The Age of Equipoise

A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation

W L Burn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1964. The purpose of this title is to examine and describe certain aspects of English life and thought between 1852 and 1867. By exploring the lives of certain men and women the reader will be presented with an illustration of the actions and opinions of the time. The book draws a contrast between mid-Victorian England and the

Chapter 1
The Distorting Mirror

MY purpose is to examine and describe certain aspects of English life and thought between about 1852 and 1867, certain ways of looking at things, certain men and women whose actions and opinions formed or at least illustrate those ways. The span of time I am taking is, roughly, a generation. It may be that as discoveries in the physical and other sciences quicken the pace of living we shall come, when we speak of a generation, to mean no more than half a dozen years. But in the nineteenth century (as until very lately) a generation meant some dozen to a score of years. Such a period is by no means too long for my purpose. No historian with a professional conscience can devote himself wholly to analysis and description and altogether neglect the passage of time. There is, besides, as a warning against taking too short a span, a mere year or two, the dictum of Henry James: “To live over other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the varying intensity of the same—since it is by these they themselves lived.” The number of things to be perceived in a very short period is relatively small; their growth and variation are scarcely apparent. On the other hand a long period is likely to show so much change and movement as to frustrate my purpose, which is the study of one (I believe fairly coherent) society rather than its transformation into another. Moreover, after fifty years or even less the “hum of implication”, as Mr Lionel Trilling calls it, has altered in tone and diminished in force. A generation in the sense in which I am using the word ought to be long enough to show movement but not so long as to show too much.

It is not every span of a dozen to a score of years which will serve. Some great catastrophe such as the war of 1914–18 may so much accelerate the rate of change that a boy born long enough before it to be aware of his surroundings will have lived through virtually two generations before he is twenty. What I sought was a generation which, while recognizably distinct, did not represent discontinuity in relation to what had gone before and what came after. The England of 1852–67 seemed to meet my needs. No one returning to it after a long absence abroad was likely to feel that he had strayed into another world. Most of the old landmarks were still there for him to recognize. Yet it was not the same England as that of 1842 or 1872. Something of the passions, of the ingenuous and romantic emotions, which had found expression in Chartism, in Tractarianism, in the bitter controversies over the corn laws and the sugar duties, in dozens of utopian schemes, had abated. As I shall try to show in a later chapter there was less of that single-minded vehemence which had characterized and perhaps nearly destroyed an earlier England. But in 1867, though there had been tremors and vibrations (The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and Essays and Reviews in 1860), the surface of things could be seen as almost intact. The England of the School Boards and the highly-organized parties, the upper-middle class England where the purchase of commissions had ceased and the highest ranks of the Civil Service were recruited by open competition and talent counted for rather more than birth or connection, was still a little distant. Although there was a great deal of talk about the middle classes the government of the country was still aristocratically directed; local government was still markedly and in some respects chaotically local; France rather than Prussia or Germany was the enemy to be feared; the labouring classes were still, for the most part, subordinate to their betters and their employers.

It has occasionally seemed to me that historians who deal with “civilizations” are too much inclined to adopt what might be called a post mortem attitude, to listen too anxiously for the first distant rumblings of the inevitable storm, to look with undue avidity for symptons of decay. I thought that it might be, not necessarily an improvement but at least a change, to examine a country at a moment when, whatever its faults, it neither was nor was regarded as being decayed or decadent. Today the slightest, the most short-lived, betterment in our economic or strategic position is welcomed with wild enthusiasm. In contrast to this is the continuous, critical self-examination to which England subjected itself at a time when both its national income and its real income per head were (by our petty standards) increasing at so fantastic a rate. Between 1851 and 1878–83 the national income rose from £613,000,000 to £1,109,000,000; real income per head by 27–30 per cent between 1851 and 1878; between 1846–50 and 1871–5 the average level of the export gain from trade rose by 229 per cent,¹ In the matter of national defence, although there were apprehensions and anxieties which could almost fittingly be described, as those of 1859, as “panics”, an attempted invasion of Britain remained remote, the prospects of a successful invasion scarcely existed, the destruction of the country as part of civilized society was beyond comprehension. Perhaps as a result of this basic prosperity and safety there was little in the way of “escapism”. Although the age produced many critics and some rebels, scarcely any of them gave it up as a bad job; missionaries, explorers, emigrants had their reasons for leaving the country but one would have to search for a long time before finding evidence that their physical withdrawal implied moral repudiation. The sentiments to be found, for instance, in Congo Pilgrim (1953), whose author declared herself a rebel in the Welfare State and “a voluntary exile from the thin crust over the crevasse of emptiness, greed and fear which is western civilization today”, are essentially un-Victorian; though not to be criticized on that ground.

