attempting to relate the ‘age of equipoise’ to Gladstone’s career, it is necessary to address a possible objection to the notion itself. How, it might be asked, can this apparent climate of tolerance and understanding be squared with the mid-Victorian crisis of faith? Were these not precisely the years when a large number of intellectuals declared their doubts about God? Did not Mary Stanley, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, ²⁷ Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), 13, 58. ²⁸ Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society (London, 1872), 156–204.

Moral Disciplines

235

Henry Callaway, Arthur Hugh Clough, A. B. Bruce, James Anthony Froude, Francis Newman, and T. H. Huxley lead the way in the late 1840s? Did not William and Harriet Law and John Ruskin follow in the 1850s, Leslie Stephen in the early 1860s, and Princess Alice, R. J. Derfel, and W. K. Clifford in the late 1860s: to name but a few? (The prominence of women relative to the part they played in the public sphere generally is noteworthy.) Surely, it might be argued, these spiritual revulsions revealed—and in turn engendered—a profound existential pessimism, such as cannot be reconciled with G. M. Young’s ‘atmosphere . . . of progress, conﬁdence, and social union’? Fifteen years ago this objection would have carried a great deal of weight, for it was then automatically assumed that the mid-Victorian crisis of faith was traumatic for those who experienced it. That view still predominates in most accounts, including A. N. Wilson’s recent volume on the death of God,²⁹ but some other scholars have tended to play its impact down, most notably the contributors to an important volume of essays edited by Richard Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman. It is true that those who abandoned belief often indulged in protestations of despair, but then, as Frank Turner has pointed out, many of them had formerly been evangelicals, and just as evangelicals could only get into right relations with God through the drama of conversion, so in order to get out of them many must have felt it requisite to have (or appear to have) an equally violent deconversion.³⁰ In other words, one could not simply slip out of a religion based on salvation by faith in the same gradual way that one could allow one’s church observance to dwindle. Another relevant point is that avowals of disbelief often occurred after years of spiritual agony and indecision, which meant that the actual coming-out could seem like a deliverance. Take, for example, Leslie Stephen. A. N. Wilson presents his case in terms of the utmost pathos amounting even to suicidal despair, yet Stephen’s own retrospective account conveys a quite different impression: ‘I did not feel that the solid ground was giving way beneath my feet, but rather that I was being relieved of a cumbrous burden. I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it.’³¹ But even allowing that there were some cases where ²⁹ A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (London, 1999). ³⁰ Frank Turner, ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith that was Lost’, in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman, eds., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (Houndmills, 1990), 9–38. ³¹ Leslie Stephen, ‘Some Early Impressions’, National Review, 42 (Oct. 1903), 214, reprinted in Leslie Stephen, Some Early Impressions (London, 1924), 70. For discussion of Stephen’s case, see John W. Bicknell in Victorian Studies, 43 (2000–1), 506–7; Jeffrey von

236

Boyd Hilton

loss of faith did entail misery to individuals, it would be mistaken to infer that their experiences signiﬁed a society in spiritual crisis. The fact that a signiﬁcant number could now renounce Christianity almost certainly indicated the opposite, being a sign that public opinion had softened on the matter. Sceptics and free thinkers had to give up fellowships and the privilege of walking on college lawns, but they were no longer regarded as Satanic, ostracized, or accused of threatening the entire social ediﬁce. Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (probably written in 1851 although not published until 1867) is often said to epitomize the Victorians’ struggle between belief and doubt, yet its strongest term to describe the retreat of faith is—‘melancholy’. In considering how traumatic loss of faith might have been, it is also necessary to take its causes into account. As many contemporaries recognized, and most historians would afﬁrm, the main threat to religion in the 1850s and 1860s came not from without but within; not from geology— Ruskin’s ‘dreadful hammers’—nor from biology—Darwin’s theory of natural selection—nor even from biblical criticism—D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835–6)—but from a widespread feeling of moral revulsion against an evangelical orthodoxy based on sin, moral trial, atonement, and eternal punishment. Markham Sutherland, the ﬁctional vicar of J. A. Froude’s Nemesis of Faith (1849), made the scale of his anxieties clear when he referred to ‘scientiﬁc difﬁculties, critical difﬁculties, and, worse than all, metaphysical difﬁculties’. I will not, I must not, believe that the all-just, all-merciful, all-good God can be such a Being as I ﬁnd him there described [i.e. in current religious teaching] . . . jealous, passionate, capricious, revengeful, punishing children for their fathers’ sins, tempting men, or at least permitting them to be tempted into blindness and folly, and then destroying them . . . This is not God. This is a ﬁend.³²

Of course, the effects of de-conversion might be just as painful, whatever the cause, but falling out of love with one’s inherited beliefs and voluntarily adjusting them seems altogether less painful (indeed, might seem almost a normal part of growing up) than being forced to abandon opinions because of incompatible new truths from without. Besides, it would seem Arx, ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith as Crisis of Vocation’, in Helmstadter and Lightman, eds., Victorian Faith in Crisis, 262–82. ³² J. A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London, 1849), 10–12. See Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960 (London, 1977); Howard R. Murphy, ‘The Ethical Revolt against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England’, American Historical Review, 60 (1955), 800–17.

