Copyright Fine Art Society

Victoria Regina

1837

From the Painting by H. T. Wells, R.A.

The
QUEEN’S REIGN

AND ITS COMMEMORATION · A LIT­ERARY AND PICTORIAL REVIEW OF THE PERIOD · THE STORY OF THE VICTORIAN TRANSFORM­ATION · BY SIR WALTER BESANT

1837

1897

The Werner Company · · London

Chicago · New York · Berlin · Paris
Eighteen Hundred and Ninety Seven

CONTENTS

Introduction

“Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty.”

As You Like It.

When Sydney Smith, towards the close of his life, considered the changes which had passed over the country within his recollection, he said that he wondered how the young men of his time had managed to preserve even a decent appearance of cheerfulness. Sydney Smith died in 1845, just at the beginning of those deeper and wider changes of which he suspected nothing; for, though he was a clear-headed man in many ways, he was no prophet—he saw the actual and the present, but was unable to feel the action of the invisible and potent forces which were creating a future to him terrible and almost impossible. Had he possessed the prophetic spirit, he would have been another Jeremiah for the destruction of the old forms of society; the levelling up and the levelling down destined to take place would have been pain and grief intolerable to him.

I have always maintained that the eighteenth century lingered on in its ways, customs, and modes of thought until the commencement of Queen Victoria’s reign, and I regard myself with a certain complacency as having been born on the fringe of that interesting period. I might also take pleasure in remembering that one who has lived through this reign has been an eyewitness, a bystander, perhaps in some minute degree an assistant, during a Revolution which has transformed this country completely from every point of view, not only in manners and customs, but also in thought, in ideas, in standards; in the way of regarding this world, and in the way of considering the world to come. I do not, however, take much pleasure in this retrospect, because the transition has taken place silently, without my knowledge; it escaped my notice while it went on: the world has changed before my eyes, and I have not regarded the phenomenon, being busily occupied over my own little individual interests. I have been, indeed, like one who sits in a garden thinking and weaving stories, nor heeding while the shadows shift slowly across the lawns, while the hand of the dial moves on from morning to afternoon. I have been like such a one, and, like him, I have awakened to find that the air, the light, the sky, the sunshine have all changed, and that the day is well-nigh done.

Do not expect in this volume a Life of Queen Victoria. You have her public life in the events of her reign: of her private life I will speak in the next chapter. But I can offer you no special, otherwise unattainable, information; there will be here no scandal of the Court; I have climbed no backstairs; I have peeped through no key-hole; I have perused no secret correspondence; I have, on this subject, nothing to tell you but what you know already.

Do not again look in these pages for a résumé of public events. You may find them in any Annual or Encyclopædia. What I propose to show you is the transformation of the people by the continual pressure and influence of legislation and of events of which no one suspected the far-reaching action. The greatest importance of public events is often seen, after the lapse of years, in their effect upon the character of the people: this view of the case, this transforming force of any new measure, seldom considered by statesman or by philosopher, because neither one nor the other has the prophetic gift—if it could be adequately considered while that measure is under discussion—would be stronger than any possible persuasion or any arguments of expediency, logic, or abstract justice.

I propose, therefore, to present a picture of the various social strata in 1837, and to show how the remarkable acts of British Legislation, such as Free Trade, cheap newspapers, improved communications, together with such accidents as the discovery of gold in Australia, and of diamonds at the Cape, have altogether, one with the other, so completely changed the mind and the habits of the ordinary Englishman that he would not, could he see him, recognise his own grandfather. And I hope that this sketch may prove not only useful in the manner already indicated, but also interesting and fresh to the general readers.

W. B.

Easter Sunday, 18th April 1897.

CHAPTER I
QUEEN AND CONSTITUTION

“The wise woman buildeth her house.”—Book of Proverbs.

In 1837 the Queen mounted the throne. It was a time of misgiving and of discontent. The passing of the Reform Act of 1832 had not as yet produced the results expected of it; there were other and more sweeping reforms in the air: the misery and the oppression of the factory hands, the incredible cruelty practised on the children of the mill and the mine, the deep poverty of the agricultural districts, the distress of the trading classes, formed a gloomy portal to a reign which was destined to be so long and so glorious. Thus, in turning over the papers then circulated among the working-classes of the time, one observes a total absence of anything like loyalty to the Crown. It has vanished. A blind hatred has taken its place. What is loyalty to the Crown? To begin with, it is something more than an intelligent adhesion to the Constitution; it regards the Sovereign as personifying and representing the nation; it ascribes to the Sovereign, therefore, the highest virtues and qualities which the nation itself would present to the world. The King, among loyal people, is brave, honest, truthful, the chief support of the Constitution, the Fountain of Honour. To obey the King is to obey the country. To die for the King is to die for the country. The Army and the Navy are the King’s Army and Navy. The King grants commissions; the King is supposed to direct military operations. The King is the First Gentleman in his country. When one reads the words which used to be addressed to such a man as Charles the Second one has to remember these things. Charles the Second, unworthy as he was in his private life, was still the representative of the nation. Therefore, to ascribe to that unworthy person these virtues which were so notoriously lacking was no more than a recognition of the fact that he was King. Has, then, personal character, private honour, truth, principle, nothing to do with kingcraft? Formerly, nothing or next to nothing. Now, everything. Another George the Fourth would now be impossible. But he has been made impossible by the private character of his niece.

Consider a little further the question of loyalty. I say that in 1837 among the mass of the people, even among the better class, there was none. Indeed the loyalty of the better sort had suffered for more than a hundred years many grievous knocks and discouragements. The first two Georges, good and great in official language, were aliens; they spoke a foreign tongue; they saw little of the people; yet they were tolerated, and even popular in a way, because they steadfastly upheld the Constitution and the Protestant religion. The third George began well; he was a Prince always of high moral character, strong principle, and great sincerity. Since Edward the Confessor or Henry the Sixth there had been no Sovereign so virtuous. But his constant endeavours to extend the Royal Prerogative, his obstinate treatment of the American Provinces against the impassioned and reiterated entreaties of Chatham, Burke, and the City of London, his stubborn refusal to hear of Parliamentary Reform, his desire to govern by a few families, his long affliction and seclusion, destroyed most of the personal affection with which he began. His successor, the hero of a thousand caricatures, a discredited voluptuary, never commanded the least respect except in official addresses; nor did William the Fourth, old, without force or character, without dignity. Wherefore, in 1837, when the cry of “Our Young Queen” was raised, it met with little response from the great mass of the people.

THE DUKE OF KENT

In its place there was an eager looking forward to Revolution and a Republic. There can be no doubt that in the thirties and the forties there were many who looked forward to a Republic as actually certain; that is to say, as certain as the next day’s sun. The Chartists numbered many strong Republicans in their body, though the Law of Treason forbade them to put forward the establishment of a Republic as one of their aims. There were newspapers, however, which spoke openly of a Republic as a matter of time only. The great European upheaval of 1848, save for the miserable fiasco of the Chartist meeting, left this country undisturbed. Not a single Republican rising was attempted in Great Britain. Those living men who can remember thirty or forty years back, can very well recall the Republican ideas which were floating about in men’s minds. Where are those ideas now? They are gone; they exist no longer, save, perhaps, among a very small class. I do not know even if they have an organ of their own. The reason is, that as the Chartist movement—the agitation for Reform—was due mainly to the widespread distress and the discontent of the country, so, when the distress vanished, the desire for change vanished also.

THE DUCHESS OF KENT

In this account of transformation the return to loyalty must be noted first. It is not only loyalty to the Queen herself, though that is universal, but to the Crown. There is a general feeling that the Leader of the Nation—not the Imperator, Dictator, or Emperor, but a nominal Leader, such as our own, one under whose presidency the Government is carried on, who is not, however, the Government—is more conveniently the heir of a certain family rather than a person elected by the country at large at regular intervals. The United States think differently. This, however, is what seems to us. We do not want a great popular election convulsing the country once every four years with a desperate party struggle; we have already quite as many elections as we want; we are quite satisfied if our President succeeds when his time comes, gives his name to the events of his reign, and continues in the Presidential chair for life. We ask of him only to make himself as good a figure-head as he can; we expect him to observe his coronation oath; and we beg him, if he wishes to stay where he is, not on any account to intrigue or scheme for the extension of the Royal Prerogative.

On the other hand, we willingly agree to attribute to a Sovereign all the glories of the reign; as if he himself commanded the armies and the fleets; as if he himself enlarged Science and Learning and Philosophy; as if he himself were a leader in Literature, Science, and Art. This is because the Sovereign is the representative of the Nation. In the same way the disasters and miseries of the reign must also be placed to his account, as if he himself were the author and the cause of everything. Thus by far the greater part of the distress and discontent which prevailed during the first years of the Reign (1837–48) was attributed in the minds of the people as due to the Sovereign and the monarchical forms of Government.

With the gradual return of loyalty gradually grew quieter the old clamours for the abolition of the House of Lords. I will show you some other reasons why this clamour ceased. First of all, in times of prosperity political changes are never demanded. A revolution presupposes a time of want, distress, or humiliation. We have enjoyed a time of general prosperity for many years.

I believe that Americans find it hard to understand the continued existence of our Upper House. Well, but something may be said for that. Thus, the House of Lords contains about 650 possible members; of these about thirty, or even less, and those including the Law Lords, do the whole work of the House. These thirty are in a sense representatives of the whole number, not regularly elected, but allowed to be the representatives. It is quite conceivable—even by the strongest advocate of popular election—that a body of 650 gentlemen, all of the best possible education, nearly all advanced in years, all independent in their circumstances, all wealthy, with no private interests to advance, unconnected with commercial enterprise, with no companies to support, no schemes of money-making in the background, might elect out of their own body a Second Chamber of much greater weight and moral authority than any body elected by the multitude. In such a House, one would argue, there is no place for bribery, jobbery, or corruption. In fact, there are none of these things.

THE DUCHESS OF KENT AND PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 2

THE PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 4

AUTOGRAPH OF PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 4

But, it is objected, a caste is created, and there should be no such thing as a caste. Perhaps not; if we were to start anew, we would have none. Australia has none, nor New Zealand; in our case, however, the caste is two thousand years old and more. It is venerable by reason of its age; it would be extremely difficult to remove it; moreover, it is a caste rendered innocuous by the simple provision that the younger sons do not belong to it; none but the Head has any power or authority by reason of belonging to it; it is a caste, not of so many families, but of so many men. Moreover, English people like old institutions; this House of Peers, therefore, is not only kept on, but is rendered popular by the continual infusion of new blood—the continual election to the House of new men with no family connection or influence. Among the recently made Peers there are successful men of business: engineers, physicians, manufacturers. Tennyson, Lister, Leighton, Kelvin, show that a peerage is at last open to literature, science, and law.

