Paternalism in Early Victorian England

F David Roberts

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317271796
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

First published in 1979. This book studies the social outlook which historians today call paternalism. It was an ideology which informed social attitudes at all levels of society and expressed itself in countless ways. In this work, David Roberts provides a comprehensive examination of the revival, amplification, and transformation of the ideals of paternalism as a social remedy in the Early Victorian Period. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Part One

The Intellectual Revival

Chapter I

In Search of a Theory of Paternalism

In 1827 Kenelm Digby, an Anglo-Irish landowner turned amateur historian, published volume four of his romantic evocation of the beauties of feudalism, The Broad Stone of Honour. In 1847 Arthur Helps, private secretary to the Whig minister Lord Morpeth, published Friends in Council, an earnest discourse on the social duties of wealth. In the two decades between these two works some eighteen other English writers published more than thirty books that espoused paternalist social ideas. The same two decades also saw an endless outpouring of novels, pamphlets, and articles that championed the same principles. Never before and never after had so many writers espoused in so short a time paternalist ideas, and never before had the more thoughtful of them sought more seriously to place those ideas on a firm philosophical base.

The authors of these many works included quite a few writers of great reputation. They included, for example, the romantic poets Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. In 1829 the poet laureate, Robert Southey, revived old Tudor ideals in Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospect of Society, and in 1832 he republished those many pleas for a more paternal society that had graced the pages of the Quarterly Review and entitled them Essays Moral and Political. In 1830 the poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his book On the Constitution of the Church and State, placed paternalist theory on the metaphysical foundations of German idealism. In 1835, a year after his death, his nephew, H. N. Coleridge, published some of his uncle’s famous conversations at Highgate in a book entitled Specimens of Table Talk and in 1839 republished the poet’s Two Lay Sermons of 1816, which had explored more deeply than ever before the philosophical and moral basis of a landed paternalism. William Wordsworth meanwhile published as a “Postscript” to his Collected Poems of 1835 his brief but incisive essay on the obligations of the higher classes toward the lower.

The search for a theory of paternalism was not limited to romantic poets, or to Tories and Anglicans: Presbyterian divines and Roman Catholic medievalists alike sought to find new answers to new problems by reviving and altering old attitudes. Scotland’s most famous minister, the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, preached from the pulpit and the press on the social duties of the kirk and its property-owning elders. In 1826 he completed his three-volume work, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, a quite precise, logically argued, and elaborate blueprint of a paternalism that rested on church and property, though not on the state.

Far different in tone from the blueprint of this stern Calvinist were Kenelm Digby’s eleven volumes, Mores Catholici or Ages of Faith. Published between 1831 and 1842, they glorify the medieval church as romantically as The Broad Stone of Honour had medieval chivalry. Digby was a historian and not a philosopher, and he does not, like Coleridge and Chalmers, treat in a theoretical way the social duties of property, church, and state. But, nevertheless, he exalts by his enthusiastic and vivid reconstruction of the medieval age those very institutions and attitudes that are so important to the paternalist position.

Far different from Kenelm Digby’s romantic world of the past is Michael Thomas Sadler’s mercantilist world of the present. Sadler, a Leeds merchant and Tory M.P., published Ireland; Its Evils, and Their Remedies in 1829 and his Law of Population in 1830. In these works he attempted to establish a new theory of political economy, one his biographer R. B. Seeley called “THE PATERNAL SYSTEM.” It was a system whose leading characteristic was “to foster, to protect, cherish, encourage, promote.” Michael Sadler’s closest ally in this effort was his neighbor from Bradford and fellow agitator for the ten-hour day for factory workers, Richard Oastler. No systematic thinker, Oastler still had much to say in his forty-one pamphlets published between 1827 and 1841. In those pamphlets he showed how the old and trusted institutions of king, church, and land could be employed to solve the problems of factory, pauperism, and slums. Men as different as Oastler, Sadler, Digby, and Chalmers thus joined the romantic poets Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to form a pre-Victorian generation of intellectuals who sought to work out a theory of paternalism.

The early Victorian intellectuals that followed also had their ardent paternalists, anxious to develop a sound social philosophy for their trying times. They included men no less famous: Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, William Gladstone, and Benjamin Disraeli. In 1845, three years after Thomas Arnold’s death, his close friend A. P. Stanley published The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold, a work that included Arnold’s famous Letters on Our Social Condition of 1832 and his Principles of Church Reform of 1833. In these writings Arnold called for a reformed and enlarged church, which would join with earnest manufacturers and public-spirited landowners to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor. It was a call that Thomas Carlyle also made, though more stridently and with a greater emphasis on the state than on the church. In his Chartism of 1839 and Past and Present of 1843, Carlyle expressed his desire for a society in which authority at every level did far more governing, protecting, and guiding. Paternalists indeed came in many varieties ranging from the idiosyncratic Carlyle to that serious young Tory just down from Oxford, William Gladstone. In 1838 Gladstone alarmed his political patrons with his Coleridgean view of the Church’s social role in The State in Its Relations with the Church, and in 1840 he further discomfited them by expressing his High Church sentiments in Church Principles. His future rival, Benjamin Disraeli, alarmed few and delighted many with his idealized portraits of paternalist landlords and model manufacturers in Coningsby in 1844 and Sybil in 1845.