Moral Disciplines

237

strange to present as wholly conducive to misery initiatives that had the express purpose of banishing metaphysical and eschatological misery. It should not be inferred from the above that there was no crisis of faith, simply that it did not occur when it is usually thought to have done, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. If at that time owning up to religious doubts brought release after years of agony, and if it was made easier to do by society becoming more indulgent in such matters, then it follows that the real crisis of faith had already taken place during the second quarter of the century. It is no coincidence that, of all A. N. Wilson’s cast of characters, the one who most obviously did go through agonies was John Sterling, whose problems began much earlier, in the early 1830s. There are in fact at least four reasons for seeing the second quarter of the nineteenth century in terms of the real crisis of faith. These are the nature of the prevailing religion itself, the absence of any bolt holes available to Anglicans, the inability of more than a very few to let up on God altogether, and the fact that the main threats to belief at that stage were external. The ﬁrst point has already been touched on. Whatever hopes, comforts, and consolations it offered, evangelicalism was intrinsically a religion of crisis—of temptation, trial, danger, anxiety, conscience, and retribution. In many periods—the eighteenth century, for example—something like the Lisbon earthquake would be seen as a reason to doubt the existence of God. In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, by contrast, sudden and violent acts of nature killing thousands of innocent people were generally thought to prove his existence. No wonder even the regenerate trembled lest they be consigned to eternal punishment, literally conceived. This was less frequently the case among Nonconformist denominations, whose crusading agendas gave their religion a more assured and optimistic ﬂavour, but upper- and upper-middle-class Anglicans matched a defensiveness about their own social privileges with an even greater apprehension about what God, who had granted them those privileges, might have in store for them. They were constantly being told, by Gladstone as much as anyone, that the rich had a harder row to hoe in the race to salvation, and that the poor enjoyed a ‘spiritual superiority’. This reﬂection helped them to justify their worldly privileges to themselves, but the price they paid was a religion which brought them anxiety rather than comfort.³³ ³³ To clarify, the personal and family lives of front-line evangelicals like Wilberforce were often far from grim; what is being described here is the effect on so many rankand-ﬁle evangelicals.

238

Boyd Hilton

The second point—the lack of bolt holes—relates to the fact that, for every Anglican who embraced agnosticism or even atheism after c.1848, there were probably hundreds who merely discarded the harsher evangelical doctrines in favour of the fashionable incarnational religion popularized by F. D. Maurice.³⁴ The latter had been brought up as a Unitarian, and introduced into the Church of England a Unitarian-style conviction that God was a God of love who did not punish in anger. Before 1850, however, this escape route was simply not available within the Church of England, since the scheme of salvation was a cardinal tenet of most High Churchmen as well as evangelicals. True, the so-called Liberal Anglicans of the 1830s³⁵ played down the harsher aspects of orthodox doctrine, and can therefore be seen as precursors of the later nineteenth-century Broad Church, to which most of Maurice’s devotees belonged, but they did not offer anything like the same degree of comfort, either because like Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall they were too intellectual, or else because like Thomas Arnold their theology was quite as scarily retributive and conscience-striking as that of any evangelical. Arnold preached a God of love and forgiveness, but it was hardly an avuncular sort of love. Of course, there was always Unitarianism itself, but for members of the Establishment this was still regarded as beyond the pale, the social pressures against embracing it still acute. The third point is that, although God was known to be under attack, not least from French scientists and German philosophers, before 1850 the vast majority of English people were not yet ready to let go, partly for social reasons but mainly for spiritual ones. Not being ready to let go, they still dared to believe that God might be in his Heaven despite everything. ‘It’s not the despair! I can stand the despair! It’s the hope I can’t stand’, cries the punctuality-obsessed anti-hero of Michael Frayn’s ﬁlm script Clockwise (1986) as, desperate to make a vital appointment on time, he sees off a succession of hobgoblins only to be thwarted by yet more foul ﬁends. Likewise it was hope that unnerved so many Christians in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It could almost be the motto of Tennyson’s elegiac poem In Memoriam, composed from 1835 onwards, published in 1850, and indicative of an anguish amounting almost to ³⁴ Women, who for ﬁfty years had invested most strongly in evangelicalism, were now especially attracted to Maurice’s more benign version of Christianity. ³⁵ Heirs of the earlier Latitudinarians and Noetics.

Moral Disciplines

239

mental derangement. Tennyson was a Cambridge friend of Sterling, though unlike him he ultimately kept his faith. However, if In Memoriam is any guide, it must have been touch and go, for the poem oscillates between hope and despair in its ‘wild and wandering cries’ of personal grief. Finally, the challenge to Christianity was more deadly before 1850 than afterwards because it was external. The ethical revulsion felt by Froude and others from the mid-century onwards was troubling, but given the Mauricean alternatives it did not necessarily entail loss of belief in God. Scientiﬁc and critical assaults, by contrast, could not be sidestepped so easily. And, as recent research has conclusively demonstrated, the warfare between science and religion occurred in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and not the third as used to be thought. (It coincided, in other words, with the real crisis of faith as it is being presented in this essay.) The biggest single scientiﬁc bombshell is now seen to have been Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844) and not Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). The latter was once thought to have ‘banished [God] from the world’,³⁶ but it is now seen to have been assimilated pretty easily by the majority of upper- and upper-middle-class Anglicans.³⁷ Vestiges, on the other hand, was dynamite. So much is evident, for example, from In Memoriam, in which the greatest threats to orthodox belief were identiﬁed as fashionable phrenology (which challenged free will), the nebular hypothesis (which challenged the idea of a creational big bang à la Genesis), palaeontology, and geology. The two last struck Tennyson as especially damaging to faith, given that recent ‘facts’ had forced Christian scientists to propose a theory of ‘punctuated progression’—by which they conceded that God had performed successive acts of special creation, and had intervened from time to time in the earth’s history in order to extinguish dinosaurs and suchlike primitive forms of life. This seemed hard to reconcile with a God who loved all those whom he had created. ³⁶ N. Annan in P. Appleman, W. A. Madden, and M. Wolff, eds., 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington, Ind., 1959), 35–7. ³⁷ Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago, 1989); James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago, 2000); Boyd Hilton, ‘The Politics of Anatomy and an Anatomy of Politics c. 1825–1850’, in S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young, eds., History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 179–97.