The validity of my title, The Age of Equipoise, remains to be proved but what I sought was a generation in which the old and the new, the elements of growth, survival and decay, achieved a balance which most contemporaries regarded as satisfactory. Inevitably there are risks in using any title which includes “The Age”. Of what or of whom shall it be The Age? Sometimes a material symbol is chosen and here it might be “The Railway Age” or “The Gas-Lit Age”. Neither title would be completely indefensible. England was proud of the evidence of progress and the promise of comfort which gas-lighting and railway transport afforded. But neither of them was, by the middle of the century, a novelty. The Gas, Light and Coke Company had been granted its charter as long ago as 1812; William Murdock, who could reasonably claim to be the pioneer of coal-gas as a source of light, had died in 1839 at the age of eighty-five. Railways no longer evoked, in the mid-century, the same degree of enthusiasm or suspicion or dislike which they had originally met with. Landowners were coming to look on them as convenient sources of profit rather than as disturbing innovations: Charles Dickens, the socially rootless man, sentimentalized the stage-coach but R. S. Surtees, in private life a Durham squire, had no regrets for its passing. Moreover, neither the gas-lamp nor the railway was omnipresent. The oil-lamp and the candle illuminated far more houses, if increasingly fewer public buildings, than gas. The horse, whether for transport, exercise, display or sport, was still of vast importance in English life. “Carriage-folk” was a sufficiently exact description of a class in English society. With the production of elliptic springs at the beginning of the century and the improvement of roads the craft of carriage-building had flowered. They are gone now, all the carriages, gone with their forgotten names—berlin, barouche, calèche, coupé, clarence, daumont, landau, phaeton—but the age in which such craftsmanship and ingenuity were lavished on them was not the Railway Age alone.

Other possible titles for such a book as this are available but each suffers from being pre-selected from a particular angle of vision. To the historian of architecture the age might be that of the neo-Gothic; to the historian of painting, that of the pre-Raphaelites; to the social historian, the Age of Drains and Sewers; to the administrative historian, the Age of the Inspector. Each title, though none is without some degree of appropriateness, is insufficiently comprehensive. And it would be still more hazardous to take a title from some major literary work of the day, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example, or Macaulay’s History of England. Paradise Lost, as Gladstone remarked, does not represent the time of Charles II nor The Excursion the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Another form of nomenclature is possible, using the name of a man. But of what man? Cobden and Bright and J. S. Mill are altogether too un-representative. Bagehoťs claims are stronger and few of the chapters that follow will lack some allusion to him or some quotation from him. Yet the cool serenity on which his claims are based is, in fact, fatal to them. England produced too many men the reverse of serene: men who formed the mobs at elections and public executions; men who attended meetings at Exeter Hall and subscribed to the Record; men who committed small frauds and men who saw great visions. Palmerston’s claims are stronger than Bagehoťs because he not merely touched but handled life at so many points. He stood for a certain gross manliness, both personally and nationally; he was an aristocrat and a landowner with an appeal to the class below his own; he was at once insular and cosmopolitan, breezy and adroit; through Shaftes-bury he was in touch with Low Church opinion; he had a manly detestation of the slave trade and a manly interest in public health; he was, probably, the most “progressive” Home Secretary of his day. What disqualifies him is his lack of the sober, serious, conscious thoughtfulness so characteristic of the age he lived into; and the sense that there was, at the bottom of him, a moral vacuum. It is not absurd, moreover, to ask what Queen Victoria would have thought of fifteen years of her reign being described as “The Age of Palmerston”. So The Age of Equipoise may be as good a title as any. It is better, certainly, than Bagehoťs tempting alternative, The Age of Discussion. There was interminable discussion on many subjects; on army reform, on compensation to Irish tenants for improvements, on church rates, on rate-supported elementary education; leading to no immediate results. But Bagehoťs title obscures the fact that the age, much as it talked, could also act decisively, as it did in the instances of the Indian Mutiny, of divorce, of limited liability, of medical practice.

