High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  IV

  Ashley argued for the improvement of other features of urban life, not merely the number of hours spent at work. The increasing levels of drunkenness, the rise in crime and the proliferation of brothels he understood to be consequences of a moral problem to do with the lack of cohesion – especially religious cohesion – in the new urban communities. He campaigned about the abysmal levels of sanitation too, which brought him back to the abdication of responsibility on the part of employers and government. Ashley was shocked to read findings by Edwin Chadwick, secretary of the Poor Law Commission, who had reported on the sanitary conditions of the poor. He had noted that ‘the formation of all habits of cleanliness is obstructed by defective supplies of water; that the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation is greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged in modern times; that of the 43,000 cases of widowhood, and 112,000 cases of destitute orphanage, relieved from the poor’s-rate in England alone, it appears that the greatest proportions of deaths of the heads of families occurred from the above specified and other removable causes.’93 Carlyle, too, had been shocked by Chadwick’s statistics showing the short span of life enjoyed by industrial workers. ‘It is one of the most hideous facts I ever fell in with in the history of Mammon-Worship and Laissez-Faire. The Govt will actually have to attend to all that shortly, or prepare itself for being kicked to the Devil. We cannot go on in that way, and will not!’94 Chadwick had found that in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch the average lifespan of the working classes was sixteen years, thanks to high infant mortality, smallpox and the meanest poverty: a third of the span that ‘gentlemen and professional people and their families’ could expect.95 For all their poverty, however, Londoners spent £3 million a year on gin.

  Distracted though Ashley was by such considerations, one question, linked to factory conditions, came to dominate his thinking. When children were working in factories they were not being educated. In February 1843 he had made the case in the Commons for the education of the poor, following the publication on 30 January of the second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission. It dealt with children working in branches of industry not covered by the Factory Act, describing long working hours in trades such as calico printing, hosiery and metalworking. He conceded that the voluntary bodies, including the dissenters, had done all they could to educate poor people, but ‘a great and terrible wilderness’ still remained: and the scale of the problem was growing. The population of England and Wales had risen to 15,906,829 at the 1841 census. Ashley calculated that 1,858,819 of these had to be educated at the public expense (excluding 50,000 children in workhouses). He outlined figures for Manchester and Birmingham that showed a correlation between illiteracy and crime, and the incidence of brothels, beer houses and public houses. He cited evidence from the police of the corruption of the morals of young children in these areas, not least as a result of their having little or no work, but instead time to roam the streets unsupervised. Boys as young as nine were found in beer shops, and there was a high incidence of illegitimacy.

  Ashley quoted a clergyman as saying: ‘The condition of the lower classes is daily becoming worse in regard to education; and it is telling every day upon the moral and economic condition of the adult population.’ Another said that the condition of children was ‘utterly disgraceful to the character of a Christian country’. One of the children replied to a question put to him: ‘I never heard of France; I never heard of Scotland or Ireland; I do not know what America is.’ James Taylor, a boy aged eleven, said that he ‘has never heard of Jesus Christ; has never heard of God, but has heard the men in the pit say “God damn them”; never heard of London.’96 It had been estimated that the loss through theft and robbery in Liverpool alone in one year stood at £700,000.97

  Ashley also addressed the notion that a society could imprison, flog or hang those who became degenerate or criminal as a result of ignorance, and somehow establish order. He attacked ‘the utter inefficiency of our penal code’ and told the House:

  The country is wearied with pamphlets and speeches on gaol-discipline, model-prisons, and corrective processes; meanwhile crime advances at a rapid pace; many are discharged because they cannot be punished, and many become worse by the very punishment they undergo—punishment is disarmed of a large part of its terrors, because it no longer can appeal to any sense of shame—and all this, because we will obstinately persist in setting our own wilfulness against the experience of mankind and the wisdom of revelation, and believe that we can regenerate the hardened man while we utterly neglect his pliant childhood.98

