The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians

F. David Roberts

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780804745321
• eBook ISBN: 9780804780933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In 1830, the dominant social outlook of the early Victorians was a paternalism that looked to property, the Church, and local Justices of the Peace to govern society and deal with its ills. By 1860, however, the dominant social outlook had become a vision of a laissez faire society that relied on economic laws, self-reliance, and the vigorous philanthropy of voluntary societies. This book describes and analyzes these changes, which arose from the rapid growth of industry, towns, population, and the middle and working classes.

Paternalism did not entirely fade away, however, just as a laissez faire vision had long antedated 1830. Both were part of a social conscience also defined by a revived philanthropy, a new humanitarianism, and a grudging acceptance of an expanded government, all of which reflected a strong revival of religion as well as the growth of rationalism.

The new dominance of a laissez faire vision was dramatically evident in the triumph of political economy. By 1860, only a few doubted the eternal verities of the economists' voluminous writings. Few also doubted the verities of those who preached self-reliance, who supported the New Poor Law's severity to persons who were not self-reliant, and who inspired education measures to promote that indispensable virtue. If economic laws and self-reliance failed to prevent distress, the philanthropists and voluntary societies would step in. Such a vision proved far more buoyant and effective than a paternalism whose narrow and rural Anglican base made it unable to cope with the downside of an industrial-urban Britain.

But the vision of a laissez faire society was not without its flaws. Its harmonious economic laws and its hope in self-reliance did not prevent gross exploitation and acute distress, and however beneficent were its philanthropists, they fell far short of mitigating these evils. This vision also found a rival in an expanded government. Two powerful ideas—the idea of a paternal government and the idea of a utilitarian state—helped create the expansion of government services. A reluctant belief in governmental power thus joined the many other ideas that defined the Victorian's social conscience.

PART I

The Tradition of Paternalism

CHAPTER 1

The Idea of Paternalism

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, no social outlook was more widespread and deeply rooted in Britain than paternalism. It pervaded the age’s novels, poetry, and learned tomes, as well as the speeches and editorials of its politicians and journalists. It was also instinctive to the wealthy and powerful who governed Britain and owned and ran its economy. Given how widespread its appeal was, it varied in form and content. There was no one paternalism. Indeed, the word “paternalism” was never used; “paternal government” and “patriarchal principle,” yes, but not “paternalism.” Yet there was enough of a common agreement on its basic assumptions to allow later historians to use that term, and even to draw up a model of paternalist ideas.

A MODEL OF PATERNALISM

Almost all Victorian paternalists held four basic assumptions about society: it should be authoritarian, hierarchic, organic, and pluralistic. That it should be authoritarian followed from the very word “paternal.” Fathers command and expect to be obeyed, and so do kings, bishops, landlords, justices of the peace, and even constables. In their sphere, they all are sovereign, as fathers are, and if their rule is not authoritarian, confusion follows. Paternal authority must be firm, even severe. The typical paternalist believed in capital punishment, whipping, summary justice for delinquents, and imprisonment for seditious writers.

Confusion would also follow if there was no fixed hierarchy defining the respective place of those many authorities and the subjects they ruled. Paternalists never doubted that God had created a hierarchical society. They decried all leveling measures, all talk of equality, because without inequality there would be no structure by which the wealthy could govern wisely and the poor work and obey. At the heart of the paternalist’s hierarchical outlook is a strong belief in dependency, a dependency only possible where there is deference to one’s betters.

Less obvious is the paternalist’s third assumption, that society should be organic. Although the word “organic” was uncommon, phrases such as “old social bonds,” “social ties,” and “community” were far from rare; and those ties and bonds were increasingly imperiled by huge, impersonal factories and cities. In rural England, there were personal ties, a sense of mutuality, of being one family, bound all together, each in his or her appointed place. Unlike on the Continent, the many paternalist spheres were relatively autonomous in England, part of a pluralistic rather than centralized paternalism. On the Continent, kings were the fathers and governors of their subjects. In England, property was the single most important source of authority, and since property was widely held, paternalism was exercised in many different spheres, in a mostly pluralistic way, a way Englishmen, proud of their “English Liberties,” never doubted was necessary for paternalism. “Property has its duties as well as rights” became a hallmark of the early Victorian paternalists. Since property owners seldom questioned their rights, the emphasis of this maxim was on duties, and three in particular were understood, those of ruling, guiding, and helping. It was certainly the landlord’s duty to rule his estate and parish firmly and resolutely—to fine tipplers, jail poachers, transport arsonists, and evict slovenly tenants. As protector of his parish, he also had to suppress crime, riots, and disorder, put the idle to work, and see that vagrants were expelled and the king’s peace kept.

