High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  In the class war fought in weekly fiction magazines in mid-Victorian England, the new owners of capital are depicted as despised by their betters and schemed against by their inferiors. Industrialisation had created a powerful new middle class, who paid the price for their new influence by being sneered at for their vulgarity by an aristocracy that, within two or three generations, many of them would join. Some of the fictional mercantilists, however, have a shred of decency. Mr Millbank in Coningsby may be a Liberal, and may have strict views about his beautiful daughter marrying above her to the grandson of a marquess, but he is an enlightened mill-owner. His clerk at his mill ‘detailed to Coningsby the plans which Mr Millbank had pursued both for the moral and physical well-being of his people; how he had built churches, and schools, and institutes; houses and cottages on a new system of ventilation; how he had allotted gardens; established singing classes.’3 Mr Thornton in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South is more utilitarian: though he has some softness in his heart, and gives work to a man who has helped lead a strike. Gaskell showed how class prejudice cut both ways. Margaret Hale, daughter of a clergyman and granddaughter of landed gentry, is ‘glad we don’t visit’ a family who ‘made their fortunes in trade’. ‘I don’t like shoppy people,’ she adds. ‘I think we are far better off, knowing only cottagers and labourers, and people without pretence.’4

  When Margaret’s father, assailed by religious doubts, moves to a manufacturing town in Darkshire – Lancashire – to work as a private tutor, his daughter asks, with incredulity: ‘What in the world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a gentleman?’5 Margaret finds it hard to comprehend that a manufacturer – who has made his own pile – can possibly be a gentleman: all such a man can do is engage in ‘pretence’. She has imbibed such doctrine from her mother, who wonders why, if her husband wishes to be a tutor, he could not go back to Oxford ‘and be a tutor to gentlemen’.6 Faced with Milton – Gaskell’s fictional representation of Manchester – Mrs Hale is aghast. ‘Fancy living in the middle of factories, and factory people!’7

  Margaret is put in her place once she gets to Milton. She asks Thornton, of another, ‘he cannot be a gentleman – is he?’8 Thornton, a former shop assistant, replies that ‘I am not quite the person to decide on another’s gentlemanliness . . . I don’t quite understand your application of the word.’ (Kingsley would instruct him in The Water-Babies, in which he characterises the salmon as the gentleman of the fish world. ‘Like true gentlemen, they look noble and proud enough, and yet, like true gentlemen, they never harm or quarrel with anyone, but go about their own business, and leave rough fellows to themselves.’9) Later on, when Thornton behaves towards Margaret in a way that he thinks gracious but she regards as offensive, she accuses him of doing so because, not being a gentleman, he cannot see his fault.10 (Again, Kingsley could help: ‘Salmon, like other true gentlemen, always choose their lady, and love her, and are true to her, and take care of her, and work for her, and fight for her, as every true gentleman ought; and are not like vulgar chub or roach or pike, who have no high feelings, and take no care of their wives.’11) The Hales have not just gone from South to North, but to another planet.

  The economic transition was something few in the upper classes could grasp. Their wealth was rooted in land, as agricultural proprietors, but in some districts as mine-owners. In both cases, snobbery about trade was ill-placed. Without a trade in agricultural products or in coal, there was no income for them. The only distinction between their sources of wealth and that of the newly affluent was that the latter had owned their means of income-generation for years rather than centuries. Once the Corn Laws were repealed the value of agricultural land fell; whereas manufacturing would, for most of the nineteenth century, earn its proprietors and shareholders a handsome income. The contribution this made to the wealth of the country would be reflected in the extensions of the franchise, though not always in the attitudes of those with old money.

  North and South presents this new reality. Thornton, who made his own money, tries to tell his workforce that if orders dry up, so does the demand for their labour; that striking will simply imperil their livelihoods more; and that the need to invest in machinery soaks up profits, leaving the mill-owner with little room to meet wage demands that cannot be funded by productivity. Thornton’s mother regards the strikers as having another, almost Marxist agenda: ‘the mastership and ownership of other people’s property’.12 The workforce, in her view, comprised ‘a people who are always owing their betters a grudge’.13

  One of the workers contemplates leaving industrial life and returning to the land, until Margaret Hale acquaints him with the realities of that existence: ‘You could not stand it. You would have to be out in all weathers. It would kill you with rheumatism. There mere bodily work at your time of life would break you down.’14 She goes on: ‘It would eat you away like rust. Those that have lived there all their lives are used to soaking in the stagnant waters. They labour on, from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields, never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads. The hard spadework robs their brain of life; the sameness of their toil deadens their imagination . . . they go home brutishly tired, poor creatures! Caring for nothing but food and rest.’15 The only people from the lower orders with something approaching a happy existence are domestic servants: for the masses, life was uniformly a struggle. Gaskell’s description of life on the land explains why so many tens of thousands of families chose to forsake it in the first half of the nineteenth century, and take their chances in the dark, satanic mills instead.