Again, it is objected that the House of Lords can oppose a popular measure. So can every Upper House. But the Peers, though they often send back measures amended, never refuse to assent to measures which are understood to be desired by the mass of the people.

Again, any profligate may sit in the House. This is an objection which is met by the simple fact that a Peer of well-known bad character would not dare to present himself in the House of Lords. But the Peers represent Norman blood and feudal ideas. Nothing of the kind. Most of the Lords are of quite recent creation, and are sprung from families obscure and even humble. Here is an instance. I was once conversing with a bricklayer, an elderly man, who had formerly been a prize-fighter. He began to talk of a certain noble family. “My father,” he said, “used to go poaching with his grandfather. They were both employed on the same farm. His grandfather went into the town of —— and set up a shop for game—hares and rabbits and such—which my father poached for him till he got took and went to prison.” The sequel is obvious. The man who started the shop and made the other man do the work and undergo the risk for him, got on; his son started life in a higher plane, showed abilities, grew rich, and was eventually created the first Peer of his family. This is perhaps an extreme case; but the point is that Englishmen are constantly working their way to the front by sheer ability and without any family influence whatever; that when they are well to the front they receive Peerages; that the whole family is thereby raised in the social scale; and that every Peer represents a network of cousins, nephews, and relations, who rejoice in his rank because it lends them too a certain social superiority.

PIERREPONT PARK, BROADSTAIRS, KENT

One of the early Residences of the Queen

Victoria

Kensington Palace

1826 December

PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 6

THE MUSIC-ROOM AT PIERREPONT PARK

For these and other reasons, the outcry against the House of Lords has ceased. It will perhaps revive again, but in some milder form; for the old assertion of rank, the former haughtiness of the aristocrat, has been greatly mitigated: in the last century it was complained at Bath that noble Lords would not even enter the society of plain gentlemen; it is now understood that whatever may be a man’s rank, he cannot be any more than a gentleman. Rank gives him precedence: a seat in the House of Lords, but no more; this is all he can claim.

A third cry, which used to be loud and general, but is now greatly reduced in volume, is the disestablishment of the Church of England. A large and powerful society has been working for this end for many years. Members have been sent up to the House, pledged to bring about these results. Yet the Church remains. When the Irish Church was disestablished, nearly thirty years ago, every one said that the English Church would go next. What excellent prophets we are. How many similar predictions do I remember! The Irish Church was disestablished because it was not the Church of the people, but of a small section. The English Church remains, because it is the Church of the majority, and is without doubt becoming more so every year. The Churches are crammed with people—of the better sort: the working-man, though as a rule he does not go to Church, has learned during the last sixty years to regard the Establishment with friendliness and respect, if not with gratitude and affection.

KENSINGTON PALACE IN 1819

We see in this country at the present day a loyalty to the Crown, to equal which we must go back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and for the same principal reasons, a Sovereign personally respected and beloved, a period of marvellous expansive prosperity and advancement of every kind. We see the Republican form of Government no longer advocated; the House of Lords no longer attacked; the old cry for the disestablishment of the Church growing daily weaker; the See of Canterbury extending everywhere its authority, and promising to become the Rome of the Episcopal Church.

I call attention to another point. Everybody knows that a great part of the history of this country consists of the long and never-ending struggles of the King to extend his prerogative, and of the people to maintain their rights. To observe that the reign of Queen Victoria presents not one single instance of a desire on the Queen’s part to extend her powers—those powers are much less than those of the President of the United States—she has been contented with them. Again, she has welcomed every act of reform; she has always shown a perfect trust in the whole people; she has clung to no small clique of families; she has admitted no reservation of aristocratic caste; she has willingly received as her ministers such men as Gladstone, Disraeli, John Morley, James Bryce, and others who have no pretensions whatever to aristocratic descent; she has been, in a word, entirely loyal to the Constitution: she has lived, not for herself, but for the Empire.

It is impossible here to avoid saying—what every one else writing on this subject has already said—something about the extent and population of the British Empire. Under the Union Jack at this moment there lie the British Islands, Egypt, India, Burmah, a part of Borneo, Australia, New Zealand, the Dominion of Canada, the West Indies, South, East, and West Africa, with innumerable islands scattered over the face of the whole globe. A great deal of this territory has been acquired since the year 1837: at that time vast tracts of it were worthless deserts, for which no one ventured to predict a future. Australia contained a few thousand whites; New Zealand, not half a dozen; South Africa was the Cape and nothing more; Canada contained only the two divisions; there was no emigration—there was no thought of emigration. The exports and imports of the country, though they were thought large at the time, were only worth a hundred millions sterling, against four hundred millions at the present day. The national debt in 1837 amounted to 30 per cent of the wealth of the whole country: at present it is 7¼ per cent on that wealth. In 1837 there were 28,000 merchant ships belonging to Great Britain and her colonies: at present there are about the same number, but with four times the tonnage. And so on with tables of figures which show the advance made by the country in every branch of industry and enterprise. Above all things, we may look round and observe that, just as on the site of Fort Dearborn of 1837 now stands the splendid city of Chicago of 1897, so, where there was nothing in 1837 but wild plain and lonely hill, there now stand crowded and busy cities like Melbourne and Sydney: there now lie bathed in the golden sunlight populous colonies like Manitoba and British Columbia: there now look upward in their youth of hope nations like New Zealand. Great Britain in sixty years has become the mother of four nations. Yet a little while, a few years, and these nations—federated Canada, federated Australia, federated South Africa, United New Zealand—will be four independent nations, proud, strong, eager to meet whatever fortune may send them, with the prayers and the blessings of the little Island whence they sprang.

KENSINGTON PALACE IN 1897

It remains to be seen what reception they will get from the United States; whether there will be only five independent Anglo-Saxon countries allied with each other and the mother country by bonds never to be broken, while the sixth still holds aloof; or whether the five shall become six, all independent, neither one before nor after the others, and so the unity of the race be preserved, and its destiny as the leader of the world be assured.

As for the public and the private life of the Queen I have told you that I know no more than you yourselves. That she ascended the throne, a young girl of eighteen; that she married happily; that she has been blessed with many children; that she has lost her husband and two of her children, and more than two of her grandchildren, you know already. Despite the fierce light that beats upon the throne, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in her long occupation of that seat which has to be concealed or defended. No prince has ever occupied a throne with greater loyalty to his people’s liberties; nay, those liberties have increased and broadened without a word from the Queen to stay their advance. Religious disabilities have vanished: the Catholic, the Dissenter, the Jew, the Atheist are on the same level with the Anglican; the Franchise has widened, without a sign of opposition from the Queen. It may be said that she has been admirably advised. Perhaps you will acknowledge, however, that it is the first characteristic of a noble mind that it can understand, and will listen to, advice.

Foreigners cannot, perhaps, fully understand the depth and the reality of that loyalty of which I have spoken—it is a personal as well as constitutional loyalty—they can, however, understand, and they will acknowledge, that there has never lived upon the earth a woman who in her lifetime has created, and has inspired, and has possessed so much affection, respect, and confidence from all parts of the world.

Of the good woman what sayeth the wise King Lemuel—who wrote too little—from the oracle which his mother taught him?

She spreadeth out her hand to the poor;
Yea, she reacheth forth her hand to the needy.
Strength and dignity are her clothing,
And she laugheth at the time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom,
And the law of kindness is on her tongue.
Her children rise up and call her blessed:
A woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands,
And let her works praise her in the gates.

CHAPTER II
TRANSFORMATION OF THE PEOPLE

“Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.”—Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Above all things, gentlemen,” says Goldsmith’s prisoner for debt, “let us guard our liberties.”

What were the liberties of the people? They were very real; but they did not open the debtor’s prison; nor did they include representation. You will hardly believe that the old condition of things should have lasted so long.

Before the Reform Act of 1832 the only persons who had votes at elections were freeholders; in some boroughs the electors were the Mayor and Corporation; some were “pocket” boroughs, in which the territorial magnate of the neighbourhood nominated the Member; in some there were only two or three electors, who openly put up the seat to the highest bidder. The House of Commons was a body made up almost entirely of younger sons or cousins of the Lords, who voted as they were ordered; many of the members held places under Government—they voted as they were told; many of the members were bribed on every important occasion. On the declaration of the American War of Independence it was in such a House Mr. Burke vainly thundered and protested that taxation in a free country could only go with representation. Alas! the liberties of the country had no other guard than the House of Commons; and the House betrayed the country. It took sixty years of almost continual struggle to get the Reform Act of 1832; yet in a country of twenty millions no more than 440,000 had votes. There are now six million voters; that is to say, the suffrage is practically universal. There are people still outside the wide limits of the franchise, but they are, as a class, so poor, so held down by the hourly necessities of finding food, that they can hardly be considered as suffering any loss of dignity by having no votes. For my own part, I do not think that the suffrage should be a matter of right, nor should it depend upon income or rent; I think that a man before he is allowed to vote should show that he possesses some knowledge of the history of his country and its constitution. I do not expect any one to agree with me, but that is my opinion.

PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 8

Consider, next, the changes in the conduct of elections. Formerly the election was open and public: it occupied several weeks; during the whole time the town was filled with violence, clamour, drunkenness, and bribery; the elector had to fight his way to the hustings; the mob, which took sides with impartial ferocity, fought each other and hustled the electors. Since it was proclaimed how every man voted, electors had to vote against their conscience for the sake of their private interests—for instance, in the great Westminster election of 1784 the King let his tradesmen understand clearly how he expected them to vote; a contested election cost many thousands; no one could sit in the House who had not an estate worth £300 a year at least; Roman Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews were not permitted to become Members of Parliament.

On the other hand, an election of the present day is conducted with perfect order. There is no shouting; there is no fighting; at eight o’clock in the morning an office is thrown open; a policeman stands outside to direct the voters; almost everybody in the electoral district records his vote. He receives a paper with the names of the candidates upon it; he marks the name for which he votes, folds the paper, and gives it to a clerk, who in his presence drops the paper into a box. At the close of the day the voting papers are opened and counted. The election is over. There has been no bribery, nobody knows how any man has voted, and the whole business is complete in one day.