240

Boyd Hilton Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life . . . ‘So careful of the type?’ but no: From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go . . . [Man] trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s ﬁnal law— Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed. In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), LV–LVI³⁸

There are also grounds for thinking that biblical criticism, like science, was more scarifying before 1850 than after. Take, for example, the case of Edward Pusey, who as an inquisitive young man was encouraged by the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford to spend time at the universities of Berlin (where he studied under Schleiermacher), Bonn, and Göttingen. The outcome was a substantial volume entitled An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany (1828). Three years later, however, alarmed by signs of popular subversion during the political crisis over parliamentary reform, Pusey gagged on what he had done, did his best to suppress the book, and spent the rest of his life on biblical exegesis of the most orthodox sort, in other words with his head in the intellectual sands.³⁹ It would be easy to read this story in linear or whiggish terms, as an early (and swiftly regretted) anticipation of later mainstream critical scepticism. From such a perspective, this German tradition only entered the consciousness of the British as a whole in 1846 with George Eliot’s English translation of Das Leben Jesu. Alternatively, and perhaps more plausibly, Pusey’s personal crisis can be seen as a problem speciﬁcally of the socially turbulent 1830s and 1840s. Timothy Larsen has argued recently, and with great conviction, that Strauss did not come over in translation as a latter-day Voltaire. Rather, by placing ³⁸ It seems that these lines preceded the publication of Vestiges, being based mainly on Tennyson’s reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3). Ricks, Tennyson, ii. 370–1n. ³⁹ H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Edward Bouverie Pusey: From Scholar to Tractarian’, Journal of Theological Studies, 32 (1981), 101–24.

Moral Disciplines

241

knowledge of the historical Jesus on a surer footing, he was seen as seeking (like Maurice) to improve rather than abolish Christianity. ‘Wild rumours notwithstanding, Strauss’s real appeal in a British context was that he was less radical than alternative skeptical voices; his approach was more palatable for those with lingering pious convictions or sensibilities.’⁴⁰ Elsewhere Larsen has gone so far as to suggest that the 1850s was a decade in which many notable reconversions occurred among persons who had formerly declared their attachment to secularist values. His exemplars are all radicals like Thomas Cooper, but if the reason for reconversion was the growing emphasis on God’s cuddlier (i.e. Mauricean) aspects, there is no reason why it should not have operated at all levels of society. Clearly this possibility demands further research, but whether or not there were many returns to faith among the upper and middle classes in the 1850s and 1860s, it does seem evident that German philosophy had been more frightening to such Englishmen when it appeared in a language that hardly any of them could understand, and that translation to a large extent tamed it. The publication of Essays and Reviews (1860) has traditionally been seen as the point at which the German poison ﬁnally began to ﬂow through establishment veins, but although the book caused a greater stir than Darwin’s one year earlier, the aftershock was hardly overwhelming. As Owen Chadwick has observed, ‘the book was [only] important because it was written by clergymen. If laymen had written it, it would have fallen dead from the press.’⁴¹ There are then many reasons for supposing that losses of faith occurring at or after the mid-century were neither traumatic nor a source of conﬂict, either for individuals or for society at large. One might even go further and argue that loss of faith was sometimes a consequence of the decline in a conﬂictual culture. So much is suggested by Arthur Hugh Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, a long poem written in 1848, the year of his deconversion. As the following passage suggests, his problem seems to have been, not the warfare between faith and doubt, but rather the fact that that war was now seen to be over, or was so unclear cut as to be unrecognizable as warfare.

⁴⁰ Timothy Larsen, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Tex., 2004), 43–58. ⁴¹ Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols. (London, 1966–70), ii. 78.

242

Boyd Hilton Where does circumstance end, and Providence, where begins it? What are we to resist, and what are we to be friends with? If there is battle, ‘tis battle by night: I stand in the darkness, Here in the melee of men, Ionian and Dorian on both sides, Signal and password known; which is friend and which is foeman? Is it a friend? I doubt, though he speak with the voice of a brother. ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ Though I mistrust the Field-Marshal, I bow to the duty of order, Yet is my feeling rather to ask, where is the battle? ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ ⭈ O that the armies indeed were arrayed! O joy of the onset! Sound thou Trumpet of God, come forth, Great Cause, to array us, King and leader appear, thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee. Would that their armies indeed were arrayed, O where is the battle! Neither battle I see, nor arraying, nor King in Israel.

Presumably Clough meant that it was easier to hold on to Belief when the world seemed fallen, and when Unbelief stalked the land with a capital U. If so, it was another indication that the mid-Victorian loss of faith reﬂected a society suddenly more at ease with itself.⁴²

III Perhaps because he was prepared to put up with probabilities as distinct from certainties, Gladstone did not suffer from doubts himself, but he was acutely conscious of the threats to belief, and desperately anxious to combat them. He was also determined, more forcefully than anyone, that public life should bear witness to God’s truth. If, as suggested above, the equivalence between his earlier ‘political Tractarianism’ and his later liberalism presents a conundrum, the constant was surely Gladstone’s desire to read God’s will for mankind. The difference lay in how that should be done. Because the very existence of God was being challenged, it was not enough simply to believe. There had to be some systematic basis for doing so, which in practice at that time meant that faith had either to be based on nature or revelation. One could ‘prove’ the existence of a God by demonstrating the wonderful contrivances of creation (natural theology), ⁴² Matthew Arnold may have been making a similar point in Dover Beach, published in 1867 but probably written in 1851, and possibly addressed to Clough, when he described the armies of faith and doubt as ﬁghting in ignorance and by night.

Moral Disciplines

243

and one could demonstrate the existence of a Christian God with reference to certain sacred texts, the testamentary legacy of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. This formulation may seem over-schematic, but there can be no doubt that Gladstone saw the situation in such terms. So much is evident from his well-known devotion to the philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, whose The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736) celebrated the symbiotic relationship of these two complementary approaches to faith.⁴³ Though both were indispensable, Butler wrote at a time when natural religion struck his contemporaries as self-evidently true, whereas revelation—with its emphasis on miracles and the supernatural—seemed highly suspect. Explicating the apparent analogy between them was therefore his way of asserting the full Christian message. However, the younger Gladstone who wrote The State in its Relations with the Church was part of a generation in semi-revolt against one hundred years of natural theology. All too obvious social ills—such as revolutionary movements, disease, poverty, and crime—backed up by the discoveries of scientists (‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’), seemed to show that if God was good he was not powerful, and vice versa. Gladstone may also have reacted against the Bridgewater Treatises,⁴⁴ some of which represented the vapid last gasp of natural theology. His disparagement of Paley’s degraded system of ethics (cited above) suggests as much. Like his Tractarian friends he preferred to base his faith on the Church’s historical credentials, but unlike them he cleaved to an older High Church as represented by Alexander Knox and William Palmer. In Gladstone’s polity as it was envisaged in The State in its Relations with the Church, moral instruction was to be imparted by a type of clerisy, famously deﬁned by Coleridge as comprising ‘all the so called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country’.⁴⁵ Likewise Gladstone’s reference in the same book to sovereigns and their ‘coadjutors’ echoed Coleridge’s earlier lines about great poets and scientists who had gone before, like Milton, Newton, Priestley. ⁴³ Hilton, Age of Atonement, 170–83, 340–52. ⁴⁴ Eight high-proﬁle treatises published during 1833–4. The immediate stimulus to writing The State in its Relations with the Church was Gladstone’s disgust at the utilitarian basis on which Thomas Chalmers defended National Establishments in his celebrated lectures of 1838, and Chalmers was the most prominent of all the Bridgewater authors. ⁴⁵ S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830), ed. John Colmer, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 10 (London, 1976), 46.

