High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Similar precautions had been taken in surrounding streets where a view ‘however remote’ could be obtained. ‘The windows of the Court-house in the Old Bailey have been barricaded, as has also the churchyard of St Sepulchre, where loss of life was caused about 30 years ago, on a similar occasion, by the palisading along the top of a dwarf wall surrounding the church, and to which people had clung in great numbers, giving way.’

  Müller was hanged ‘before such a concourse as we hope may never be again assembled either for the spectacle which they had in view or for the gratification of such lawless ruffianism as yesterday found its scope around the gallows.’184 They were a ‘dismal crowd of dirty vagrants . . . loungers . . . drunken men’, and on the night before the hanging they were joined by ‘a thick, dark, noisy fringe of men and women [who] settled like bees around the nearest barriers’. There was a party atmosphere: ‘well-dressed and ill-dressed, old men and lads, women and girls. Many had jars of beer; at least half were smoking.’ The gallows themselves were wheeled out of the Debtor’s Door in the early hours, to the cheers of a crowd that by then numbered about 5,000. The police surrounded the scaffold. ‘Then, as every minute the day broke more and more clear, the crowd could be seen in all the horrible reality in which it had been heard throughout the long wet night. The women were ‘of the lowest and poorest class’. The men were ‘such . . . as only such a scene could bring together – sharpers, thieves, gamblers, betting men, the outsiders of the boxing ring, bricklayers’ labourers, dock workmen, German artisans and sugar bakers, with a fair sprinkling of what may be almost called as low a grade as any of the worst there met – the rakings of cheap singing-halls and billiard rooms, the fast young “gents” of London.’ As The Times’s reporter laconically noted, ‘there can be only one thing more difficult than describing this crowd, and that is to forget it.’ Well-dressed people who made the mistake of attending found their hats knocked off and their pockets picked. ‘None but those who looked down upon the awful crowd of yesterday will ever believe in the wholesale, open, broadcast manner in which garotting and highway robbery were carried on.’ By the time of the hanging there were an estimated 50,000 people crammed into the streets outside the prison: and as eight o’clock struck and the condemned man was brought out, a cry went up of ‘hats off!’, and the men in the crowd moved as if one. A prison chaplain, the Reverend Mr Davis, led the way, reading sentences from the Burial Service. Müller, pale of face but rigid of bearing, went up the steps and stood on the trap under the noose.

  ‘Following him close came the common hangman, who at once pulling a white cap over the condemned man’s face, fastened his feet with a strap, and shambled off the scaffold amid low hisses.’ A Lutheran pastor who had accompanied Müller to the gallows urged him to confess his guilt before the drop; which he did, in German, and then the bolt was pulled. This alone silenced the crowd, which was, for five or ten minutes, ‘awed and stilled by this quiet, rapid passage from life to death’. This did not last for long: ‘before the slight, slow vibrations of the body had well ended robbery with violence, loud laughing, oaths, fighting, obscene conduct, and still more filthy language reigned round the gallows far and near.’ A ballad was written about the execution, and sold 280,000 copies, proving the ability of the spectacle to seize the public imagination.185

  As the campaign to end public executions continued – given great impetus by every event such as this, which seemed to belong to a Hogarthian London of gin-soaked whores and thieves of a kind contemporary society tried to convince itself it had left behind – the campaign to abolish hanging altogether became stronger. William Tallack, a Quaker in his early thirties, became secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in 1863, and sought to recruit strong forces to give evidence to a Royal Commission on the subject that was set up the following year. However, abolitionism was an extreme minority interest, even among advanced liberals. Tallack wrote to Mill in January 1865 to solicit his support, only to receive the reply that ‘I have a very strong opinion against its total abolition, being persuaded that the liability to it . . . has a greater deterring effect, at a less expense of real suffering, than any other penalty which would be adequate to the worst kind of offence.’

  Mill sent his regrets, pleading that if the Commission wished to summon him as a witness, it would not be on the ‘right side’ from Tallack’s point of view.186 He was, indeed, the very antithesis of the bleeding-heart liberal that he might have been mistaken for. He fully supported flogging for crimes of brutality, and told Florence Nightingale in 1860, when she urged a forgiving aspect on society, that ‘with many minds, punishment is the only one of the natural consequences of guilt which is capable of making any impression on them. In such cases, punishment is the sole means available for beginning the reformation of the criminal; and the fear of similar punishment is the only inducement which deters many really no better than himself from doing acts to others which would not only deprive them of their own happiness, but thwart all attempts to do good to themselves and others.’187

  When the Royal Commission reported in 1866 its recommendations on the abolition of public executions were at last acted upon. Lord Cranworth, the Lord Chancellor, told the House of Lords on 1 May that year that ‘most of the theoretical objections to private executions are absurd’.188 Lord Malmesbury disagreed: the ‘fear of disgrace’ attendant on being publicly executed being, he thought, an important part in the deterrent effect of the capital sentence.189 He also felt that ‘the English mind’ would ‘revolt’ at the idea of a ‘secret’ execution: and that the inevitable consequence of making executions private would be the abolition of hanging altogether.190 Shaftesbury dismissed the point about disgrace, observing urbanely that ‘he did not believe that the sense of shame had much influence on that class; indeed, he was convinced that in the great class from which murderers were taken the sense of shame was wholly extinct; and such men often looked forward to the time when they would appear on the scaffold and publicly exhibit their hardened state of mind to a crowd of companions.’191

  The upheavals over the next two years, as the Reform Bills were considered, led to further delay: but in the spring of 1868 the Capital Punishment Within Prisons Bill was introduced into the Commons, and passed. It received Royal Assent on 29 May 1868, three days after the hangman, William Calcraft, had conducted what would be the last public execution in Britain: hanging the Fenian Michael Barrett at Newgate for his part in a bombing in Clerkenwell the previous December that had killed twelve people and injured another fifty. Capital punishment in Britain would last for almost another 100 years, but thereafter always away from the eyes of the mob.