At first sight a generation seems to offer a neat, compact subject for study; only at first sight because this project, like every other, has its own difficulties. It would be possible to pick a dozen men who, at the beginning of the ‘fifties, were embarking on their careers; and to say that these men represented their generation. Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94) and Walter Bagehot (1826–77) would fit admirably into this category and, indeed, they must be central figures. But they could not be immediately influential to the exelusion of older men—Gladstone born in 1809, J. S. Mill born in 1806, Palmerston born as long ago as 1784. And behind the middle-aged or elderly living were the influential dead such as Jeremy Bentham (1784–1832), T. R. Malthus (1766–1834) and S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834). It thus becomes necessary to illustrate the thought of the age from men whose outlook had been moulded by the ideas and events of a previous one. It is equally permissible to compare what men did and said between 1852 and 1867 with what they did or said before or after. Indeed, to assume that what a particular man said in 1855 is evidence whereas what he said in 1835 or 1875 is not, would be to add a grotesque artificiality to a project already, perhaps, artificial enough.

There is another difficulty, inseparable from any study of this sort but more acute by reason of the period with which it is concerned. One has to be on one‘s guard against the temptation to believe that a man‘s importance is to be measured by his noisiness or verbosity or even by his talents. A comparatively commonplace man or a man whose thought was for the most part commonplace (as Palmerston’s was) may easily have had a greater influence upon a given society than a man who lived deeply and intensely but remote from common experience. So one is torn between the lure of the “typical”, the “representative”, and that of the eccentric and exotic; not daring to ignore the possibility of greater individual depth in the first than seems apparent or the danger of regarding as eccentric what in certain times and places was scarcely abnormal.

As usual the historian must steer as best he can between Scylla and Charybidis. Scylla, here, is represented by certain manifestations of the considerable interest taken in recent years in mid-nineteenth century England. They involve the danger of regarding as important what is merely curious, of taking a collector‘s delight in the discovery of superficial unlikenesses to ourselves, of halting our investigations just before they approach the deepest thoughts and feelings of the people we invesgitate. Under such treatment Carlyle the historian and social philosopher is crowded into the wings by Carlyle the dyspeptic and hypochondriac and Dickens the novelist, who in his day had kept half of England waiting on tenterhooks for his next instalment, by the ageing, dissatisfied man who seduced Ellen Teman. George Eliot and John Chapman, Thackeray and his tiresome though long-suffering Mrs Brookfield, Mill and Mrs Taylor—there seems no end to the list and it would not be entirely fanciful to suggest that posterity has a slight grudge against Matthew Arnold because he was too prudent and discreet to allow himself and Marguerite to be added to it. Two fashions of our own age work in the same direction. Political democracy demands that the barrier between the great and the small shall be broken down and that the statesman, the judge, the prelate shall be shown to be a man of like tastes with the platelayer, while a sex-drunk public is largely if not exclusively interested in their amatory experiences or “love-life”. Thus the mid-Victorian scene acquires something of the air of a faintly scandalous museum.

The search among Victoriana for the frivolous, the irresponsible and the erotic is not a very elevating occupation and to escape from it the historian is tempted to disregard personal abnormalities, to discover “patterns” and to fit the helpless dead into them on the basis of their place in the social structure, the families they sprang from, the schools and universities they attended, the amount and character of their possessions; in the last resort their “background” and the “trends” which they exemplified. This may be the way to Charybidis.

It does not follow that any prudent historian today would care to disregard such factors or to attribute to the educated mid-Victorians the wide freedom, the “unconditioned” existence, which they for the most part believed they enjoyed. Coventry Patmore‘s life was the more fortunate through circumstances for which he was not responsible. The assistantship in the British Museum to which he was appointed in 1846 might not have been so filled in the days of open competition; the material benefits of his second marriage might not have been so great if it had taken place after instead of sixteen years before the Married Women‘s Property Act of 1882; that he bought an estate in Sussex in 1865 and sold it in 1874 at a profit of £9,000 must have been due in part to the appreciation in that interval in the value of landed property. To take a larger example, one recognizes how much of the Radical-Nonconformist individualism, of the opposition to State intervention, was due to the fact that the people and groups who held these views were unlikely to gain direct benefit from the extension of State action. If, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 THE DISTORTING MIRROR
• 2 THE DAY AFTER THE FEAST
• 3 GETTING AND SPENDING
• 4 LEGAL DISCIPLINES
• 5 SOCIAL DISCIPLINES
• 6 THE END OF AN EPOCH
• INDEX