In changing the franchise and the mode of election we have changed the House of Commons itself. It represents the people—not one class only, but the whole people. There are in it younger sons of Lords; they no longer come in as nominees, but on their own merits; there are no pocket boroughs; there is no property qualification, some of the Members are lawyers, some literary men, some tradesmen, some working-men; all the nation is represented in that assembly. The House is no longer the rich man’s club as it used to be, but it represents the nation; it is no longer a fortress of prejudice and conservatism, but it represents the nation. And consider the vast accession of dignity and self-respect to the working-classes when they realise that the government of the country is really and actually in their own hands, and that they can bring in their own Members of Parliament without coercion and without fear.

A WATER-COLOUR DRAWING BY PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 12

The next change is in education. Sixty years ago the mass of the country was uneducated. Millions could neither read nor write; millions could read a little and could not write at all. The whole country is now educated—in every rural village, in every crowded city street, there is a school, and the children are compelled to come in. In addition to the schools there are village libraries, institutions with lending libraries, public libraries where the best literature of the past and the present is freely offered to the people. They can carry home the books, they can have as many books as they are able to read. We are creating new readers by the million. Are we, it is often asked, creating also a whole nation of students? Hardly. Education does not create students, who are born, not made. Besides, we do not want to become a nation of students. The hard work of the world is not done by students or philosophers. Education, however, teaches us something of our own ignorance, something of the source of information, something of humility. Above all, education falling on a kindly soul gives the lad a new recreation for his evenings: instead of horse-play along the streets, instead of drinking at a bar, instead of “keeping company” with a girl every evening, he reads. He does not read for instruction, he pursues no course of study, he reads just for recreation; but such is the character of the reading found for him that he imbibes a great amount of information, learns manners, and acquires a higher standard of morals. The circulation of the penny weeklies proves that he reads; there are a hundred of them at least; their circulation is enormous, some of them attaining to half a million. If we buy some and look at them we find them “scrappy”; they are not vicious, or immoral, or seditious, they are the exact opposites of these; but they are scrappy; it would seem as if their readers, which is probably the fact, are incapable of a sustained argument, and like to be stimulated by short stories of adventure, odds and ends of history, and so forth. Think, however, of the change from a nation which was in great part illiterate in 1837 to a nation which knows something of history and something of geography, and which now reads with avidity. Hardly a cottager now but takes in his weekly newspaper. Lloyd’s Weekly News is, I believe, the most widely circulated of them. It claims more than a million readers; it owns a great pine-forest in Norway to supply its paper, and it is a most respectable paper, popular and full of news, taking one side strongly, but never scurrilous. If you want to understand the English rustic of the day, send for the last number of Lloyd’s and read it through. I am sure that after reading this journal your appreciation of the British rustic will be distinctly raised. And you will own that he is changed indeed.

AN ETCHING BY HER MAJESTY

Consider, next, the widening of the world. I think that it is the tendency of those who live in a small country to make it smaller by their own seclusion. The rustic, for instance, formerly knew nothing of the world but his farm and his village and the nearest market town, whither he carried produce or drove the pigs on market day. This town—which once a week was enlivened by the crowd attending the market; the farmers at the Corn Exchange or the cattle-sheds; the cries of the people at the stalls; the farmers’ ordinary at the principal inn—was, to the rustic, a metropolis, a centre of gaiety. There came rumours, it is true, of an outer world. Somewhere or other there was a king; a recruiting-sergeant carried off a young man here and there; there were recollections of the great wars when wheat went up to 103s. a quarter, when farmers became squires, and squires became peers, but the rustic remained where he was. The village was so full that wages ran down, even while wheat went up; in Devonshire, a man of eighty years assures me that the wages of the agricultural labourer in his youth were 7s. a week, with a two or four roomed cottage, and a pound or two to be made at harvest time. Such a man, with his family, never tasted meat all his life, except sometimes a piece of fat pork. His children lived chiefly on oat-cake. The man’s drink was rough harsh cider. It seems incredible how strong men, of splendid physique, could have been made out of such materials.

THE CORONATION SPOON

THE AMPULLA OR RECEPTACLE FOR THE HOLY OIL FOR ANOINTING

This man’s position is now so far improved that he receives about twenty shillings a week, with harvest allowances; that he has an allotment on which he grows his vegetables; that he keeps poultry and a pig; that he eats meat of some kind every day; that his wife and children go warmly clad.

THE CORONATION VESTMENTS

What has caused this change? The widening of the world. How the world was first discovered by the English rustic to be so wide and so empty, I do not know. It was during the twenty years between 1815 and 1835 that the discovery began; at first it spread very slowly; the rustic heard of it at the market town; he met with a sailor who talked about the splendid chances beyond the seas; he heard letters read from settlers in Canada and Australia; here and there one, greatly daring, left the village, and was considered as good as dead till letters arrived entreating all—father, mother, brothers, and sisters—to leave their home and join him. At last they began to go, and the tide of immigration set in that has never since stopped or slackened. In the year 1815 the emigration from this country amounted to no more than 2000; in 1825 it was 25,000; in 1850 it was nearly 300,000. From 1815 to 1896 I do not think that the emigrants from these shores have amounted to less than 10,000,000; of these more than one-half have gone to the United States. These emigrants do not, for the first generation at least, forget their native land and the kin they have left behind them. Imagine, then, the difference between a village closed absolutely to the outer world, into which there penetrates no voice, no rumour, no report from without, and a village where every family has got sons and daughters in the lands across the sea.

The world has been widened for us by the rise of the other nations of our race. It has also been widened by the railway and by the cheap post. Small as is our island compared with the great continent of America, there was formerly no knowledge of any part of it outside the native place; at the present moment the people can get about all over the country—to the seaside, to London, to the Lakes, to Wales; everywhere there are excursion trains and cheap tickets; the children learn by their annual treats to look out every year for new and interesting places; to the people the excursion is an event which excites and stimulates them all. You may see them by thousands in the ruins of an old abbey, trying to reconstruct the past splendours; or among the ruins of a Norman Castle; or in the gardens and galleries of some great house which is thrown open to them; or by the seashore, rowing, sailing, bathing; or in some park, where the children dance and sing and try to persuade the deer to let them come near. In one small town of Lancashire, a town of factories, the people spend £30,000 a year on their excursions; they descend upon the Lincolnshire watering-places, which are small and ill-provided, and they eat up the town and the farms all round; they invade the hotels of Ambleside and Grasmere, and eat up all that therein is; they reduce the Isle of Man to famine; they leave the coast of Northumberland empty and cleared out, with an emptiness like that caused by the locust. Such is the effect of the world’s widening.

Painting by Sir George Hayter

THE CORONATION

Painting by C. R. Leslie, R.A.

THE QUEEN RECEIVING THE SACRAMENT AFTER HER CORONATION

Consider next the cheap post. The people have begun to write to each other. Formerly there was little or no communication by letter. It is true that a cheap and easy way was practised, by means of which a young man could communicate to his friends the simple fact of his safety. It was to address a letter to his mother; if she took that letter in it would cost her eightpence at least, but she knew there was nothing written within, therefore she refused to take the letter, which was undelivered, but she knew from the address outside that her son was safe. Now, however, letters pass freely into the village; they convey information, as to work and pay, that the newspapers have not yet learned to furnish; wherever workmen are wanted, thither sets in a stream in search of work. Some years ago a mischievous fund was raised, called the Lord Mayor’s Fund, for the unemployed. A rumour of this fund ran through the whole length and breadth of the land; all the unemployed came up to London from all parts to share in the money so raised; it was distributed chiefly in soup tickets; the men took the tickets, sold them, and drank the contents. The point, however, to notice is that the people, before the proposed fund was started, knew all about it, and had begun to come up in order to claim their share.

I have spoken of the rise in wages. To this I will return presently. Meantime observe that with the rise of wages there has also arrived an extraordinary cheapness in food. The price of wheat, between the years 1786 and 1837 was never lower than 39s. a quarter, and rose to 106s., 113s., 119s., and even 126s. a quarter. It was over 70s. a quarter for seventeen years of that time, and over 50s. for forty years; it is now about 20s. With the price of grain, other things have fallen; tea, which sixty years ago was five shillings a pound, can now be had for eighteenpence; sugar, of which the commonest kind formerly cost ninepence a pound, is now about twopence; cheese, butter, rice, and other products are now imported, and are sold at a half of their former price; meat comes over from New Zealand, frozen, in unknown quantities; clothing is half the price it was; the working-man’s wages, therefore, which have more than doubled, represent a much greater purchasing power. He stands, therefore, upon a higher level of comfort. Another thing—a very important thing—has been done for the rustic. By an Act passed quite recently village councils—parish councils—have been founded. To these councils, elected by the working-classes from themselves, are entrusted the governing of the parish: the lighting, paving, cleaning of the streets, the order and police, and all matters belonging to the daily life of the place. On these councils the squire and the parson may sit, if they are elected; but they have no more power than the others.

So far, it is reported that without the presence of the squire or parson the new councillors flounder. This, however, was to be expected.

Painting by Sir G. Hayter

PRINCESS VICTORIA, AGE 16

In the year 1837 any person who owed another any sum of money, however small, was liable to be arrested for debt, and if he would not pay he could be thrown into prison and kept there till he did pay. Thousands of unfortunate debtors were kept in prison for the whole of their lives on account of some miserable debt which, if they had been out of prison, they could have paid off in a short time. There was a devilish malignity about the law which enabled an attorney to roll up a bill of costs (which the prisoner had to pay), on this pretence and that, like a snowball increasing as it rolled; the warders of the prison demanded fees and “garnish,” in default of which the prisoner was turned into the “poor side,” where the privations and misery and enforced idleness were terrible. If a working-man got into prison, as was always happening, there was no hope for him: the costs went mounting up, he could do no work, he must sit down and starve. Outside the prison, what became of his wife and children? In the year ending 5th January 1830, 7114 persons were sent to the prisons of London for debt; in 1840 the number of prisoners for debt were 1732 in England; in Ireland, under 1000; in Scotland, under 100. By the Act of 1861 imprisonment for debt was forbidden, except in case of debt fraudulently contracted; in 1887, by the Bankruptcy Act imprisonment for debt was virtually abolished altogether. A terror was removed from life when the walls of the Fleet and the Queen’s Bench were taken down and the gates thrown open. The recovery of small debts is now entrusted to the County Court, where the Judge makes an order that so much should be paid weekly or monthly. If the debtor breaks that order, he is liable to imprisonment for contempt of Court.