244

Boyd Hilton The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe’er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love’s wondrous plan Coadjutors of God. S. T. Coleridge, Religious Musings, 1794

The vision died, not because it was necessarily wrong in itself, but because the collapse of the Oxford Movement and the break-up of the Conservative party meant that the instruments no longer existed for carrying it into effect.⁴⁶ Gladstone had therefore no option but to base his search for truth on foundations that he had previously condemned—and Newman still condemned—as inadequate: that is, on private judgement and on inferences from the book of nature. Matthew’s formulation (‘colonial affairs, the morality of free trade and ﬁnance, and the morality of international affairs’) was about English citizens deciding how to spend their own money, about establishing ‘little Englands’ and surrogate English citizens in the third world, and about nations following their own destinies without interference from superpowers. Non-interventionist, free-trade, and free-market policies, by allowing natural forces to operate, were ways to discover experimentally what truths God had in store for humankind. Not that Gladstone was in much doubt as to the answer, writing in 1852 that ‘free and unrestricted exchange . . . with all the nations of the world’ would maintain Britain’s role as ‘the standard bearer of the nations upon the fruitful paths of peace, industry and commerce’.⁴⁷ ‘Fruitful paths.’ As this phrase suggests, Gladstone not only turned to natural theology but helped to give it a new twist. Whereas the natural theology of the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century had sought to detect God’s wisdom and power from the evidences of creation as it existed, the newer natural theology of the 1850s was impregnated with the idea of continuous development and progress—a uniformitarian as distinct from catastrophist vision. Bagehot, for example, argued that nineteenthcentury Western civilization was new because it was ‘changeable’, and he called his own the ‘age of discussion’ because ‘the common discussion of common actions or common interests [was] the root of change and progress’.⁴⁸ So powerful was this sense of uplift that even Darwin’s theory as to the origin of species (promulgated in 1859 but formulated two decades earlier) was generally interpreted in an optimistic, Lamarckian ⁴⁶ This was like Peel in 1829, declaring that he would have to abandon the attempt to govern Ireland through the Protestant Constitution because there were not ‘sufﬁcient instruments for its effectual and permanent continuance’. ⁴⁷ Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874, 81. ⁴⁸ Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 159.

Moral Disciplines

245

light, its emphasis on random and violent redundancy suppressed in favour of a belief that evolution would lead to ‘better, wiser, and more beautiful beings’.⁴⁹ Gladstone himself observed somewhat later that ‘the doctrine of Evolution, if it be true, enhances in my judgment the proper idea of the greatness of God, for it makes every stage of creation a legible prophecy of all those which are to follow it.’⁵⁰ Previous prophets like Arnold and Carlyle had called on human beings to strive, not for anything in particular, but because personal quest was all that a stationary universe had to offer. For Gladstone, a generation later, it was not so much a case of striving as of going with the ﬂow (or, in the case of statesmen, trying to anticipate it). The raven and the writing desk—standing respectively for nature and revelation—were equivalents for Gladstone in so far as they provided complementary bases for belief in God. His conﬁdence in ‘the great social forces which move upwards and onwards in their might and majesty’ was consistent with a widespread conviction among mid Victorians that the universe was open-ended. Such a perspective spelled the death of theodicy, since the existence of sin and suffering were now to be explained—not with reference to moral trial or providential admonitions—but by the fact that the world was not yet fully developed. It was this sense of evolutionary progress that provoked Salisbury’s sour comment about Gladstone’s ‘gorgeous reckless optimism’, and caused some schools and congregations, even as late as the mid-twentieth century, to sing a distorted version of Milton’s famous hymn, Let us with a Gladstone mind Praise the Lord for He is kind.

FURTHER READING Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991). Cowling, Maurice, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1980–2001). ⁴⁹ Paradoxically, or perhaps not, it was often the more fundamentalist evangelicals, those who had always seen God in a cruel light, who accepted Darwinian theory on its own terms most easily. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979), 252–98. ⁵⁰ Gladstone to Stanley Jevons, 10 May 1874, in Gladstone, Correspondence on Church and Religion, ii. 101.

246

Boyd Hilton

Helmstadter, Richard, J., ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’, in Bruce L. Kinzer, ed., The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1975), 3–42. —— and Lightman, Bernard, eds., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (Houndmills, 1990). Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Impact of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988). Jones, H. Stuart, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke, 2000). Larsen, Timothy, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Tex., 2004). Rowell, Geoffrey, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford, 1974). Secord, James A., Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ (Chicago, 2000). Young, David, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford, 1992).