  Graham did not doubt what Ashley had said: indeed, he quoted figures from the London City Mission concerning two districts in Holborn. In one, there were 103 families comprising 391 persons, 280 of whom were over the age of six and illiterate. Of those over the age of twenty, 119 could not read. In a contiguous district 102 of 158 heads of families were illiterate.99 He said the Education Committee of the Privy Council would continue to make grants to bodies that wished to establish schools. The Anglican National Society also began a fund to set up schools in manufacturing and mining districts, and within three weeks it had raised £32,000. The Queen, Peel, the Duke of Portland and the Duke of Northumberland all contributed.100 Politicians worried about what one called the ‘defective education’ of schoolmasters, a larger number of whom would be needed.101 The search for obstacles was always easier than the search for solutions.

  When in 1844 the government had limited the working day for children to six-and-a-half hours, it allowed them time to go to school as well.102 No child would be employed unless he could produce a certificate of attendance at a school. The minimum age for working was raised from eight to nine. Graham expressed the hope that teaching in these part-time factory schools might improve, and that instruction might be based more rigidly on the ‘sound principles of religion.’103 Some suggested education be made compulsory for all children, not merely those in factories or mills. This general lack of schooling was a ‘primary evil’, as the MP Joseph Hume put it.104 Graham’s difficulty in understanding the importance of educating the lower orders was well expressed, by himself, in a debate in May 1845. He said: ‘I contend that no education will be of any advantage to the people, unless it be accompanied with some endeavours to better their circumstances.’105 Others believed better education constituted an improvement in circumstances and would lead to more such.

  V

  Ashley resigned his rural seat in 1846 because he felt unable to oppose repeal of the Corn Laws; so was out of the House when the ten-hours measure was finally passed, in 1847. His philanthropy continued from outside Parliament. He had from its inception chaired the Committee of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes. This organisation, founded in 1844, had grown out of the Labourers’ Friends Society of the 1830s, whose main purpose had been to provide the lower classes with allotments on which they could grow food. The Queen and Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, were its patrons; Prince Albert its president; its vice-presidents (of which Ashley was one) were headed by the Duke of Manchester and the Marquess of Bristol. Its committee comprised clergymen and industrialists. The Society met at Exeter Hall, that place of do-gooding reviled by Carlyle. It sought to build good homes for the poor, alleviating the physical and moral conditions in which many lived. Also, it set up friendly societies to lend money for better housing. The work was ‘undertaken on Christian principles for the attainment of Christian ends.’106 Ashley and the Society were determined that Chadwick’s principles of sanitation should be observed in all model dwellings and lodgings for the poor. However, the return on their investment offered to speculative builders to build on behalf of the Society – 4 per cent – was roughly half what Prince Albert himself thought would be needed to persuade builders to join the scheme.

  Even more notably, from 1844 Ashley presided over the Ragged School Union, which set up schools run by volu
nteers for children in the poorest parts of cities. He funded one such institution out of his own pocket. In December 1846 he wrote in the Quarterly Review about the schools, and about the children found in them, on the grounds that few of his class would know anything about either. ‘Their appearance is wild,’ he wrote. ‘The matted hair, the disgusting filth that renders necessary a closer inspection, before the flesh can be discerned from the rags which hang about it; and the barbarian freedom from all superintendence and restraint, fill the mind of a novice in these things with perplexity and dismay.’107 He wrote of the smell of their habitat – ‘regions of filth and darkness’ – during the summer and the spectacle of ‘hundreds shivering in apparel that would be scanty in the tropics’ during the winter. He took heart that ‘moral and physical degradations have not yet broken every spring of their youthful energies’: these children were salvageable.