The English working-man has been accused of servility. Such a charge could never be brought against the working-man of London, or of the North; that servility existed in some of the agricultural districts was undoubtedly true. How should it be otherwise when a man’s daily bread, his work, his home, his wage, depended wholly on one man—the squire? His village was his prison; he could go nowhere else; there was no work for him out of his village; the squire was his “overlord,” to use the old phrase; he was not legally, yet he was in reality, ascriptus glebæ, bound to the soil; he looked for help in sickness and in trouble to the great house whose ladies looked after the village, helping, feeding, clothing, and admonishing. The man was like a child in leading-strings, or at best like a schoolboy under rule and discipline. With the cause of that servility, the fact itself is vanishing.

The depression in agriculture seems also, on the whole, turning out favourably for the agricultural labourer; the farms are worked more economically and want fewer hands; but the superfluous hands have left the village—there are now no more than are wanted day by day; if an odd piece of work turns up it is difficult to find a man to do it. The men are therefore valued in proportion to their paucity of numbers; their wages, for the same reason, are going up; they live more comfortably, they have more money to spend, they are more independent.

Painting by Sir George Hayter

TAKING THE OATH TO MAINTAIN THE PROTESTANT TRUTH

The old laws forbidding workmen from making combinations or “Covins” for the advancement of wages were passed in the fourteenth century, and remained in force until the year 1825, when they were at last repealed. You think, then, that nothing remained for the workpeople but to form as many combinations as they pleased. You are quite wrong. There was still the right of holding public meeting. Until that was acquired—it was only fully granted a few years ago—the repeal of the old law was practically valueless. The right of forming trades unions has been acquired entirely during the present reign. Now the trades union is not popular; it has been ruthlessly enforced; the treatment of blacklegs has been cruel; yet no one can deny that the position of the working-man has been enormously improved, his independence advanced, his wages increased, by the union. The Agricultural Union has not done so much: partly because the countryman is difficult to manage; partly because it would appear that he wants another kind of union. Thus the skilled agriculturalist is a man who knows a great deal, he cannot be replaced except by one like himself; the best chance, therefore, is to stimulate emigration and keep down his own numbers.

Painting by Sir David Wilkie

THE QUEEN’S FIRST COUNCIL

I have not mentioned among the forces making for advance the abolition of flogging. As a matter of fact flogging is not abolished, but it is only inflicted upon civilians as a punishment for robbery with violence. About thirty-five years ago there was a common form of robbery called “garrotting,” in which violence and brutality were commonly exhibited. By the advice of the judges the garrotter, on conviction, was flogged. It is maintained that the flogging practically stopped the garrotting. However that may be, there is no doubt that the ruffian who suffers that punishment dislikes it extremely. But this punishment did not affect the respectable classes. In the Army and the Navy, on the other hand, where flogging was practised continually, it did affect them; and it seems wonderful that, in the face of the prejudice against the service which these punishments created, we should have been able to maintain an Army at all. It is, however, just to state that flogging in the Army had been enormously reduced: in 1869 there were only 21 soldiers flogged out of our whole army of 150,000, while an able seaman of the first class could not be flogged at all; and in the same year, in the whole of the navy of 80,000 men only 8 were flogged. By the Army Discipline Act of 1879 flogging was finally abolished. But, I repeat, I do not consider this reform as affecting materially the mind of the English working-man.

Now read through this long list of reforms, every one of them exercising steady, continual, irresistible influence upon the individual. What changes do you expect to find in him?

THE QUEEN IN BRIDAL DRESS

He has become, in fact, more independent, more responsible; he knows so much more that he feels his own ignorance; he is not so easily led by a demagogue; it is not so easy to inflame his passions; he thinks and asks questions; he is better fed, better clothed; he walks more upright; he is no longer a machine; he understands the power of combination; he sits at the table of his parish council on equal terms with the squire and the vicar; he no longer regards his native village as the place to which he is bound; he has friends in various parts of the world; they come home from time to time and they tell him of these countries—Republics all, except in name—where there are no squires and no landlords; and he asks himself whether it is better to stay on in the old place, or to try for a bigger thing beyond the seas.

Changed as he is, and certain to change yet more and more in the immediate future, do not forget that the English working-man, even of the town, feels a great shrinking about leaving the old home. In a village this seems natural; the place is calm and lovely, the ancient church with its gray tower standing in the churchyard, where the rooks and pigeons and blackbirds keep up a continual chorus; the village green, the village inn, the gabled cottages, the gates that lead to the Hall, the fields and hedges, the stream, and the hills, and the hanging woods—these things enter into the very heart and soul of the Englishman; he loves them all, he cannot choose but love them, though he would not know how to express his affection; in the churchyard he knows the mounds that belong to his own people; in the tavern he sits among his cronies on the polished settle beside the fire, his mug before him, his pipe in his mouth. In his heart he wants no other life. These things he could not find in America or Australia or New Zealand. Yet he is changed, and if you wait for twenty years you will no longer recognise him for what he was. He is getting a touch from America, a thought from Australia, a custom from New Zealand; he will be a citizen of the world, and, if I read the signs aright, he will become before another generation the owner and the master of agricultural England.

Painting by Sir George Hayter

THE MARRIAGE OF THE QUEEN TO PRINCE ALBERT

Let us leave the village and turn to the town.

There are two books in our literature which tell of English factory life in the early part of this century. One of these is Disraeli’s Sybil; the other is Mrs. Trollope’s Michael Armstrong. I fear that these two books are not read so much as they should be; partly, perhaps, because we do not love to dwell too much on the shameful side of history. The condition of the working-man before the Victorian era is indeed a very shameful part of history. The record of the factory and the mine is very black. Let me show you something of what it was. I tell you beforehand, that the story proves that power over his fellow-men must never be entrusted to any man; for he will abuse that power—he will become an oppressor and a tyrant.

He began this oppression with the children. He has a mill, a factory, a mine; in which he made the children work. He worked them so cruelly; he gave them such long hours, such poor food, such wretched clothing, that he lowered the vitality of these unfortunate children so that an epidemic broke out among them; it carried off thousands. This frightened the owner of these children, because, if they all died, what would become of his mill?

Then the House of Commons interfered—very reluctantly—because to stand between the master and his man was felt to be a dangerous innovation. It interfered, however, and passed a law which forbade children under nine to be employed in a factory, and limited their hours to twelve, exclusive of an hour and a half for rest and food; so that by this merciful Act a little girl of ten might be, and actually was, made to work from six in the morning till half-past seven at night. Can one conceive a readier method of destroying strength, youth, self-respect, everything? But the injured millowner got over this law. He was not forced to make the children work continuously. He therefore made the children work in relays, so that they had half the night as well as half the day to work in. This went on for thirty years before the nation was moved by the injustice and cruelty of the thing. An Act was passed that no children should work between 8.30 P.M. and 5.30 A.M.; that children under thirteen should not work more than 48 hours a week or eight hours a day; and that those under eighteen should not work more than 68 hours a week or 11⅓ hours a day. As I told you, the man who had the power exercised it cruelly, heartlessly, ruthlessly, for the conversion of his people into slaves.

Paintings by Winterhalter

PRINCE ALBERT AND QUEEN VICTORIA AT THE TIME OF THEIR MARRIAGE

Then, because the Act spoke of the factory or the mill, and not of the mine, they took the little children and dropped them into the coal-pit. When the boy or the girl was six years of age—six! think of it—they took the little thing and put it in a dark passage, underground, with instructions to open and shut a door in order to let the trucks come and go. All day long—for twelve hours—that innocent infant was kept in the dark opening and shutting the doors. They worked from four in the morning till four in the evening; when they were taken up they were stupid, and cared for nothing but to sleep. When they grew older they pushed the trucks with their heads; when they grew older still the lads became hewers of coal: the girls—now women—continued to push the trucks with their heads or to drag them, clad in nothing but a pair of short trousers. This was done in a Christian country which boasted of having abolished slavery. Observe that there was no chance for these children ever to learn anything, ever to do anything, except to continue all their lives in the coal-pit; they were doomed to brutish ignorance, to unremitting toil, without holidays, except on Sunday—day after day, week after week, year after year, till they could push the truck no longer, till the pick fell from their hands.

The chimney-sweep’s case was almost as bad as the miner’s. He too was taken at a very early age, and his duty was to climb the chimney, sweeping it as he went up. It is not a pleasant thing to climb a chimney choked with soot; it abraded hands, elbows, and knees: sometimes the little wretch could get no higher; if he failed he was beaten unmercifully. There was a curious prejudice against sweeping with a brush: the child was allowed to go unwashed, though the neglect of cleanliness was certain to bring on a dreadful disease. It was not till four years after the Queen began her reign that an Act was passed protecting the children and substituting the brush for the human body.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE—FRONT VIEW

BUCKINGHAM PALACE—GARDEN VIEW

This was the treatment of children in mill, in mine, in town. There were other lines and branches of cruelty because children are helpless. But these examples will suffice.

Let us leave the children and turn to the men. The change for the better began, I believe, with the ideas of the French Revolution, at first eagerly caught by the English working people: it was continued by the long agitation for the Reform Act of 1832 and the fierce resistance of the Duke of Wellington and the Bishops: these ideas and this agitation taught the people how to combine and act together. They also taught the people to hate a Government in which they had no share or part or lot. A great many—though still the minority—could now read; the papers they read were bitterly hostile to the ruling powers. As I have already pointed out, there was no loyalty at all among the working-men of the Thirties; they did not pretend any. Their papers were revolutionary; the things they said of the Queen and the Prince Consort were revolting; the aristocracy, according to them, were open and shameless; the clergy were pampered hypocrites. What has happened since then? The people have been admitted to their share in the Government; they can do what they like: if they choose they can alter the Constitution. Do they choose? Not at all; they have become loyal; they have become, comparatively, conservative.