  Nor, however, was it just the operative class who failed to understand the new capitalism. Mr Hale, with his feudal instincts, cannot either, and tackles Thornton about the hardship being passed on to the workers. Thornton strives to explain to Hale that ‘as trade was conducted, there must always be a waxing and waning of commercial prosperity; and that in the waning a certain number of masters, as well as of men, must go down into ruin’.16 Gaskell notes that ‘he spoke as if this consequence was so entirely logical, that neither employers nor employed had any right to complain if it became their fate.’ Such utilitarian sentiments shock the Hales: but they show the foundations of Victorian capitalism, and Victorian commercial success.

  II

  A middle-class visitor from Germany, twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels, catalogued the conditions endured by the working class in industrial towns. Engels’s father was a Prussian industrialist with an interest in a mill in Manchester. In 1842 he sent his son there in the hope that seeing the glories of capitalism would cure him of his socialist leanings. Instead, Engels drew on a brief acquaintance with Karl Marx to develop those opinions further. He also met a woman of radicalism equal to his own, Mary Burns, who introduced him to the most appalling sights that Manchester and industrial Lancashire could offer. The first fruits of these explorations were three articles on the condition of England published by Marx in Paris. A longer series of articles, also published by Marx, formed the basis of a book Engels published in German in 1845 entitled Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, which was not published in English (as The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844) until 1892.

  Urban Manchester and Salford horrified Engels. He described the working-class accommodation in those towns as ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’. In 1843 in Parliament Street 380 people shared a single privy.17 The hovels had been erected to make money for speculative builders, and expense had been spared. The inhabitants matched their surroundings. ‘A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles,’ he wrote.18 It was a ‘hateful and repulsive spectacle’. He added: ‘In such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.’19 Such areas were prone to disease, notably cholera. ‘When the epidemic was approaching, a un
iversal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city,’ Engels notes, disgusted at the hypocrisy that caused those same people to have a Health Commission appointed to inspect the ‘unwholesome dwellings of the poor’: not to protect the poor, but to protect the bourgeoisie.20 The poor, prone to illness, were also prey to charlatans and quacks who claimed they could cure them, at a price much less than the high fees commanded by doctors, though still barely affordable. Engels wrote that ‘vast quantities of patent medicines are sold, for all conceivable ailments: Morrison’s Pills, Parr’s Life Pills, Dr Mainwaring’s Pills, and a thousand other pills, essences and balsams, all of which have the property of curing all the ills that flesh is heir to.’21 He estimated that between 20,000 and 25,000 boxes of Parr’s Life Pills were sold each week: ‘And they are taken for constipation by this one, for diarrhoea by that one, for fever, weakness and all possible ailments.’

  He savaged a beverage called Godfrey’s Cordial, which was full of laudanum, and which women poured down their children to pacify them ‘until they die’: ‘the less susceptible the child’s system to the action of the opium, the greater the quantities administered.’ The children who didn’t die were instead ‘pale, feeble, wilted and usually die before completing the second year.’22 It was yet another contribution to the ‘general enfeeblement of the frame in the working-class’. Elsewhere, he found evidence that factory conditions delayed puberty in young girls and caused skeletal problems in all children, as well as the long hours wrecking the nervous system and creating perfect conditions for disease. On top of this, he was shocked to see that most of the food that the poor could afford was adulterated, not merely nutritionally deficient but also in some cases positively harmful.

  Apart from the high levels of prostitution, and the enforced intimacy between men and children that overcrowded living conditions created, Engels reported sexual aggression by mill-owners among their female operatives, a jus primae noctis of the Industrial Revolution. He quoted from the Factory Inquiry Commission’s report a witness from Leicester saying that factories there were ‘the gates of hell’ for young girls, and that most of the town’s whores had started in the mills there.23 In Manchester, a witness said, three-quarters aged between fourteen and twenty employed in factories were ‘unchaste’. As for importuning by masters, Engels asserted that ‘the threat of discharge suffices to overcome all resistance in nine cases out of ten, if not in ninety-nine out of a hundred, in girls who, in any case, have no strong inducements to chastity.’24 Such a claim, lacking supporting fact, smacks of propaganda, but a grain of truth was probably there.

  The propaganda message is quite clear. ‘The proletariat was called into existence by the introduction of machinery,’ Engels wrote.25 The owners of that machinery had reduced its operatives to a state of such misery. The competition between workers was, he said, ‘the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie’.26 This was why so many employers were against trades unions. Engels felt that the freedom an individual worker had to bargain with his employer was worthless: the employer could always dictate terms. He quoted an east London clergyman describing the hordes of men at the docks each morning, many of whom went away again without work or money, ‘cast down by disappointed hope’.27

  Engels expressed a hatred of the middle class – a subset of which is the manufacturing class – because it was ‘enriched directly by means of the poverty of the workers’ and ‘persists in ignoring that poverty’. This spirit is at odds with what novelists of the time suggest, which is that there was not much active class hatred in England. There was, though, much class ignorance and prejudice. Engels does seem to harbour a blanket prejudice himself. He cannot avoid reckless generalisation: he admits the ‘utter ignorance’, but says it is of the ‘whole’ middle class of ‘everything’ that concerns the workers. This delusion – a delusion proved by ‘middle-class’ writers such as Gaskell in her descriptions of working-class life – provokes Engels into announcing that ‘before too long’ there ‘must break out a Revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.’28 The sheer wrong-headedness of this should cause the reader to discount Engels’s assertions, though his facts are plain enough.