Index Ackerknecht, Erwin 54–5 Addison, Charles 222 Africa 169–70, 171, 173, 175–6 see also Egypt, South Africa AIDS 58 Akroyd, Edward 88 alcohol 14, 17, 26, 33, 36, 49, 52, 84, 87, 90, 109, 115, 147, 162, 163, 195 Alice, Princess 235 Allon, Henry 93 American Revolution 103 Anatomy Act (1832) 77 Anglo-Catholics 188, 190–1, 192, 195, 196, 197 see also Catholics, Tractarians animals 49 Anti-Corn Law League 32 anticlericalism 189 Arabi Pasha 119 aristocracy 107 Armenia 103 army 83, 88, 117, 134, 135, 136 see also soldiers Arnold, Matthew 98, 236 Arnold, Thomas 179, 197, 227, 234, 238, 245 Artisans’ Dwellings (Torrens) Act (1868) 215 Artisans’ Dwellings (Cross) Act (1875) 215 art galleries 86 Asquith, H. H. 102 Athens 108, 110–11 Atiyah, P. S. 159, 164 Australia 7, 77, 89, 168, 171–2, 176 Austria 80 Ayrton, A. S. 87

Behlmer, George 162 Benthamism 6–7, 8, 25, 41, 43, 55–6, 76, 169, 170, 215, 226 Benton, Lauren 168 Biagini, E. F. (Eugenio) 211, 222 Biblical criticism 240–1 Birkenhead 57 Birmingham 47, 82, 111 Blackwell, Elizabeth 126, 149–51 Blair, Tony 120 Blake, Edward 114 Blake, Sophia Jex- 139–40 Bland, Lucy 153 ‘Bloody Code’ 16, 18, 160–1 see also capital punishment Boer War 48, 104, 195 see also South Africa Bombay 173 Booth, Charles 48 Bradford 89 Bradlaugh, Charles 102 Brewer, John 11 Bridgewater Treatises 243 Bright, John 101, 103, 121, 231 Bristol 47 Brodrick, George 85, 86 Brooks, Christopher 166, 190 Bruce, A. B. 235 Bruce, H. A. 87 Bulgaria 96, 103, 111, 117–18 Burke, Edmund 8 Burials Act (1880) 91, 179, 186 Burn, W. L. 232 Bush, George W. 120 Butler, Joseph 243 Butler, Josephine 38, 126, 131–4, 135, 139–40, 145, 151, 152–3, 234

Bagehot, Walter 82, 86, 225, 234, 244 Baldwin, Peter 17, 46 Ballot Act (1872) 87–8 Baner ac Amserau Cymru 116 Bank Charter Act (1844) 31 bankruptcy, see debt baptism 186–7 Bartley, Paula 148, 151

Calcutta 173 Callaway, Henry 235 Cambridge 91, 110, 187, 239 Canada 171–2, 176, 210 canals 213 Canning, George 77 capital punishment 160–2 Cardwell, Edward 87

248

Index

Caribbean 169, 171, 205 Carlyle, Thomas 234, 245 Catholics 31, 74–5, 78, 80, 91–3, 95, 102, 103, 116, 194, 196, 231, 233 Chadwick, Edwin 7, 42, 46, 55–6, 65–6 Chadwick, Owen 241 Chalmers, Thomas 194 Chamberlain, Joseph 3, 83, 86, 88, 89, 111, 116, 117–23 Chambers, Robert 239 Chanock, Martin 171 Chant, Laura 152 Chartism 19, 30, 33, 87, 104, 105, 129, 133, 218, 229–30 Chatham 144 children 35, 49, 130–2, 133, 148–50, 151, 216 China 103 Christian Socialists 82 Church, Richard 199 Church Association 184 Church Congress 184 Church (Defence) Institution 184 Church of England 4–5, 27, 30, 31, 74, 91–4, 97, 102, 104, 179–200, 226–9, 233, 237–8 church rates 31, 91, 181, 183, 185–6 clerical magistrates 188–9 disestablishment 94, 97, 104, 115, 194–6 in Wales 115–16, 194 Protection Society 184 Church of Ireland 31, 84, 115, 193, 195 Church of Scotland 5, 104, 115 Great Disruption 104 citizenship 101, 107–8, 127, 132 City of London 27, 31, 63 civil society 1, 4, 5, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 51–4, 58, 65–6, 126, 128, 130, 149, 153 Civil War American 64, 81, 88, 105 English 103, 105 civilization 8, 17, 92, 106, 120, 214 Clark, J. C. D. (Jonathan) 104 Clergy Discipline Act (1840) 182 Clifford, W. K. 235 Clough, Arthur Hugh 235, 241–2 Cobbe, Frances Power 234 Cobbett, William 181, 190 Cobden, Richard 101, 109, 231 Colchester 138, 144

Coleridge, S. T. 76, 197, 227, 243, 244 Colonists’ Association of East Africa 170 Combination Acts 217 Conder, Eustace 98, 100 Conservatives 9–10, 32, 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 89, 90, 91–2, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 110, 116, 118, 127, 208, 211, 231, 232, 244 Constabulary (Ireland) Act (1836) 170 Contagious Diseases Acts 4, 37–8, 90, 96, 125–6, 133–47 Royal Commission (1871) 135, 142–8 Cook, Robin 121 Cooper, Thomas 241 co-operatives 19, 108, 109, 211 Cootes, William 151 Corn Laws 27, 30, 32, 77–8, 79, 109, 231 courts Chancery 209 of conscience 165–6 county 165–7 ecclesiastical 184 superior 165 coverture 38, 216 Craven, Paul 217 crime 12, 15, 16, 36, 76, 225 see also law Crimean War 28, 78, 79, 134 Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) 151–2 Croker, J. W. 234 Cromwell, Oliver 103, 105 Cross, R. A. 215 Crystal Palace 229–30 Cymru Fydd 116 Dale, R. W. 93 Darwin, Charles 236, 239, 241, 244 Dasent, G. W. 231 Daunton, Martin 32, 44, 46 Davis, Jennifer 162 Dawson, George 82 debt national 28, 29, 117, 121, 210 personal 164–5, 167, 175, 206, 208–10, 216, 221 defence 28, 29 degeneration 49 democracy 2, 3–4, 16, 20, 45, 48, 73, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88–9, 95–7, 99, 101, 103, 104–8, 110, 122, 198, 227