THRONE ROOM, BUCKINGHAM PALACE

BALL AND CONCERT ROOM, BUCKINGHAM PALACE

The recreations of the working-man, apart from the tavern, were boxing and dog-fighting. Single-stick, wrestling, quarter-staff, cock-fighting, had to a great extent gone out. Boxing remained, every man knew how to handle his fists: you may remember that in Tom Brown at Oxford, there is a serious discussion on the knotty question whether a gentleman can, or cannot, always lick a cad. Dear me, this kind of talk is now so old-world. However, a man was always supposed to be ready to strip and engage—gentleman or cad. Dickens’s stories contain many instances of the rough-and-ready “turn up.” The change is a gain from one point of view; it is a loss, from another, that the noble art of self-defence has fallen out of practice; it is, further, a gain as well as a loss, that it shows signs of returning to favour.

There are still fairs left. Several fairs were held in the neighbourhood of London. Bartholomew’s, degenerated into a scene of drunkenness and disorder, still continued. Greenwich Fair continued, and Deptford Fair; there was also a fair at Barnet; but the fairs had practically gone out of the life of the country. It was a mark of the times that the working-classes no longer delighted in the noise and the ribaldry that disgraced the later years of the London fairs.

I have spoken of education in the rural districts. Long before the young rustic could learn to read, the townsmen had the chance of some education. There were many charity schools: there were the schools of the National Society and of the British and Foreign Society: there were also the Sunday Schools.

Criminal procedure does not, perhaps, affect the average civilian. At the same time one learns that before 1836 it was actually forbidden that a prisoner should defend himself before the jury by counsel. Imagine, if you can, a timid, shrinking girl, called upon to plead for her life in open court after being maddened by jargon which she did not understand and formalities which only filled her with bewilderment. It is said that the judges themselves repaired this evil: it is quite possible. Our judges have always been superior to the laws they have had to administer; but then the prisoner was at the mercy of the judge; he might, or he might not, find a remedy for the speechlessness and the incapacity of the prisoner.

If you take up a bundle of old newspapers you will find that every one of them has got a red stamp upon it. This was the tax upon newspapers. It was a penny a copy in 1760; in 1815 it was actually fourpence a copy; in 1836 it was reduced to a penny; in 1855 it was totally abolished. There was, in addition, a tax on paper, which was repealed in 1861. It is wonderful how newspapers continued to exist at all with an impost so crushing: it is still more wonderful how working-men’s papers could hold their own. In fact, their circulation was very small; they were weekly, not daily; they were taken in at taverns where the men could see them, not by the men themselves. It is not one of the least reforms of this reign which has placed in the hands of everybody a cheap newspaper, full, large, with copious intelligence, and educated commentary.

QUEEN’S STATE COACH

The outcome of the national discontent was the organisation called Chartism. Look at the working-man of the present day. He has received an education sound and thorough, up to a certain point, at the Board School; he has had the chance of continuing his education after leaving school at evening classes. He has also had the chance of joining a Polytechnic, which is a kind of technical University, teaching everything; and a kind of public school, in which athletics of all kinds are practised and encouraged. There are a great many thousand lads in the Polytechnics, and they are as fine young fellows as one can desire to see. They are skilled in technical work; they are taught by the best men in their own subjects; they do not drink or frequent taverns; they do not loaf about the streets. I do not pretend that these lads are representatives of their own class; I admit that they are the flower of the flock. The working-man has now free libraries and reading-rooms, where he can sit and read or borrow books to take away. There is no longer any revolutionary talk among those who converse; there is Socialism, of course, but that is very different. It would be difficult indeed for a young man to escape some of the Socialist ideas which are in the air, and are producing unexpected and far-reaching results. Here, however, except among a few foreigners, we have no Anarchists. The wages are better, the hours are shorter; there is a Saturday half-holiday; there are four Bank holidays in the year, besides Christmas Day and Good Friday. Everything is cheaper—food and clothes of all kinds. Lectures, concerts, dramatic recitals, debates, dances, are got up everywhere by the working-men for themselves.

The working-man’s attitude towards the Church, to which I have already alluded, has quite changed of late years. He formerly regarded it with a ferocious hatred, being taught by the papers they published for him that the clergy believe nothing, and wallow in ease and luxury at his expense. “Why,” said one of them to me twenty years ago, “if the Church was abolished we should all get our breakfast for nothing.” That kind of talk has now vanished. If the Sunday morning orator still denounces Christianity with perfervid vehemence—as he used to do in the Whitechapel Road—the working-man listens with a smile and presently goes on to the next ring, where the Socialist preaches universal happiness to come as soon as we can get the much-desired equal division; and him, too, he leaves presently with another smile. He is not in the least moved by either orator.

Canon Barnett’s Church in Whitechapel is an example of what may be done with a parish composed entirely of working-people. They do not attend his services, I believe. But he has educated them into an audience which listens intelligently to the best and most thoughtful and most cultivated scholars and teachers of the day; they flock every year to a Loan Exhibition of Pictures which he collects for them; he gives them receptions, concerts, discussions; he has built Toynbee Hall in their midst as a settlement and place of culture. Some of them he has made students and scholars: it is not too much to say that Canon Barnett’s parishioners are intellectually far above the average of the class supposed to be their superiors—that of the shopkeepers and the traders. However, it would not be fair to take these people as an average of our working-man. When I think of the mass of the people as they were sixty years ago—how ignorant they were, how drunken, how brutal, how dangerous to order and to government, how unruly, how disloyal—I cannot but claim for the men of the present a change nothing short of transformation! There is still much to be done, the Millennium is not yet reached; but there is no comparison—none—between the people of 1837 and the people of 1897; and the advantage is all on one side.

WINDSOR CASTLE FROM THE RIVER

CHAPTER III
TRANSFORMATION OF THE BOURGEOIS

“Will you mock at an ancient tradition?”—Henry V.

When one speaks of the Bourgeois, one means the class which Matthew Arnold was never tired of ridiculing as without culture, ideals, or standards. For my own part, I think it would be more useful to recognise, first, that there are certain occupations in life which can be carried on very well without ideals; that the advent or genesis of ideas among certain people would inevitably spoil them for their humble work; and that it is sufficient for the State if they remain on the side of order, with due respect to law and justice. Now, whatever the short-comings of these people with respect to culture, no one can complain of them with respect to their love of order.

A craftsman—a man who makes anything—may cultivate himself to the highest, and remain a craftsman; he may be an artist; he may be a poet; he may nourish himself upon the noblest thoughts, and yet remain a craftsman. Out of the trade of shoemakers have sprung poets, artists, and actors. Cobblers have been fierce politicians. But a man who sells the shoes which another man makes cannot, in the nature of things, cultivate lofty standards or æsthetic ideals. His occupation, which has in it something servile, forbids it. And I have here to speak of the English tradesman, and to show the transformation which has fallen upon him too.

Let us consider the daily life of a London shopkeeper early in the present century. He had a shop in Cheapside. The shop occupied the front part of the ground-floor: at the back was the “parlour,” the family living-room, which looked out upon a small churchyard, in which funerals were conducted almost daily; the ground was covered with bones and bits of coffins; once a month or so the sexton made a bonfire of the wood. Upstairs were the bedrooms—the best bedroom in front, which nobody ever occupied because there were no guests. Here the tenant of the house lived, he and his family; they had no change, and desired none, from day to day. An apprentice lived with them, slept under the counter, and made himself useful in the house as well as in the shop—washing plates and dishes after meals and running errands for his mistress. One servant was kept; she and the daughters and the mistress of the house were all occupied perpetually in making things; they made puddings, cakes, jam, preserves, pickles, cordials, perfumes, washes, and home-made wines—thin and pallid fluids named after cowslip, primrose, raspberry, and currant. When they were not making or cooking they were sewing; all the women of the house sewed perpetually—they were slaves to the needle: they sat round the table in the parlour, with a single candle, and sewed in silence all through a winter evening. The girls had been to school; they went to a private school in the suburbs, where they learned various small feminine accomplishments; they learned from their mother certain maxims which should regulate the conduct of every maiden. And on Sunday they turned out for church in toilettes whose splendour highly gratified the pride of their father, because they seemed to challenge all Cheapside to spend more money upon the daughters’ dress. Yet he knew, and all the neighbours knew, that this finery was all contrived at home—hats trimmed, ribbons and streamers put in place, and the lovely sleeve designed by the girls themselves. At church they enjoyed a service which we should call lugubrious. The psalms were read, two hymns were sung but slowly, and the sermon, an hour long, was an argument on doctrine; but there was the pleasure of sitting in the Sunday best, which made one forget the doctrine and enjoy the hymns.

QUEEN IN ROYAL CLOSET, ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, WINDSOR

Painting by Landseer

THE QUEEN, THE PRINCE OF WALES, AND PRINCESS ROYAL

All day long in the week, and during a good part of the evening, the good man served in his shop. It was a shop of which survivals may still be found in various parts of London—a shop with a round window furnished with many small panes of glass; the window was not garnished with the choicest wares which this dealer had to sell—not at all; he prided himself on keeping much better things within than those which he chose to show. After dark the window was illumined by two or three candles.

He breakfasted, for the most part, on tea and toast; he dined at one o’clock, plentifully if not luxuriously; it was not the custom, among his class, to invite friends to dinner. The house, in fact, was regarded as a kind of sacred harem, to which no one was invited. Friends, however, were taken to the tavern. Unless he was a Dissenter, this citizen was a member of the Vestry, and served all the parish offices. On Sunday he dined more plentifully than on a week day: he was a member of a club which met once a week; there he exchanged sentiments which we should call commonplace, but they were expected; any other sentiments would have affected his friends painfully, with doubt and misgiving.

These sentiments were based upon convictions fixed and unalterable. He believed—long before any Reform Bill—that the only land of liberty was Great Britain; that British armies were irresistible, and British fleets were ever victorious; that the greatest enemy to mankind was the Pope; that the greatest crime conceivable was not to pay your debts, especially debts contracted with a tradesman of Cheapside; that the greatest disgrace was to become bankrupt. A debtor’s prison he regarded as the chief safeguard and stay of British trade; he would listen to no sentimental nonsense about locking up debtors—every debtor ought to be locked up, ought to be flogged, ought to be hanged!

THE QUEEN’S PRIVATE CHAPEL, WINDSOR

ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL

He entertained no sympathy with trades unions: the working-man was the servant of his employer; it was not for him to regulate his own wages and his hours; he was to take what he could get, what the generosity of his master, what the conditions of trade, allowed him to have.