Of lesser fame, but in terms of paternalist theory of greater importance, were the writings of R. B. Seeley, William Sewell, and Arthur Helps. Seeley, who was a London publisher and a strong evangelical, wrote Memoir of the Life and Writings of M. T. Sadler (1842), The Perils of the Nation (1843), and Remedies Suggested for Some of the Evils which Constitute the Perils of the Nation (1844), all three of which spelled out in detail Michael Sadler’s PATERNAL SYSTEM. William Sewell, fellow and subrector of Exeter College and late professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, published his ideal vision of a paternal world, Christian Politics, in 1844, the same year that Arthur Helps brought out The Claims of Labour, Seeley his Remedies, and Disraeli Coningsby. Measured by publications, the year 1844 was the high-water mark of the paternalist revival.

Seeley’s Remedies, Sewell’s Christian Politics, and Helps’s Claims are classic expressions of the paternalist outlook. Such was not the case with F. D. Maurice’s The Kingdom of Christ of 1843 or W. G. Ward’s The Ideal of a Christian Church of 1838. These works treat theological and ecclesiastical matters and deal only secondarily with social theories. But when they do discuss the church’s role in relation to social problems they are pronouncedly paternalist.

Dealing more directly with social questions are such exposés of social distress as Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne’s Agricultural Labourer of 1844 and G. W. Perry’s The Peasantry of England of 1846. Equally direct were manuals for the practice of paternalism, such as the Reverend John Sanford’s 450-page Parochialia of 1845. Practical works, they offer imaginative ideas and shrewd comments about how the wealthy can take better care of their dependents. In many ways their practical proposals and shrewd hints formed a firmer basis for a social theory of paternalism than the Christian Socialist vision of John Minter Morgan or the medievalist dreams of the architect Augustus Welby Pugin. Pugin in his Contrasts of 1836 used his pictorial imagination, architect’s pen, and scholarly erudition to present a picture of that harmonious but lost world of fifteenth-century ecclesiastical paternalism, while Morgan, in his Religion and Crime of 1840, fused together Christian idealism, Owenite ideas, and a firm conviction in the paternal role of the wealthy. Paternalism as a set of basic assumptions concerning the framework of society and as a set of duties for various orders could be quite protean, serving both as the backdrop to Pugin’s medieval monasteries and as a frame for Morgan’s future temples of labor.

The names of Morgan and Pugin bring to twenty the authors who between 1827 and 1847 published works espousing paternalist ideas. There were, of course, others whose writings reflected these ideas. They even find expression in those two celebrations of English manufactures, Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures, published in 1835, and W. C. Taylor’s Factories and the Factory System of 1844. These many works constituted that unprecedented efflorescence of paternalist ideas that characterized social thought in the 1830s and 1840s.

Also part of that efflorescence was the republication and rereading of the great classics. Far more Cambridge students in those years read William Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy than Coleridge’s Two Lay Sermons, just as far more Englishmen read and reread Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France than William Sewell’s Christian Politics. It was indeed Burke’s Reflections, first published in 1790, that started that wave of paternalist writings that crested between 1827 and 1847. Before 1790, to be sure, paternalist attitudes were widely held, but in a rather conventional, even tepid, way. After Burke these same conventional attitudes suddenly came to seem crucial, if society were not to dissolve into revolution. There is in the Reflections a far greater passion for a hierarchical and organic society in which the wealthy do their duties than in, for example, William Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy of 1785. Both authors assume a society based on private property, great inequalities, various ranks and orders, authoritarian landlords, a pastoral clergy, and an obedient laboring class, all with their respective duties. But in tone and feeling they are as different as was the latitudinarian eighteenth century from the romantic nineteenth: Paley’s arguments are cool, moderate, and utilitarian, Burke’s passionate, eloquent, and based on moral absolutes.