Index Derfel, R. J. 235 Devonport 144 Devonshire, 8th Duke of 86 Dicey, A. V. 6, 7, 8, 159, 164, 176, 215 Dilke, Charles 88 disease 3, 4, 44, 46, 54–9, 134, 135 see also Contagious Diseases Acts, public health, venereal disease Disraeli, Benjamin 32–3, 74, 96–7, 118, 193, 210 divorce 38, 165, 186 Divorce Act (1857) 186 Dodgson, C. L. (Lewis Carroll) 229 Dunning, T. J. 110 Durham 112 East India Company 173 Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Act (1840) 182 Edinburgh 140 education 7, 10, 30, 53, 76, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 94–6, 103, 104, 108, 120, 123, 148–50, 231 design 76 religious 73, 77, 90, 92, 104, 108, 181, 187–8 School Boards 148 Education Act (1870) 84, 91, 108, 117 Egypt 99, 118, 119–23 electricity 47 Elias, Norbert 17, 52 Eliot, George 240 Elliot, Arthur 84 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 127, 128 n. 5 Ellis, Tom 116 Emery, William 197 emigration 207, 210, 214 empire 4, 28, 48, 85, 88, 92, 98–9, 106, 113–14, 117, 118–23, 138, 153, 168–76 of Napoleon III 74, 80 self-government in 77, 79, 119–23, 169–70 Employers and Workmen Act (1875) 171 Encumbered Estates Act (1849) 210 English Church Union 184 ‘English constitution’ 101 Epping Forest 87 Ertman, Thomas 51 Essays and Reviews (1860) 241 Established Church Act (1836) 182

249

eugenics 48–9 Europe 2, 8, 19–20, 28, 41, 47, 53–66, 72–3, 77–80, 85, 95, 99, 104, 106, 120, 136, 153 evangelicals 25, 92, 93, 117, 127, 179, 184, 192, 197, 224, 232, 235–8 Evans, David Morier 207 Fabians 6–7, 8 factories, see labour regulation Falklands 200 family 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 49, 125, 128–31, 133, 149 Fawcett, Henry 87, 110 Fielden, John 43 Finer, S. E. 7, 51 First World War 199 Forster, W. E. 89 Foucault, Michel 11–13, 14, 34, 35, 49, 52, 181 Fox, Charles James 77 France 29, 53–4, 57, 58, 60–4, 74, 75, 80, 85, 113, 121, 122, 136, 137, 139 Frayn, Michael 238 French Revolution 103, 196 free markets 1, 5, 40, 203–22, 224, 244 free trade 10, 65, 66, 71–2, 79–80, 98–9, 101, 104, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 208–9, 211–12, 228, 229, 231, 244 see also Corn Laws, tariff reform freedom of conscience 92, 96, 98, 103–4, 106, 117, 126, 228 freedom of contract 84, 159–60, 164–7, 174–5, 215–19, 222 see also labour regulation freedom of speech 15, 87, 128, 137 freethought, see secularism friendly societies 109 Froude, J. A. 83, 88, 235, 236, 239 Gambles, Anna 231 Garrett, Elizabeth 126, 140 gas 47, 213 Gaskell, Elizabeth 233 Gatrell, V. A. C. (Vic) 160 Gee, Thomas 116 General Board of Health 55–6 Germany 29, 48, 53–4, 57–8, 60–4, 113

250

Index

Gill, Robin 190 Gladstone, W. E. 1, 3, 9–10, 32–3, 36, 85, 87, 88, 92, 99–100, 101, 117–19, 204, 210, 213, 225–30, 232, 237, 242–5 and Ireland 90, 99, 112–14 ﬁscal policies 71, 83, 116–17, 213, 228–9 Glasgow 44 Glorious Revolution (1688) 101 Gore, Charles 197 Goschen, George 82, 89, 99–100 Great Exhibition (1851) 229–30 Greece 107, 108, 110–11 Green, Simon 190 Green, T. H. 84 Greenwell, William 189 Greg, W. R. 88 Grey, 2nd Earl 77 Grey, 3rd Earl 88 Grifﬁn, Ben 216 Grote, George 107 Habitual Criminals Act (1869) 36 Hammond, Barbara 6 Hammond, Burrell 191 Hammond, J. L. 6 handloom weavers 43 Harcourt, William 74, 87, 89 Hardie, J. Keir 102, 111–12 Hare, Julius 191, 238 Harling, Philip 221 Harris, Jose 16–17, 30 Hartington, Marquess of, see Devonshire, 8th Duke of Hastings, 20th Lord 191 Hay, Douglas 217 Heathcote, William 191 Helmstadter, Richard 235 Henderson, Arthur 102 Herzen, Alexander 19–20 Hilton, A. J. B. (Boyd) 9–10 Holland, Henry Scott 197 homosexuality 49 Hopkins, Ellice 148, 151 House of Lords 115 housing 43, 215 Howe, Anthony 231 Howell, George 111–12 Hungary 20 hunting 194 Hutton, R. H. 81 Huxley, T. H. 235

illegitimacy 14, 16, 146 imperialism, see empire Independent Labour Party 106, 114 India 28, 96, 122–3, 169, 173–6 Penal Code (1862) 169–70 individualism 1, 6, 7, 11–12, 15–19, 26, 38–9, 53, 55, 72, 78, 82, 89, 93, 100, 132–3, 159, 167, 174, 176 Industrial Schools Amendment Act (1880) 148 Inge, W. R. 199 insanity 12, 37, 133 internationalism 102, 113–14, 118 Iraq 120, 121 Ireland 3, 4, 30, 79, 91, 92, 95, 99, 113, 118, 120, 122, 168, 170 Board of Works 209 Famine 5, 207–10, 228 Home Rule 90, 99, 106, 112–17, 123 land 84, 109, 170 Land League 4, 109 Northern 101, 104 United Irishmen 103 Irish National League 112, 114 Italy 80, 113, 116, 120 Jeune, Francis 182 Jefferys, J. B. 219 Jews 31, 228 Joint Stock Act (1844) 204, 219–21 Joyce, Patrick 106 Karsten, Peter 172, 176 Knox, Alexander 243 Kostal, R. W. 206 Kruger, Paul 119 Labour party 101, 113, 123 see also Independent Labour Party labour regulation 7, 28, 33, 38–9, 41, 43, 64, 84, 101, 109, 130, 132, 147, 171–3, 175–6, 189, 210, 217–19, 231, 233 Ladies’ Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls 148 Ladies National Association 38, 125, 148, 152 land 84, 85, 89, 101, 109, 115, 116, 123, 170, 176, 208–10 Lang, Cosmo Gordon 199 Lansdowne, 3rd Marquess of 82 Larsen, Timothy 195, 240–1