This man, of whom there were many hundred thousands in the country, read no books; he was quite ignorant of what we call everything, that is, of literature, science, art, music, history. Something he knew of what was going on, because there were newspapers at the tavern, which he sometimes read. But he took in no newspaper, and he read no books. There were no books in his house at all; his girls read no books. A book of Family Prayers there was; and for Church purposes, Prayer Books and Bibles, but no books. And so this man, with all his household, lived and died, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, without culture, without ideals, without standards, without aspirations.

QUEEN’S PRIVATE SITTING ROOM, WINDSOR

THE ROYAL KITCHEN, WINDSOR

He had become, after the Mob Riots of the eighteenth century, a prodigious coward. Formerly, as in 1715, when a mob appeared in the street, he had run to the mug-house or tavern, seized a club, and sallied forth to disperse that mob. Gradually he lost courage; he stayed at home; he was sleek and fat and unwarlike; when the mob came along he put up his shutters, locked his door, and sat behind it trembling. However, the establishment of the New Police sufficiently repressed the mob, and made the question of the civic valour no longer necessary.

For holidays, he had none, that is to say, he felt no need of any change year after year; he lived the daily routine, and would not alter it if he could. Some of his neighbours—a few—had begun to go in the summer to Brighton or to Margate. Not our friend; he stayed where he was, with his nose over the churchyard, and said that London air was best. Once a year he might take his family to Bagnigge Wells or over to Vauxhall; on summer evenings he would walk with them in the pleasant fields outside the city walls; he wanted no other holiday. Nor did his people. His daughters married and left him; but he and his wife kept on where they were until the end.

The man himself, ill-educated, vulgar, incapable of understanding anything except that which lies on the surface, unfortunately stood in the eyes of the world to represent the City: the trading merchants had gradually withdrawn from the Corporation, leaving it to the shopkeepers, so that for a time the Mayor and Corporation of the greatest city of the world were drawn from a narrow, vulgar part of the community. Not only the city, but trade itself fell into contempt during this interval. You may remember that Thackeray is filled with contempt of trade, with his Alderman Gobble and the purse-proud merchants.

One point must be acknowledged in favour of this man. He was a great stickler for what he called morals—not including that part of morals which deals with the treatment of dependents. Private character he expected of his friends: a young man who came courting his daughters had to bring with him an unsullied private character. You may note, if you please, because the virtue is the foundation of all trade, that in his private expenditure he was thrifty.

How, then, has this man been affected by the changes of sixty years?

First, his trade is entirely altered. The extension of machinery has affected every line of trade. In watchmaking, for instance, the best watches were made in Clerkenwell: they cost from six pounds to a hundred and twenty pounds; a machine-made watch can now be obtained for twenty shillings. So with stuffs, velvets, silks, ribbons, everything: machinery has largely increased the production and as largely diminished the cost. This means, as one effect, that less capital is required to embark in trade. Free Trade, which has done such great things for this country, though we make no converts, has largely affected the retail trade.

THE QUEEN IN ROYAL ROBES

Apart from his trade the English tradesman’s private life has been completely changed. He no longer lives next to a noisome burial-ground in the city; he has a villa in a suburb; he goes into town every morning and comes out in the evening; the old evenings with the city cronies are things of the past. In his suburb there is very little social life even for his children; for himself there is none. He does not frequent theatres or concerts; he stays at home. In the morning he reads a newspaper; in the evening he reads books and plays cribbage. As for his children they have forgotten the former stage; they are well educated; they go into the professions; they are artistic and become Art students; they are as well read as can be desired; they are in the stream of modern ideas.

Not only this, but the social position of the tradesman has been raised: here and there one may find a huge palace devoted to the sale of everything; the palace has been created by the genius of one man, and is controlled by the mind of one man. It is impossible to feel anything but respect and admiration for a man of such great ability, who has created interests so vast and so commanding.

The shopkeeper has, for the most part, abandoned the Corporation; he no longer seeks office in the city; when he does, he is a man who can hold his own with the merchants who have once more taken over the municipality; the City is the gainer by the change, and so is the London tradesman, because what advances the reputation of the City also advances him.

Painting by Sir Edwin Landseer

ROYAL GROUP, WINDSOR, 1843

The forces which have changed the common people have also acted upon himself and his family: the widening of the world, improved communication, and cheap postage and the rest. His young people are not concerned with the polytechnics, but they are moved by the spirit of athletics that drag all the youth of this country into the playing-fields. They career over the country on bicycles; they play golf, lawn-tennis, cricket, football; they are not shut out from suburban society by the old exclusiveness with which “wholesale people” formerly regarded “retail people.” The playing-field is a leveller; there is no rank in a football team.

BALMORAL CASTLE

Painting by C. R. Leslie

BAPTISM OF THE PRINCESS ROYAL

Let us not forget to remark how large a knowledge of geography is possessed by our friend of Cheapside. You would be amazed at the extent: sure and certain I am that the average American citizen cannot compare with my man in this respect. He has learned this knowledge by following day after day the wars and rumours of wars which assail the country continually. Since the accession of Queen Victoria, we have carried on war in Canada, at the Cape, in India, in New Zealand, on the West Coast of Africa, in the Crimea, in Egypt, in China, in Abyssinia, in Dahomey, in Burmah, in Afghanistan, in Chitral, and I know not where beside. This good man, with his newspaper and his atlas, gets up his geography from day to day and from war to war.

Painting by F. Winterhalter

ROYAL GROUP, 1848

There is perhaps a “seamy” side to trade of every kind. With that I have no concern whatever; I have only to show here how the events of sixty years have affected the London tradesman, and this, I venture to hope, I have succeeded in doing. Again, it must be understood that I am talking of the better class—not necessarily the richer class—of London retail dealers. There are, I believe, those who live for making money, and have no other care or thought. For them order, law, peace, justice exist for no other purpose than to allow the most perfect freedom for the besting of the customer. The old Cheapside trader was narrow and stupid; these people are neither narrow nor stupid; they are sharp; they exist in every trading city; they are purse-proud and ostentatious; they flourish their wealth at the “Grand Hotels”; they wear the finest fur and the richest silk—and, if you please, we will say no more about them.

CHAPTER IV
TRANSFORMATION OF THE PROFESSIONS

“I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar.”

Merchant of Venice.

Sixty years ago there were three professions and two services. The two services were the Army and the Navy; the three professions were the Church, Law, and Medicine.

The Church was the natural home of the scholars: a few scholars drafted off into the Law; there were also a few in the House, where they made apt quotations from Horace, and delighted the members by giving a Virgilian turn to a debate. Nowadays—alas!—were a scholar to venture on a Latin quotation, the House would not understand.

It is pleasant to look back upon the quiet, uneventful, peaceful life of the early Victorian scholar. He began at a public school, where he needed no stimulus in the way of stripes; he devoured books; he acquired scholarship by a kind of intuition; he wrote Latin verses, in which every hexameter had a Virgilian phrase and every pentameter reminded one of Ovid; he wrote Greek Iambics more easily than the most rapid English poet ever composed blank verse; he thought in Latin; he made jokes in Greek. This boy gained, of course, a School scholarship and entered one of the Colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. Here he obtained one of the College scholarships; one of the University scholarships; all the prizes that there were for Latin and Greek compositions; and at last took the highest degree possible in Classical Honours. This done, a Fellowship was the next step. This place was worth about £300 a year, with rooms, commons, and dinner free. There were no duties attached: if he chose to take Orders and to remain unmarried he might keep his Fellowship for life. He did take Orders: he was appointed College Lecturer in Classics; he remained Lecturer for ten years, when the Tutor took a College Living; he then succeeded to the Tutorship, which was worth three or four thousand a year. He then had two courses open to him: he might remain Tutor long enough to amass a considerable fortune, and then take a College Living and retire into the country; or he might wait on, presently retire, and either finish his days as a Fellow, or be perhaps elected to the Mastership, a post both dignified and well endowed. By this time he had passed the period when men most desire to marry: he was settled in most excellent rooms; he had a free library; his habits were fixed; the College Port was renowned; he was too comfortable to run the risk of change. Therefore he stayed where he was, within the walls of the old College, and younger men took the College Livings. He never wrote anything to prove his own learning or to advance the learning of others; he produced nothing except a few Greek epigrams. And when at last he died there was for a brief period a memory of one who had been among them—a great scholar—and then oblivion closed over him and he was gone. Such was the life of the Don. Sometimes he retired from the College and took the Head Mastership of a school, but not often.

Painting by Count D’Orsay

THE ONLY EQUESTRIAN PORTRAIT OF HER MAJESTY

All the clergy were not College Dons and great scholars. Yet there was always, at that period, a flavour of scholarship about them: the beneficed clergy of the country were generally younger sons of the country gentry, because almost every family had a church living in its gifts, and these livings were too valuable to be bestowed out of the family. A young man who took a curacy in the country without family influence probably found himself stranded for life on eighty pounds a year. Those of the benefices which did not belong to private patrons were either in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, with whom interest was required; or of the Bishop, who had his own relations to provide for: of the sons, nephews, and cousins, for instance, of Dr. Sparke, sometime Bishop of Norwich, it was said “as the Sparkes fly upwards;” or of some college at Oxford or Cambridge which wanted them for its Fellows. The only chance for such a man was to attract attention as a preacher in some town. But this chance came to few; therefore for half the clergy at least their profession was a starveling. Yet those who had no interest entered it, in hopes and under the pressure of a call which they believed to be real, and not to be disobeyed under penalties too awful to be contemplated. Meantime it is now nearly fifty years since Charles Kingsley, who could never shake off the prejudice of small middle-class gentility, uttered the sneer that the modern way of making your son a gentleman was to send him to Oxford first and to put him in Holy Orders next. He here expressed, however, a common feeling about the clergy, which was that they should be scholars first, gentlemen next, and Divines last. And there is no doubt that the social position of the Church, and, therefore, the adhesion of all the better classes to the Church, has proved of the greatest value, in times of religious decay, towards maintaining the Church in her position of ascendency.

The administration of the parish was still that of the eighteenth century. That is to say, the Church was there, before all people, with open doors, offering its services, its sermons, its offices, freely to all who chose to accept them. It was not considered the business of the clergy to run after those who refused their offices. As for the piety and the reputation of the clergy, their lives were pure; there was commonly no scandal: they were supposed, however, to be addicted to wine, and in the City there were some who were known as “three bottle men.” In opinions the majority were of the Evangelical type, with Calvinistic leanings: they preached sermons wholly on points of doctrine. The general belief was that mere membership in the Church was of no importance at all, and that the salvation of the soul was an independent and separate transaction carried on between the individual and his Creator. This kind of preaching has not yet wholly ceased, but it is rare: such preachers are no longer heeded.