  A revolution in England had changed the country every bit as the events of 1789 had changed France, he argued. However, the Industrial Revolution raised a question about the people it had displaced from agricultural England, and their descendants who had multiplied in the preceding forty or fifty years: ‘What is to become of those destitute millions, who consume today what they earned yesterday; who have created the greatness of England by their inventions and their toil; who become with every passing day more conscious of their might, and demand, with daily increasing urgency, their share of the advantages of society?’29

  There is an inflammatory, polemical tone to Engels’s rhetoric perhaps inevitable in a young man of conviction, angered by the squalor he had witnessed, and fired by his determination to right wrongs through political change. He was angry that the workless operatives did not overthrow a system that he believed turned human beings into commodities, but instead went out and begged. For those in work and whom he perceived to be exploited, he favoured the weapon of the strike. ‘If all proletarians announced their determination to starve rather than work for the bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender its monopoly.’30 He felt the new working class, robbed of the protection that had existed to an extent in the more feudal societies of rural England, had far less security in their lives than slaves. ‘The bourgeoisie . . . is far better off under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out.’31

  There is an element of exaggeration and idealism in his rhetoric, though not in his descriptions of how life was. Much of his evidence is from submissions to the Factories Inquiry Commission, whose report he had studied and from which he quoted extensively. His tone is consonant with propaganda: but if it was his aim to incite a rising of the proletariat in industrial England, it was defeated by not publishing his book in English until much later. Engels had an estimate of the English industrial class based on continental precepts. The disturbances of 1842 might have encouraged him in that belief: the failure of Chartism in 1848 would dash it.

  He cites a clergyman from Bethnal Green in east London, who had written that 12,000 people lived in 1,400 houses there.32 He quotes a coroner’s report on the death in 1843 of a forty-five-year-old Bermondsey woman who had no bedstead. When she died she was found lying ‘almost naked’ on a heap of feathers she had shared with her nineteen-year-old son. ‘The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by the family as a privy.’33 The provinces had their own squalor. In Edinburgh the excrement of 50,000 people was cast into the gutters each night and, despite efforts to sweep it away, the smell and the danger of disease lingered. A fifth of the population of Liverpool – 45,000 people – lived in cellars. In Nottingham between 7,000 and 8,000 houses had been built back to back, with inadequate ventilation, several houses having to use one privy. Birmingham had courts full of filth. Its lodging-houses were ‘nearly all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps and prostitutes.’34 Bradford and Huddersfield had streets full of dungheaps. Leeds, according to the radical newspaper the Artisan from which Engels quotes, had areas full of ‘miasmatic vapours’ caused by ineffective or non-existent sewers.35 Some streets were a foot deep in mud. And, as Ashley had frequently argued, there were moral sinks as well. ‘In Leeds we found brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents’ sleeping-room, whence arise consequences at the contemplation of w
hich human feeling shudders.’

  III

  That Engels’s view of the middle classes was so prejudiced could be seen by the efforts that so many of them made to alleviate the condition of the poor. The great cause behind which they rallied was the repeal of the Corn Laws, the system of tariffs introduced by Parliament in the depression immediately after the Napoleonic Wars to protect the landed interest in Britain by increasing the price of imported cereals. The Tory party, being the party of the landed interest, favoured protection because it safeguarded their incomes. The Whig aristocracy, personified by Lord John Russell, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, were also landowners, and therefore hesitant to join any calls for its repeal. With food taking a much higher proportion of the income of low-paid people compared with the rich, the Corn Laws badly harmed the working classes. The liberal wing that was being grafted on to the Whig party in the 1840s – especially the Manchester liberals, personified by John Bright and whose apostolic leader was Richard Cobden – was heavily influenced in its approach to free trade by the classical economics of Adam Smith, who seventy years earlier had argued that free markets were the fastest route to the maximisation of scarce resources and therefore to prosperity.

  The Manchester liberals wanted the principles they applied to the price of corn to apply to all traded commodities. A protectionist regime could only harm any industry it affected, or which suffered from it in any protectionist retaliation by other trading partners. So although it was the very poorest who suffered most from the high price of food, the movement to make it cheaper was led by the middle classes, whose further prosperity depended on the widespread acceptance of the economic principle of free trade. It is no wonder that the activities of those who agitated against the Corn Laws aggrieved the landed interest. However, they also excited the suspicion of many in the working classes who feared that all the benefits of free trade would accrue to the manufacturers and not to those they employed. Landowners exploited this suspicion, arguing that some manufacturers backed repeal because if their operatives’ food cost less, they could be paid less. Some working-class activists in the Chartist movement believed them, which led to a mistrust between the two groups at a time when they ought to have been united against the Tories and the landowners.