It was also the property owner’s duty to guide, but this was quite as much the duty of the clergy as, if not more than, of the landlord. The parson preached morality to the poor on Sunday and visited them during the week to urge them to mend their ways. If they did not, many landlords and clergymen would, as magistrate, guide them by severer disciplines. Peers, squires, and parsons were convinced, as fathers are, that they knew what was best for their dependents.

The model paternalist had not only to rule and guide but also to help those in distress: soup kitchens had to be provided in periods of severe want, coal sold cheaply in January, clean cottages made available, with modest rents, and the poor law justly and sternly administered. For social critics (and later historians) anxious to find in paternalism the answer to multiplying social ills, the duty of helping was all important. But to most paternalists, it formed a set of duties less crucial than the duty to rule firmly and guide wisely. One could, after all, only mitigate, not remove, social ills, which were an inevitable part of a providential order.

The inevitability of poverty was one of many attitudes that clustered around the four assumptions and three duties that lay at the core of paternalism. The Bible itself declares that the poor shall never cease out of the land, a dictum constantly cited. Paternalists were not reformers. They had no hope of remaking the world. Evils were as ineradicable as the sinfulness of man. It was a belief that led to a second attitude, a deep conservatism. Most paternalists were nostalgic for a golden age when the lower orders had been deferential, the wealthy benevolent, and society harmonious. Innovation was suspect, particularly innovation coming from the new towns and manufactories, two dangerous dissolvents of a society and a government based on land.

A worship of land and a dislike of monied interests constituted a third attitude common to most, though not all, paternalists. Landowners had deep roots in their localities and firm personal bonds with their dependents, while money was rootless, impersonal, mobile, and free of obligations and duties. The landowner knew his tenants and laborers, could tell the worthy from the unworthy, and claimed to act in terms of a moral, not a cash nexus.

Paternalists thought in ethical terms. Belief in a moral nexus—in fair rents and just prices, in the deserving and undeserving poor, in social betterment through moral improvement—formed a fourth attitude. A sense of a just and moral economy fitted in with a mercantilism that preached protectionism for the landlord and a Church of England whose parish clergy saw in the spiritual and moral regeneration of the individual the solution to England’s social evils.

A fifth attitude, deeply ingrained, was hostility to government. It was an ambiguous hostility, one aimed largely at the central government, not the local, at laws intruding on the rights of property, not those repressing seditious literature. Landlords hated centralization but never doubted their right to govern under Parliament’s laws as justices of the peace. Many, although not all, also denounced the economists’ laissez-faire but loved the adage “Live and let live.” Although paternalism was not without its inconsistencies, it nevertheless formed a coherent social outlook, based on common assumptions which were all the stronger for being so inextricably bound up with the dominant institutions of the day, institutions all the more dominant because their roots ran deep into the past.

The roots of two of those institutions—a property that ruled and a Church that guided—had their beginnings in medieval England. It was a medieval past celebrated in the drawings and writings of Augustus Welby Pugin, the romances of Sir Walter Scott, the revival of the Gothic style, and the unstinted praise of the medieval Church by the Cobbetts and Carlyles, a past of barons and bishops faithful in the discharge of their duties, an idealized and not entirely accurate past, but one loved by many Victorians.

Paternalism had been greatly strengthened in Tudor England by a powerful gentry, a nationalized Church, and a stronger monarchy, three pillars supporting a firmly hierarchical and authoritarian society. It was also strengthened by the legislation and the writings of Tudor statesmen and humanists, the statesmen expanding the paternalism of the Crown in Parliament and the humanists making the Christian responsibilities of the stewards of the nation’s privileges and wealth far more explicit. The statute books grew fat with acts increasing the paternal role of government. Acts of Parliament decreed what one wore, what one believed, and how the poor were to be treated. On the surface, the monarchy grew ever more paternal, but in reality the peers and gentry in Parliament designed their statutes so that the justices of the peace became the actual paternal rulers of England.