William Paley, though very much of the eighteenth century, is not therefore unimportant to the history of paternalist ideas in the nineteenth. The matchless expositor of his age’s conventionalities, he based his belief in a paternal society on a mixture of biblical injunctions and utilitarian precepts, and it won him great popularity. Cambridge University adopted his Moral and Political Philosophy as a text. In 1814 it was in its twenty-eighth edition and still inspired many a gentleman’s platitude and many a clergyman’s sermon. Believing that rights and duties were synonymous, he told the sons of the gentry that the best charity is to assist those “with whose behaviour and duties we ourselves are acquainted.” Great proprietors should thus build cottages, erect manufactures, and cultivate wastes; the less wealthy gentry should serve conscientiously as magistrates, and the clergy should work among the poor and regulate their conduct.¹

Burke’s Reflections, though it is based on some assumptions common to Paley, was in many ways a reaction to Paley’s urbane and comfortable world and its mechanistic rationalism. It was also a reaction to ideas far more radical than Paley would countenance. Just as the ideas of John Locke and the political challenges of the world of commerce and finance evoked from Viscount Bolingbroke a reaffirmation of the hierarchical and paternal society of a landed aristocracy, so did the ideas of English radicals and the violence of upstart French revolutionaries elicit from Burke a powerful statement of the same old ideas. The Reflections on the Revolution in France, though essentially a political rather than a social disquisition, still affirms with great eloquence a belief in a hierarchical, organic, and pluralistic society. Burke never doubts that the divison of society into rich and poor and the subordination of the latter form part of “the unalterable relations which Providence has ordained.” For Burke “the rich are trustees for those who labour for them” and the guarantors of “those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community of subordination.” He is also particularly passionate against levelers who raise “servants against masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents.”² In expressing these hierarchical sentiments Burke said little that was original. What was new, however, was his placing such ideas on a more solid, philosophical base. He did this in three ways: first, by arguing that existing institutions were eminently useful since they reflected the pragmatic adjustments of past generations; second, by arguing that these same institutions reflected an enlarged morality, itself a part of a natural and divine law; and third, by arguing that society was so complex, intricate, and fragile that it must be held together by bonds of deference, affection, and habit. Society was organic and would, if subjected to the universal formulas of abstract reform, dissolve into chaos.

The brilliance of Burke’s writing and argument coincided in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with a deep surge of English conservatism and patriotism, a conservatism and patriotism provoked by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Since one of the main strands of conservatism was paternalism, that social outlook also enjoyed a revival. It was, for example, central in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer who looked upon Burke as “the transcendental genius.”

It is doubtful that any of the advocates of paternalism in the 1830s and 1840s would have disagreed with Coleridge’s high estimate of Burke or Burke’s high estimate of an organic and deferential society. Coleridge in 1816 urged the creation of a society in which “all classes are balanced and interdependent, as to constitute more or less a moral unity, an organic whole.” In a similar vein Robert Southey in 1830 sung the merits of

That appointed chain,

Which when in cohesion it unites

Order to order, rank to rank,

In mutual benefit,

So binding heart to heart.³

These are traditional sentiments, ones with which Oxford’s William Sewell or London’s Benjamin Disraeli would entirely agree. Only Thomas Chalmers and Thomas Arnold showed any tendencies to differ from these hierarchical and organic assumptions. There was in Chalmers’s Scottish Calvinism an individualism that verged on the philosophy of self-help later developed by Samuel Smiles, and there was in Thomas Arnold’s liberalism a belief that the government should help bring to an end society’s grosser inequalities. But these tendencies toward individualism and collectivism never got out of hand. Chalmers never allowed his belief in self-reliance to weaken his belief in the need for a vigilant, superintending kirk, one that would “link and harmonize into one fine system, the various classes,” and Thomas Arnold never allowed his alarm at exploitation to lead him to egalitarianism: “Equality,” he wrote, was either “the dream of a mad man; or the passion of a fiend.”⁴ Even though the two Whigs Arnold and Chalmers differed from the two Tories Coleridge and Southey on Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1832, all four writers agreed that society should be authoritarian, hierarchic, organic, and pluralistic and that all in their various stations should do their duties. None of the above authors sought to alter the basic framework of society.

But they all had to make their paternalist assumptions more adaptable to what Thomas Carlyle called “the condition of England question,” a phrase that became very popular in the 1840s and one that reflected the crucial fact that social, not political problems, had become paramount. The problems that Englishmen now faced differed from those confronting Bolingbroke—or even from those facing Burke. For Bolingbroke the main problem was the impact of social development on the body politic—the arrival of financiers in Parliament and men of commerce in the market for pocket boroughs. Even Burke was reacting to political ideas, to the democratic ideas of English radicals and French revolutionaries. But after the Reform Act of 1832 the political problems momentarily receded, while social problems became more acute. The articulate citizen now confronted widespread rural pauperism, overworked factory children, half-naked women in mines, mounting industrial accidents, underemployed and starving handloom weavers, crowded and disease-ridden slums, rising crime rates, an uneducated and ignorant populace, dismal overcrowded prisons, the cruel treatment of lunatics, homeless orphans, vagrancy, drunken...