Index law 4, 12, 15–16, 18, 36, 38–9, 49, 72, 88, 103, 159–78 civil 164–7, 171, 173–6, 177, 215–19 codiﬁcation 168–71, 173, 177 criminal 75, 160–4, 168–71, 173, 177 see also ‘Bloody Code’, capital punishment, crime, prisons Law, Harriet, 235 Law, William 235 Layard, A. H. 88 Lee, Robert 189 Leith 57 Lester, Markham 216 Liberal Unionists 90, 106 Liberation Society 186 Liberty and Property Defence League 90 libraries 86 Licensing Act (1872) 84 Licensing Bill (1871) 87 lighthouses 214 Lightman, Bernard 235 limited liability 221 Liverpool 44, 143 Liverpool, 2nd Earl of 9 Lloyd George, David 102 Lobban, Michael 169 Locke, John 226 local government 26–7, 29, 42–7, 53, 56, 82, 85–6, 87, 89, 107–8, 117, 120, 132, 215 Local Government Board 35, 46, 86 London 13, 15 London County Council (LCC) 215 Lowe, Robert 74, 82 Macaulay, T. B. 169, 226, 234 McConville, Seán 162 MacDonagh, Oliver 8 MacDonald, J. Ramsay 102 Mackintosh, James 234 Madras 173 Maine, Henry 122, 159, 169, 175, 176 Malta 138 Malthus, Thomas 208 Manchester 44 Mandler, Peter 231 Mann, Michael 17, 51 marriage 14, 16, 38, 126, 130–1, 137, 138, 164, 166–7, 185, 186–7, 216 Married Women’s Property Acts 167, 216 Marsh, Peter 117, 118 Marshall, Alfred 48, 215

251

Martineau, Harriet 134–7, 140, 142 Marxism 8, 14, 19 Mason, Michael 16 Massachusetts 108 Master and Servant Acts 217–19 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) 38 Matrimonial Causes Act (1878) 164 Matthew, H. C. G. (Colin) 1, 10, 228–9, 244 Maurice, F. D. 197, 238, 239, 241 May, Thomas Erskine 85 Maynooth 228 Melbourne, 2nd Viscount 226 men masculinity 79, 80, 86, 93, 105–7, 132–3, 136–7, 153, 196 ‘single male breadwinner’ 18, 34, 38–9, 130 Methodism 102, 191 Miall, Edward 83 middle class 19, 89, 101, 104 Mill, James 105, 234 Mill, John Stuart 101, 102, 106–8, 110, 117, 120, 122, 130, 137, 148, 204, 211–15 Milton, John 243, 245 Morley, John 102, 232 Mort, Frank 151, 154 Mosley, Oswald 186 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 45, 75, 108 Napoleon III 74, 78, 80 national character 2, 73, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 99, 150, 197–8 National Liberal Federation 105–6, 110–12 National Repeal Association 125 National Union of Women Workers 152 nationalism 116, 183 see also patriotism Native Porters and Labour Regulations (1902) 173 navy 28, 37–8, 48, 80, 88, 117, 144 New Liberalism 6, 16, 71, 98, 123, 216 New Poor Law (1834) 34–6, 39, 41, 76, 77, 189 see also poor law New Zealand 77, 171–2, 176 Newcastle upon Tyne 129–30 Newman, Francis 235 Newman, J. H. 233, 234, 244 Newton, Isaac 243

252

Index

Nicholls, Paul 195 Nightingale, Florence 126, 134–8, 140 Nonconformists 5, 31, 47, 74–5, 85, 89, 91, 94–7, 101–5, 108, 115, 116, 117, 119, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195–6, 197, 198, 231 and education 83, 86, 90, 95–6, 187–8 and temperance 90, 195 Obscenity Act (1857) 137 old age 35, 53 ‘Old Corruption’ 29–30, 33, 46, 74–5, 95, 188, 221 Owenism 128, 129 Oxford 91, 187, 233, 240 Oxford Movement 93, 183, 228, 244 see also Anglo-Catholics Paley, William 226, 243 Palmer, William 243 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 121, 210 Paris Commune 85 Parish and District Councils Act (1894) 108 Parliament 74–6, 97, 101, 184, 193 reform of 81, 84, 85, 104–6, 115, 125, 221 see also Reform Acts Parnell, Charles Stuart 112, 114 Parry, J. P. (Jonathan) 117, 197 party system 76, 82, 88–9, 110 paternalism 6, 8, 32, 106, 130, 131, 227, 229 patriotism 20, 73, 74, 80, 84, 97, 98, 99, 103, 121, 183–4, 197–9 Pattison, Mark 233 peace 102, 117, 231 Peel, Robert 9–10, 29, 32, 77, 78, 182, 208, 209, 211, 228, 231–2 Pentonville (prison) 37 Personal Rights Association 152 Peterloo 188 philanthropy 12, 44, 128, 136, 146, 154, 190 Pigou, A. C. 215 Pluralities Act (1838) 182 Pitt, William 9, 29, 62 Polanyi, Karl 13, 40 Polden, Patrick 166 police 20, 36–7, 52, 57, 81, 87, 138, 141, 150–1, 152, 168, 170 political economy 7, 82, 90

poor law 7, 26, 34, 76, 84, 85, 89, 105, 130, 133, 136, 142, 148, 189, 210 see also New Poor Law Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), see New Poor Law population 12, 15, 35, 44–5, 208 Portsmouth 143 Portugal 77 Post Ofﬁce 21 Pound, William 183 Priestley, Joseph 117, 243 Prison Act (1865) 142, 152 Prisoners’ Counsel Act (1836) 161 prisons 11, 37, 49, 76, 133, 141, 160, 161, 162, 163 privacy 60, 62 property 15, 30, 84, 89, 162, 174–6, 220 see also land proportional representation 106 prostitution 26, 36, 49, 58, 66, 90, 125–6, 132, 134–47, 150, 152, 153 psychology 52 public health 7, 26, 28, 41, 42–6, 54–9, 65–6, 81, 82, 83, 135, 215 Public Health Act (1848) 42, 231 Public Health Act (1875) 57 public opinion 18, 20, 30–1, 88 Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) 193 Pusey, Edward 240 race 122, 176 Railway Act (1844) 213 railways 204–7, 213 Reform Act (First, 1832) 74–6, 161, 193 Reform Act (Second, 1867) 33, 83, 105, 125 Reform Act (Third, 1884) 48, 99, 105, 114 registration (births, deaths and marriages) 186 Reid, Alastair 222 Reith, James 114 religion 2, 10, 31, 33, 73, 85, 91–7, 101–2, 106, 128, 174, 179–200, 224–45 Rendel, Stuart 115 retrenchment, see taxation Roberts, David 231 Roberts, M. J. D. (Michael) 18 Roberts, W. P. 218