It was the task of the humanists—Thomas Starkey, Robert Crowley, Thomas Elyot, and most especially Sir Thomas More—to see that that paternal rule was virtuous and just. They condemned avariciousness in all its forms—enclosures, rack-renting, evictions, and engrossing—and urged, in the words of Thomas Starkey, “living together in good order, one ever ready to do good to others.” And thus do Christian virtues “perfect common weal as every part . . . doth his office in perfect love and unity.”¹ The humanists, following Aristotle, found the origins of “the patriarchal state” in the “extensions of the family,” a patriarchal state in which, said Elyot, “all property is . . . a trust of God” and in which “the public weal . . . [is] a body, a living compact of the sundry estates and degrees of men.”²

James I and Charles I desired to complete Tudor paternalism by making the king truly the father—the firm and unquestioned sovereign father—of the commonweal. Proclamations and ordinances, Star Chamber and Councils of the North, and Laudian bishops would bring England a monarchical paternalism on the Continental model. But it was not to be. The two political revolutions of 1647 and 1688 made Parliament sovereign over the nation and the J.P.’s the rulers of the countryside. England’s paternalism would be pluralistic, not monolithic, often despotic locally, but less so from the throne.

Two other revolutions, the scientific and the capitalist, appeared to undermine paternalist assumptions. After Newton, Harvey, and Boyle, with assists from Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, the great chain of being suffered, and the world of humors, essences, and angels yielded to a mechanistic world of forces and atoms. At the same time, the moral economy of just prices and fair rents, of tariffs and monopolies, which accompanied capitalism in the mercantilist seventeenth century, yielded in the eighteenth to the individualism and self-interest of Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, two affirmations of self-interest that would have been anathema to Tudor humanists. But the pluralistic paternalism of landed estates, Church and parish, J.P.’s and municipal courts, and an array of other local authorities had struck roots.

The Reformation, like the political, scientific, and capitalist revolution modified but did not end the old paternalist values. Henry VIII placed the Church under the king; two centuries later, it was partly under the ministers of the king, who were answerable to Parliament, partly under its bishops and clergy, and partly under those peers and gentry who had the right to appoint to benefices. It was a wealthy Church, yet one whose political position was most ambiguous, at once highly respected by the landed class, whose younger sons manned it, but still as persuaded as ever of its divine mission to guide and instruct and to visit the ill, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Church, the landed estates, and local government constituted the three most powerful and wealthy of England’s many institutions, which, in their respective spheres, promised a forceful, just, and benevolent paternal rule.

The promises of a paternal rule, as the nineteenth century began, were expressed in many ways, in sermons, pamphlets, novels, and speeches, as well as in the charges of bishops, the decisions of judges, and the pronouncements of editors. Like the institutions they reflected, traditional paternalist attitudes were everywhere, but they were diffuse and unformed, often no more than a set of maxims and adages. There was no theory of paternalism, none at least that was very explicit, until the French Revolution and sudden industrial, urban, and population growth raised the alarming question of the state of the nation, which forced those most attached to England’s dominant institution to transform the paternalist’s maxims and customs into a search for a more viable and effective theory.

THEORIES OF PATERNALISM

Between 1823 and 1847, twenty or more authors published thirty or more works espousing paternalist ideas, ranging from the absentee Irish landowner Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour, or, Rules for the Gentlemen of England to Friends in Council by Sir Arthur Helps, secretary to the Privy Council. The same two decades saw an outpouring of novels, pamphlets, and articles championing the same principles. Never before, in so short a time, did so many search for a theory of paternalism with a firm philosophical base.

Easily the most prominent of the twenty were the romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth. In 1829, Southey published Sir Thomas More, or, Colloguies on the Progress of Society, and in 1832, Essays, Moral and Political. In 1830, Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State placed paternalist theory on the metaphysical foundation of German idealism. In 1835, his Table Talk was published, followed in 1839 by the republication of his 1816 The Statesman’s Manual. Wordsworth meanwhile published as a “Postscript” to his Collected Poems of 1835, an incisive essay on the obligations of the higher classes to the lower.

The search for a paternalist theory was not limited to romantic poets. In 1826, in his The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, the stern Calvinist divine Thomas Chalmers provided an elaborate blueprint of a paternalism that rested on Church and property and not the state.

Far different in tone were the prodigious writer Kenelm Digby’s eleven-volume Mores Catholicus, or, Age of Faith (1832—42), which glorified medieval chivalry, and Michael Sadler’s works praising contemporary mercantilism. Digby’s romantic view of a caring medieval Church and a noble medieval baronage greatly inspired the paternalist fervor of the Young England movement. In Ireland: Its Evils and Their Remedies (1839) and Law of Population (1830), the Leeds merchant and Tory M.P. Michael Sadler sought an alternative poli...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I - The Tradition of Paternalism
• PART II - The Vision of a Laissez-Faire Society
• PART III - Basic Attitudes
• PART IV - The Role of Government
• Conclusion
• APPENDIX - M.P.’s of Religious and Rationalist Outlook
• Notes
• Index