COUNCIL CHAMBER, OSBORNE HOUSE

BILLIARD-ROOM, OSBORNE HOUSE

Let us compare the Church of the present day. It is no longer a Church of scholars: there are still some learned members in it, but the old presumption that a clergyman must be a scholar, is quite lost and forgotten; rather the presumption is the other way, that a clergyman is not a scholar. The young scholars of the day do not, as a rule, take upon them Holy Orders: there are too many openings for their intellectual activities. Moreover, the prizes are not what they were. Agricultural depression has ruined the fellowships, cut down by one half the country livings, destroyed the value of Deaneries and Canonries. The Bishoprics still, however, keep their value, and a profession cannot be thought very poor which numbers so many prizes as the Church of England, with her Archbishops and her Bishops. Preaching, which was formerly so important a part of Church work, has decayed deplorably. The reason is the development of the parish work, which now occupies the whole time of the clergy, leaving them no time for meditation and study. For, since the people will not come to the clergy, the clergy condescend to stoop to the people. At the present moment the Church is the centre of numberless institutions and associations which aim at civilising the people rather than making them religious. The clergy preside over clubs for the lads, clubs for the girls, temperance associations, mothers’ meetings, sales of clothing, lectures, concerts, care of the poor and of the sick, benefit societies, visiting organisations, Sunday schools, country holiday funds, convalescent homes, and a thousand other things. Now the working people, and especially the very lowest class, regard this activity with a kind of admiring wonder; they see these young fellows—many of whom are not clergy, but live among them—working morning, noon, and night for no reward: they are touched by this devotion; their lads would follow them to the death. I do not say that this example makes them religious, but it fills them with that new feeling towards religion which has been already considered. The doctrines held by the present clergy are in most cases High Church, with which, personally, I have no kind of sympathy. At the same time, one must admit that the modern views have destroyed the dreadful terrors about Election and Predestination: in the Anglican, as in the Roman Church, once more the Fold protects.

PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN IN ROYAL ROBES

In Law and Medicine, fewer changes have been made. In the former, a barrister was not allowed to make a friend of an attorney, or to take his hand, or to visit at his house. The low class attorney-at-law, of whom there were a great many, practised with impunity all kinds of iniquities and conspiracies; he was, indeed, an enemy to the human race; he was usurer; he was the concoctor of civil actions, which he dragged on interminably;—it was he who filled the prisons with unfortunate prisoners; he robbed the widow and defrauded the fatherless; he took advantage of difficulties which he aggravated—he charged what he pleased. The power of the attorney—now called solicitor—for mischief is very greatly curtailed;—a taxing master looks after his bills; he can no longer clap a debtor into prison; he is liable to be struck off the rolls for misconduct.

In Medicine the physician never claimed so great a superiority over the surgeon. If he did, that superiority has vanished. Great are the recent triumphs of surgery: not so great, perhaps, those of medicine. In those days the surgeon operated in the presence of the physician; he did not aspire to the medical degree; he could not be called “Doctor.” There were no anæsthetics in those days; operations of all kinds were limited by the patient’s power of endurance: a long operation killed, because there is a limit to the endurance of pain. The discoveries of the laboratory have placed the treatment of all disease on a new and more scientific footing. Fortunately, I am not called upon in this place to do more than indicate changes that only a medical student could properly explain. We can, however, all understand the ward, clean and neat, with regulated temperature; the patients under the care of bright and cheerful nurses; the hospitals “walked” not by the young ruffians of the “Bob Sawyer” type, but keen and eager students, with whom science is more than a mere profession, and the causes of diseases more than their cure.

OSBORNE HOUSE, ISLE OF WIGHT

Sixty years ago, I said, there were only three professions. How many are there now, recognised as on an equal footing of dignity and importance with these three?

Formerly, Architecture was not considered a profession. I remember long ago, in the Sixties, listening to a group of men who were discussing whether architecture had any claims at all to be a profession—certainly the local architect was also the house-agent—and whether a gentleman could belong to it. I believe they agreed that it was only a trade.

THE ROYAL YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT”

Formerly, there was no profession of science at all. At Cambridge there were chairs of Mathematics, of Chemistry, and of other branches. But there was no profession of any branch of science. No man set up a laboratory and said “I am a chemist by profession”; there were none of the great Schools for Physical Science, such as now exist at Cambridge, at South Kensington, at Newcastle, and at other places; no young men began by “going in” for science, as they do at present. That profession which offers the noblest prizes of fame and name, together with a sufficiency of income, has been created in all its numerous branches within the last sixty years. The British Association made the world familiar with the claims and the work of the new science. Such men as Humphry Davy, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and so many others, who will be accounted the chief luminaries of this age, planted firmly the claims of science in the minds of the people, and raised the position of science to the same level as that of Latin and Greek scholarship. All these physicists, electricians, zoologists, biologists, chemists, and the rest have come into existence during the Queen’s reign. The teaching of science at our Universities and Schools, the multiplication of new Colleges in all the Colonies, as well as at home, have created places for these students and a demand for their teaching: they have also created a demand for new books, which only these teachers were able to supply.

Formerly, again, the position of teacher in a school, except when one was Headmaster of Eton, Harrow, or Winchester, was one of curious contempt. The reason for this contempt was simple: it was the connection between a schoolmaster and his floggings. That connection has now ceased. At a few schools, the Head exercises the old business with the birch: it is regarded as a custom or a usage rendered venerable by antiquity. “I was swished,” said a young fellow the other day, “nineteen times when I was at school. I have always regretted that I didn’t make it twenty.” But the assistant masters have no power of inflicting personal chastisement.

This old contempt has vanished: the profession is now regarded with great respect, and carries with it a proper amount of social consideration. No young man, formerly, who could by any possibility get into any other line of life, would take a place as assistant master even in a public school. If he did, it was in hopes of obtaining a boarding-house and making a rapid fortune. The position is now literally run after by young University men of the greatest distinction and the best credentials as to scholarship. The present Headmaster of Harrow, writing to the papers some time ago, made this suggestive observation. I quote from memory—“I believe that I have at Harrow, at this moment, the best collection of assistants that were ever gathered together at any public school. Yet I am certain that if they were all to resign, I could replace them very shortly by another collection equally good.” So ready, so eager, are the young scholars of the day to become masters in the public schools. Sixty years ago they would have stayed on at Oxford or Cambridge, and led the life already described of the Scholar, the Fellow, and the College Tutor.

Another new profession, though to the younger men it seems an old profession, is that of engineering. There are many branches of engineering: one constructs piers, jetties, railways, bridges, great works like the Forth Bridge, or smaller bridges, tunnels, roads, embankments, and the like. Another devises and constructs machinery of all kinds, another controls electricity: there must be an engineer in every factory as in every little steamer. Great prizes in money and fortune belong to this profession. It is eminently a learned profession: to attain unto any degree of eminence in it one must be a good mathematician.

Other new professions are those of the actuary and the accountant. And there are “followings” once not allowed to be professional, such as that of the painter and the sculptor, the work of literature, music, acting, etc. A young man may enter any one of these branches of mental achievement: he may choose his own department; he will occupy as good a social position as the young barrister; he will belong to the professional class. As for the prizes in some of them, if they are not equal to those of the Bar or the Church, they are considerable; in some kinds of literature, such as educational books, fiction, and the drama, successful writers command incomes which would be considered incredible by Douglas Jerrold and the wits of the early Victorian era.

To recapitulate. Where there were three professions sixty years ago there are now dozens: given a young man of ability and activity, it is difficult not to find for him an opening where he will get a chance of gaining a splendid prize of success. For the man of exceptional ability, the Church leads him to a Bishopric with a life peerage and £10,000 a year; the Bar leads him to an income of £10,000 a year, and, if he pleases, a peerage; Medicine may give him £15,000 a year, also with a peerage, or a baronetcy, if he wishes one; all the other professions have their splendid prizes and their magnificent chances which are open to a young man of ability. Compared with the condition of 1837, we are like the occupants of a broad expanse of country which has been suddenly widened in all directions by the removal of walls and fences and the abolition of prohibitions.

One thing remains with the new as with the old professions: they all demand an apprenticeship and a training. No one can enter the Law, or Medicine, or any other, without being able to pay, over a period of five years, at least a thousand pounds, probably two thousand when all is done. Until this condition is removed, which is not likely to happen, it is not true to say, or to think, that every career in this country is open to every boy.

CHAPTER V
TRANSFORMATION OF WOMAN

“A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.”

Wordsworth.

Let me present to you, first, an early Victorian girl, born, indeed, about the Waterloo year; next, her granddaughter, born about 1875.

The young lady of 1837 has been to a fashionable school: she has learned accomplishments, deportment, and dress. She is full of sentiment: there was an amazing amount of sentiment in the air about that time—she loves to talk and read about gallant knights, crusaders, and troubadours; she gently touches the guitar—her sentiment, or her little affectation, has touched her with a graceful melancholy, a becoming stoop, a sweet pensiveness; she loves the aristocracy, even though her home is in that part of London called Bloomsbury, whither the belted earl cometh not, even though her papa goes into the City; she reads a deal of poetry, especially those poems which deal with the affections, of which there are many at this time; on Sunday she goes to church religiously and pensively, followed by a footman carrying her Prayer Book and a long stick; she can play on the guitar and the piano a few easy pieces which she has learned; she knows a few words of French, which she produces at frequent intervals; as to history, geography, science, the condition of the people, her mind is an entire blank; she knows nothing of these things. Her conversation is commonplace, as her ideas are limited; she cannot reason on any subject whatever because of her ignorance,—as she herself would say, because she is a woman. In her presence, and indeed in the presence of ladies generally, men talk trivialities. There was indeed a general belief that women were creatures incapable of argument, or of reason, or of connected thought. It was no use arguing about the matter. The Lord had made them so. Women, said the philosophers, cannot understand logic: they see things, if they do see them at all, by instinctive perception. This theory accounted for everything—for those cases when women undoubtedly did “see things.” Also, it fully justified people in withholding from women any kind of education worthy the name. A quite needless expense, you understand.