  Yet soon it would be too late. Stagnant pools harbouring a ‘mephitic mass’ were everywhere in their ‘depositories of death’.108 The older inhabitants were ‘living skeletons’, reduced to such by a force ‘hostile to every physical and moral improvement of the human race’. ‘Dampness, dirt and foul air’ characterised the interior of these dwellings. There was little furniture, and, Ashley noted with particular horror, ‘some few have a common bed for all ages and all sexes’. Yet these were ‘beings like ourselves’ who had ‘long subsisted within a walk of our own dwellings’ and whose numbers had expanded with the metropolis.109 People of humble origins had founded the Ragged School movement. City missionaries helped maintain the project. However, it now behoved those of wealth and station to sustain it.

  Although the cheapest possible rooms in these unsavoury districts had been hired for teaching, and the teachers themselves worked free of charge, money was continually required. The schools had started in what Ashley termed ‘noise, confusion and violence’, and neighbours had objected to such concentrations of the lowest classes on their doorsteps.110 However, once each school was established, order was restored. ‘You cannot have a ragged school without its preliminaries; but persevere as others have done, and you will soon overcome the tumult; and those who have the least hankering after better things, will remain and obey you.’ Gangs of urchins had been known to enter the rooms by force and occupy them. ‘But patience and principle have conquered them all; and now we may see, on each evening of the week, hundreds of these young maniacs engaged in diligent study, clothed and in their right mind.’

  As with all of Ashley’s causes, this was God’s work. ‘Simple and fervent piety’ guided volunteers ‘in the genuine spirit of Christian charity, without the hope of recompense, of money, or of fame’. Many surrendered the Sabbath, their only day of rest, to work in the schools. Their work was made harder by the ‘unsettled and lawless habits’ of their pupils’ elders and the ‘physical and moral filthiness of their lives’.111 Ashley reflected that the teachers ‘have attained for themselves by immoveable endurance and pious hope, as much consolation as they have bestowed, rivalling martyrs and ascetics in all the energies of charity and patience.’112

  The pupils were nothing like ‘poor but peaceful children’. The ragged schools were there precisely to accommodate those ‘excluded from superior schools by the rules and regulations indispensable to their discipline’. He continued: ‘The decent apparel, the washed face, the orderly behaviour, the attendance by day, the penny a week, amount to an interdict on their admission, were they even so disposed, to the National and British Schools; and, over and above the regulations, the dignity of the parents of the “respectable” pupils – such is the term – would prompt them to withdraw their children from schools where an intermixture like this was allowed.’

  Of 1,600 children passing through fifteen Ragged Schools, Ashley had found that a tenth – 162 – had been in prison; 116 had run away from home; 170 slept in lodging houses (‘the chief sinks of iniquity in the metropolis’); 253 lived by begging; 216 had no shoes or stockings; 249 never slept in beds; 68 were the children of convicts; 125 had stepmothers; 306 had lost one or both parents, a large proportion being double orphans.113 The itinerant nature of many children meant attendance was often sporadic; no system of fines could be imagined; the beatings and expulsions used in ordinary schools to maintain order would not work here; coaxing, not coercion, was the way forward. The most reliable attendances were in winter, and bad weather,

  Ashley hoped that, if the circumstances of children improved, their passage through the Ragged Schools need only be temporary; but the schools would remain for those who remained ragged. The problem of delinquency – one of the things these schools hoped to ameliorate – was outlined in figures Ashley had obtained from the Metropolitan Police. In 1845 it was recorded that 14,887 persons under the age of twenty were taken into custody. A substantial proportion were female – 1,191 of 3,519 aged between fifteen and twenty dealt with by magistrates, and 257 of 1,139 in the same age group committed for trial. Ashley realised that far more offences went unreported or criminals uncaught. Of those brought to justice their crimes were mainly stealing, or handling stolen goods, and assaults and drunkenness, wilful damage and vagrancy.