Index Rochdale 231 Rome 105, 120 Rose, Nikolas 12, 52 Rousseau, J.-J. 127 Rowntree, B. Seebohm 48 Ruskin, John 235, 236 Russell, G. W. E. 83 Russell, Lord John 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 92, 101, 208, 209 Russia 19–20, 80 Said, Edward 113 Saint, Andrew 190 St. Paul’s Cathedral 200 Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of 245 Sanitary Act (1866) 57 Sanitary Law Amendment Act (1874) 57 sanitary reform, see public health Schleiermacher, Friedrich 240 science 198, 214, 236, 239, 243, 244–5 Scotland 14, 58, 114, 231 Home Rule 114–15 land 84, 109 Scott, James 51 Scott, William 183 secularism 102, 128, 129 Seebohm, Frederic 85 self-help 103, 109, 148 sex 11, 12, 14, 18, 26, 33, 49, 52, 131, 149–50, 152, 153 see also venereal disease Shoemaker, Robert 15, 17 Simon, John 58, 81 slavery 84, 103, 104, 105, 107, 129, 131, 139 Smith, Adam 203, 212, 219 Smith, F. B. 134 Smith, Josiah William 166 Snowden, Philip 102 Social Science Association 184 socialism 6, 8, 16, 73, 78, 85, 86, 89, 99, 113, 120, 129, 211, 222 soldiers 20, 37–8, 138 South Africa 118–19, 173 see also Boer War Southey, Robert 234 Spain 77 Spear, Thomas, 175 Spencer, Herbert 90, 102, 203–4 standard of living 7 Stanley, Mary 234 Stansfeld, James 86 State

253

effectiveness 2, 4, 21, 41, 54, 56, 64, 66 ‘ﬁscal-military’ 11, 18, 27, 59 strength 1, 5, 17, 25–49, 52–4, 55, 65–6 welfare 3, 7–9, 19, 20, 21, 44, 45, 109, 154, 159, 177 Statute of Artiﬁcers (1563) 218, 219 Stead, W. T. 151 Stephen, James Fitzjames 88, 122, 159 Stephen, Leslie 235 Stephens, J. R. 87 Sterling, John 237, 239 stock market 204–7, 219–21 Strauss, D. F. 236, 240–1 Suez Canal 118 Summary Jurisdiction (Married Women) Act (1895) 164 Sunday schools 188 Sweden 61, 63–4 Switzerland 64, 111 Tait, Archibald 179 tariff reform 110 see also free trade taxation 32, 45, 47, 48, 59–66, 72, 74, 81, 82, 88, 89, 97, 101, 109–10, 120, 130, 175, 213, 227 Taylor, Harriet 102, 130 temperance, see alcohol Temple, Frederick 197 Temple, William 199 Ten Hours Act (1847) 231 Tennyson, Alfred 230, 238–40 Test and Corporation Acts 31, 103 Thatcher, Margaret 9 n. 17, 20, 25 Thiers, Adolphe 62 Thirlwall, Connop 238 Thomas, Garibaldi 116 Thompson, E. P. 19 Thorne, Richard Thorne 65–6 Tithe Act (1936) 186 tithes 185–6 Tocqueville, Alexis de 107 Torrens, W. T. McCullagh 215 Tractarianism 183, 228, 229, 233, 242, 243 see also Anglo-Catholics, Oxford Movement Trades Union Congress (TUC) 19, 102 trade unions 19, 39, 106, 110, 111–12, 218, 222 transport 47

254

Index

Trevelyan, Charles 209 Trevelyan, G. O. 84 Turner, Frank 235 Turkey 122 Unitarians 82, 102, 117, 128, 238 United Irishmen 103 United States 7, 9, 49, 60, 64, 81, 88, 89, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 210 universities 86, 91, 92, 132, 140, 187, 240 vaccination 137 Valverde, Marianne 52 veneral disease 58–9, 125–6, 134, 140–1, 149–50 see also Contagious Diseases Acts Victoria (queen), 74 ‘Victorian revolution in government’ 8–9, 25–6, 40–1 Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights 148, 151 violence 15, 16, 137, 153 vivisection 137 voluntary associations 18, 53, 128, 148, 180 Wales 13, 104, 109, 114–16, 194 Home Rule 115–16 Welsh Land League 116 Walkowitz, Judith 153

Washbrook, David 174 water 47, 55, 58, 213 Webb, Beatrice 45, 217 Webb, Sidney 45, 217 Wellington, 1st Duke of 75 Wesleyans, see Methodism Westminster Abbey 199 Wiener, Martin 17, 161 Williams, Sarah 187, 190 Wilson, A. N. 235, 237 Wollstonecraft, Mary 127, 130 Wolstenholme-Elmy, Elizabeth 152 women 3, 4, 12, 17, 18, 26, 35, 37–9, 125–54, 162–4, 166–7, 175, 189, 216 suffrage 105, 106–7, 108, 114, 125, 130, 134, 148–9, 153 Wood, Charles 82, 209 ‘Woodbine Willie’ (G. A. S. Kennedy) 199 Wordsworth, William 179 working class 2, 19, 25, 26, 33, 35, 37–9, 44, 48, 81, 87, 101–2, 105, 107, 109, 111–13, 116, 129, 130, 133, 149, 154, 218, 229, 231 workmen’s compensation 165 Worsted Embezzlement Act (1843) 218 Young, G. M. 230, 232, 235 Zedner, Lucia 162, 163