THE QUEEN RECEIVING THE CRIMEAN VETERANS AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE

The girl who lived in Bloomsbury Square, or in the suburbs—say Clapham Common—had, in those days, to make herself happy with slender and simple materials. There were very few concerts: I think the Philharmonic was already in existence; Oratorios were sometimes performed: it was not every girl who liked what was then called classical music; the general cultivation of music was poor and meagre, and within very narrow limits: people liked songs, it is true, especially pathetic songs. These, like the poetry of the Keepsake and Friendship’s Offering, mostly turned on the domestic affections. The young ladies recognised this sentiment, bought or copied those songs, and sang the most mournful of ditties. Everybody, in every class which respected itself and claimed gentility of any kind, talked about the opera, to which the well-to-do young lady was taken once a year, solemnly. This gave her the right for the rest of the year to talk about the repertoire, and to speak with disrespect of the leading singers.

The theatre was very seldom visited; indeed there were reasons why it was not desirable that young ladies should go to the theatre; if they did go it was an event very much discussed both before and after. There were only one or two theatres that respectable people could possibly attend, and the one part of the house where ladies could be seen was the dress circle. Now in the Thirties, if my information is correct, there were good actors, but the plays were monstrously bad. The Queen, however, used to like going to the theatre. If you walk down to those north of the Strand, you may see how the road was widened for her to go to the Adelphi melodramas. The reading of girls was carefully selected for them; in serious circles—there were many circles in 1840 privileged to be serious—fiction was absolutely forbidden; its place was taken by religious biography: wonderful to think how large a part was played by religious biography about that time. I do not know what books besides these biographies and records of “conversation” were allowed, but I imagine that there were not many. At all events, a young woman must not be allowed to read anything which would suggest to her the wickedness of the world, the realities of the world, the truth about men and women, or the meanings of humanity. She was to leave her mother’s nest not only innocent—girls do still leave their mothers in innocence—but also in a state of ignorance, which was then mistaken for a state of grace. How far she really was ignorant no one but herself could tell; one imagines that there may have been some knowledge behind that demure countenance that was not generally suspected.

Painting by Winterhalter

THE FOUR ROYAL PRINCESSES

PRINCESS ROYAL, PRINCESS ALICE, PRINCESS LOUISE, AND PRINCESS HELENA

As for her accomplishments, they comprised, apart from the knowledge of a few pieces on the guitar and the piano, some slight power of sketching or flower-painting in water-colours. Of course it was nothing better than the amusement of an amateur. As for attempting literature, no one, with very few exceptions, ever thought of it. There was then but a limited demand for women’s literary work—a very limited demand—yet there had already been some very fine work done by women. Mrs. Ellis was writing those famous and immortal works of hers on the Women of England, the Mothers of England, the Wives of England, the Daughters of England,—so far as I know, for the subject is inexhaustible, the Housemaids of England. These essays, which I fear, dear reader, you have never seen, endeavoured to mould woman on the theory of recognised intellectual inferiority to man. She was considered beneath him in intellect as in physical strength; she was exhorted to defer to man, to acknowledge his superiority—not to show herself anxious to combat his opinions. At this very time, one woman at least—Harriet Martineau—was proving to the world that there were exceptions to the inferiority of the sex in matters of reason; while another woman—Marian Evans—already grown up, was shortly to enter the field with another illustration of the same remarkable fact.

It has been often charged against Thackeray that his good women were insipid. Thackeray, like most artists, could only draw the women of his own time, and at that time they were undoubtedly insipid. Men, I suppose, liked them so. To be childishly ignorant; to carry shrinking modesty so far as to find the point of a shoe projecting beyond the folds of a frock indelicate; to confess that serious subjects were beyond a woman’s grasp; never even to pretend to form an independent judgment; to know nothing of Art, History, Science, Literature, Politics, Sociology, Manners;—men liked these things; women yielded to please the men; her very ignorance formed a subject of laudable pride with the Englishwoman of the Forties.

Painting by Winterhalter

“FIRST MAY 1851”

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON PRESENTING A BIRTHDAY GIFT TO HIS GODSON, PRINCE ARTHUR

As for doing serious work, the girl of that period shrank appalled at the very thought. To earn one’s livelihood was the deepest degradation; the most sincere pity was felt for those unhappy girls whose fathers died or failed, or left them unprovided, so that they must needs do something. It was pity mingled with contempt. Even this meek and gentle maiden of the early Victorian period could feel—and could show—the emotion of contempt. Readers of Cranford will remember how the unfortunate lady opened a tea shop; those ladies who were too old or too ignorant for teaching—“going out” as a governess—sometimes set up a “fancy” shop, where children’s things—lace, embroideries, things in wool and pretty trifles—were sold. I remember such a shop kept by two gentlewomen, old, reduced, decayed; but they were very sad, always in the lowest depressions; I fear it was but a poor business. There were no professions open to women. Those who did not marry—they were comparatively few—stayed at home with one of the brothers, generally the eldest, and as often as not, such an unmarried sister proved the angel of the house. Sometimes, to be sure, the lot was hard, and she was made to feel her dependence. In general, I like to believe, the single woman of the family, in whom all confided, in whom all trusted,—the nurse of the sick; the contriver and designer of the girls’ frocks; the maker of fine cakes and the owner of choice recipes; who knew all the branches of a numerous family; who kept together the brothers and cousins who would fly apart but for her,—was as much valued as she deserved to be.

THE QUEEN IN GALA COSTUME

There were many ways of “going out” as a governess. The most miserable lot of all was considered—and no doubt was—to be a resident teacher in a girls’ school. In this position there was no society of any kind; there was no chance of meeting young men; there was no pleasure; there was an enforced and unnatural pretence at virtue; there was no hope of change, no hope of happiness, no hope of love; there was not even any chance of making money. One might also become a visiting governess and undertake the children of a house for the day: this gave liberty for the evening. One might become a resident governess in a house: this exposed a girl to the insolence of the servants, the advances of the sons, the caprices or snubs of her employer. Novels of thirty years ago are full of the down-trodden governess. One pities her, because the position, even at the best, must have been beastly—indeed, I remember very well—and the position intolerable for snubs and slights. At the same time, her employer complained that she was meek to exasperation, and resigned to a point which maddened. I have known ladies who were quite carried away: they became speechless in trying to tell of the meekness of a governess. Again, a girl might teach music, if she knew any—a thankless task when the stupidities of the pupils were visited on the teacher. A woman was not allowed to teach dancing: for a most praiseworthy reason, you cannot teach dancing without showing more than the tips of the toes—half the foot perhaps—where, then, is feminine modesty? This accomplishment was therefore taught by a professor, generally a man who had played in his youth some small part in the operatic ballet; he carried a little “kit” or small fiddle, with which he discoursed a scraping, watery kind of music, while his nimble feet showed the way, and his thin legs cut single or double capers which the girls admired, but were not naturally invited to imitate. Nor could a woman teach writing and arithmetic—I cannot possibly explain why. For some unknown reason these useful arts were always taught by men. Yet women could add up; women could write, even in the year 1840. One such teacher of arithmetic and penmanship I knew. He practised entirely in girls’ schools. He was proud of his profession, which he ranked with those of Divinity and Law. He was full of innocuous jokes and, so to speak, non-alcoholic stories. He died about twenty years ago, ruined, he told me, by the introduction of women into the profession.

Painting by Winterhalter

PRINCE OF WALES, AGE 7

I say, then, that in the year 1840, so far as I can remember, there was hardly a single occupation in which a gentlewoman could engage, except that of teaching. Miniature painting can hardly be called an exception, because it is given to so few to be painters. She could not lecture or speak in public. St. Paul’s admonition to women, that they must not “chatter” in church, interpreted to forbid public-speaking in church, was extended to every kind of public-speaking. No woman so much as dreamed of speaking in public at this time. Later on, a Mrs. Clara Balfour astonished people by lecturing in Literary Institutes. I believe she was the first. I remember hearing her lecture. The people sat with gloomy faces: when they came away they shook their heads. “Irregular, my dear madam.” “Sir, it is irreligious.” “Madam, it was an unfeminine and revolting Exhibition.” These comments were heard on the stairs. This system of artificial restraints certainly produced faithful wives, gentle mothers, loving sisters, able housewives. God forbid that we should say otherwise, but it is certain that the intellectual attainments of women were then what we should call contemptible, and the range of subjects of which they knew anything was absurdly narrow and limited. I detect the woman of 1840 in the character of Mrs. Clive Newcome, and, indeed, in Mrs. George Osborne and other familiar characters of Thackeray.

Of Society in 1840 let me speak only of the wealthier City class—the people who lived in big houses in Bloomsbury or in the suburbs. They had “evenings” with a little music; they were very decorous. The young men stood round the wall or in the doorways. The little music included those songs of the affections already mentioned. There was a little refreshment handed about, or set out in the dining-room. It consisted of sandwiches, cake, and negus. Sometimes there was a dinner party. The company were invited for half-past six. The dinner—always the same, or nearly the same—consisted of salmon cutlets, haunch of mutton, boiled fowl, and tongue; birds of some kind, and pudding of one or two kinds. The dishes were put on the table; everybody helped each other. Nobody drank anything until the host had first taken wine with him; there was nothing to drink at dinner except sherry. After dinner the port went round once; the ladies retired,—this was about half-past seven or a quarter to eight. The men closed up; fresh decanters were placed on the table, and they drank port steadily till half-past ten, i.e. for three long hours. Then they went upstairs to the drawing-room; and, as if the port was not enough, they had brandy and water hot.

I have spoken of the wealthier class, but there was, and there is still, an immense number of girls belonging to the ranks where care and thrift were necessary in all things. In this class the unfortunate girls were slaves to the needle. All day and all the evening they were engaged in making and mending and darning. Families were large: there were little children and big boys; and the pile of linen and of stockings waiting to be mended seemed never to grow less, while the pile of things that had to be made grew steadily greater.

A generation that has grown up with a sewing-machine cannot understand this slavery. Think of this machine which sews up a length of three feet in a minute, and of the time that was formerly required to do the same work by hand. It is not too much to say that the sewing-machine set free millions of girls. What they are doing with their freedom is considered in the next few pages.

It was, at the best, an artificial and unnatural life. There was something Oriental in the seclusion of women in the home, and their exclusion from active and practical life; it led to many a rude awakening, many a shattered idol, many a blow which embittered the rest of life.