  He pointed to the lack of moral training that had caused this, though also rebuked the shopkeepers, stallholders and people of London for putting so much temptation in the way of the morally and economically destitute. Children would disappear from the schools for weeks on end while serving prison sentences, then return; the days between their evenings at school would be spent stealing and cheating. Moral progress was slow; but Ashley told how one urchin had robbed a city missionary, not recognising him in an unusual coat: but on realising his error had given him back his handkerchief. He sought to show that acts of sympathy and kindness towards the lower orders had an effect, though the greatest evidence of improvement was among girls. The high moral tone Ashley wanted in the schools would be enforced by religious instruction and observance, something that irritated another prominent supporter of the movement, Charles Dickens. He characterised one teacher who had come under this influence as ‘always blowing a shrill set of spiritual Pan’s pipes’.114

  The Ragged Schools, according to the most recent report, numbered twenty-six, with around 2,600 pupils and 250 teachers. Four more schools had just been opened, lifting the enrolment to about 3,000. Enough money had been raised for some paid masters, who ran schools five evenings a week. Only two or three of the schools were open during the day; those that opened on Sunday taught only religion. In the week, the schools began and finished with religious instruction, in between which were reading, writing and arithmetic. In one school, on the fifth day girls were taught needlework and boys tailoring and shoemaking by a master tailor and a master shoemaker, whose wages the charity met. Pupils were admitted only if they had attended on the other four days, as a reward. The school was open each evening from 6 p.m. until 9.30 p.m.; and on the last evening for which Ashley had figures there had been sixty-three girls and forty-two boys present.

  The Ragged School Union was ambitious. Ashley hoped an industrial day school could be founded ‘in the worst locality in the metropolis, and appropriated to the reception of the most vagabond and destitute boys’, to attempt to give those who would otherwise face a life of crime an opportunity to find a trade by which they could live honestly.115 He saw these children as a metaphor not just for what was wrong with the country, but for what might be put right. ‘We must entertain higher thoughts for them and for England – and with a just appreciation of their rights, and our own duties, not only help them, by God’s blessing, from these depths of degradation; but raise them to a level on which they may run the course that is set before them, as citizens of the British Empire, and heirs of a glorious immortality.’116

  Ashley continued to chair the Commission on Lunacy, in which capacity he sought to have decent asylums built at the public expense in every country, and to have lunacy treated humanely and in its early stages. He also led schemes to assist the emigrati
on of young people to countries where their prospects might be better. In 1851 he succeeded his father in the Shaftesbury earldom, and gained a platform in the House of Lords. He did so at a time when the aristocracy’s traditional relationship with the lower orders was undergoing radical change; and, just as challenging, when the middle classes were seeking to engage in public life on equal terms with their betters. Holding such a society together would take either supreme statesmanship, or a miracle.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ASCENT OF THE BOURGEOISIE: RADICALISM AND THE END OF THE CORN LAWS

  I

  THE NEW MIDDLE class that burgeoned during the mid-Victorian period distressed some elements of the old gentry. It used its money to buy houses and land that had previously been their preserve; it sent its children to the gentry’s schools and sometimes even its universities; it sought to move on the fringes of its society, and sometimes more deeply than that; it did so with imperfect manners and taste, which it sought precipitately to improve; it sometimes attempted, successfully, to marry above its station. It did all these things thanks to having made fortunes in trade, and having better liquidity than some of its social superiors. The real blow to the wealth of the landed gentry would come with the introduction of death duties in 1894; but from the repeal of the Corn Laws onwards some fortunes dwindled. It is no wonder there were enmities. In George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt the rector, the Reverend Mr Lingon, has a decidedly unchristian view of the (admittedly ghastly) attorney Jermyn, whom he sums up as ‘a fat-handed, glib-tongued fellow, with a scented cambric handkerchief; one of your educated low-bred fellows; a foundling who got his Latin for nothing at Christ’s Hospital; one of your middle-class upstarts who want to run with gentlemen, and think they’ll do it with kid gloves and new furniture.’1 Later on, when Jermyn has buttonholed the local squire, Harold Transome, in an inn, he is told by the baronet Sir Maximus Debarry in a voice of ‘imperious scorn’: ‘Leave the room, sir! This is a meeting of gentlemen!’2