  In some respects the Victorians humanised the penal system, but in others an Old Testament belief in retribution continued to inform their policy. Throughout the period new prisons, emblematic of the harshness of the system, had been opened, and many survive today: Pentonville had been built in 1842, Dartmoor (originally a prison for Napoleonic prisoners of war) in 1850, Wandsworth in 1851 and Holloway in 1852. Many operated on the ‘separate’ system, where prisoners were kept apart, and forbidden to talk when engaging in any communal activities, such as on the treadmill or when picking oakum. The separate system required many cells and was so labour intensive for the warders that prisoners had to be drafted in to work in the prisons on tasks that warders would normally have done. Further pressure was put on the jails by the restrictions applied to the sentence of transportation to the colonies by the 1853 Penal Servitude Act, which decreed that no one could be transported for less than fourteen years. Transportation was abolished altogether in 1857. However, punishments sometimes became harsher. The response to an epidemic of garrotting in 1863 was the Garrotters Act, which specified that those convicted of this fashionable offence would be sentenced to the cat-o’-nine-tails as well as a term in prison. This savage punishment had the desired effect: garrotting soon went out of vogue. The Victorians liked to feel they were advancing the cause of hum
anity, but not at the expense of their personal security.

  CHAPTER 16

  DOING GOOD: PHILANTHROPISTS AND THE HUMANE IMPULSE

  I

  IT HAD BEEN clear to Gladstone, and would be made equally so to Disraeli when he regained power in 1874, that great advances in the condition of the people were best kick-started by State intervention. However, the prevailing sentiment – more usual among Liberals than Conservatives, who increasingly believed that paternalism was the duty of the State – was to champion individual responsibility. The poor were expected to do all they could to sustain themselves; and the rich were supposed to be alert to their obligations as Christians to help those less fortunate. The rich paid very low rates of tax, mainly in the form of duties on luxury goods. They therefore had the disposable income to support their pet causes. However, it was apparent to some of the rich that, if they were employers, philanthropy brought additional advantages such the health and loyalty of their staff: a helpful thought in a more secular age in which Christian obligations counted for less than formerly.

  Some rich people also realised that the stability of society, from which they derived particular benefit, could in part be bought by charitable work that kept the poor docile and, even more useful, grateful to their betters. The Hyde Park riot of 1866 reminded the ruling class of the monster in their midst. Although there was serious poverty all over Britain, the epicentre was in London, the largest city and one whose population – of poor, notably – was growing rapidly. And the worst part of London was the East End, not only because of the large numbers of destitute and exceptionally poor people who lived in places such as Spitalfields, Limehouse, Wapping, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Hackney and Stepney, but also because the middle classes, who had built fine houses in those places during the eighteenth century, had all but deserted them, fracturing society in the process and removing any sense of support or example from the lowest classes. In time, the need for middle-class influence in such areas became widely accepted: and many in the middle classes began to understand the moral and social importance of their going back into what had become poor communities.

  It was what Beatrice Webb, alluding in her autobiography to a verse from Hebrews, called ‘a new consciousness of sin among men of intellect and men of property’.1 She detected various stages of this consciousness: ‘at first philanthropic and practical – [Richard] Oastler [a colleague of Shaftesbury in the movement to pass the Factory Acts], Shaftesbury and Chadwick; then literary and artistic – Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and William Morris; and finally analytic, historical and explanatory – in his latter days John Stuart Mill; Karl Marx and his English interpreters.’ She had not been talking about personal sin, but about ‘a collective or class consciousness; a growing uneasiness, amounting to conviction, that the industrial organization, which had yielded rent, interest and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain.’

  The Victorians discriminated between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The former found themselves in poverty through no fault of their own – widows, orphans, the sick and maimed, the victims of the caprices of the free market on which the prosperity of Britain was based. Many were poor despite working long hours in menial tasks, often out of doors, desperately trying to find enough money by their labours to afford basic food and the meanest lodgings. The latter were criminals and those who, by a determination not to live by what Riderhood, the malevolent waterman in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, called the sweat of their brows, put themselves on a par with criminals in the eyes of Victorian morality. Work was a duty owed to God: laborare est orare. However, some – led by Carlyle – believed it was the duty of the State to provide work for the unemployed. Pauperism brought despair and shame. For most it was a temporary condition, experienced during economic downturns. To a feckless few, mostly drunks, it was a permanent, and inevitably life-shortening, event. In the 1860s and 1870s there were roughly a million paupers in England and Wales, a rate varying between about forty and fifty per thousand of the population.2

  Philanthropists helped the poor in two principal ways: they gave their money, or their time. Some who gave money also gave time, though not usually in dispensing soup from soup kitchens, but rather attending committee meetings of boards of trustees. Some who gave time did not simply scour the streets looking for orphans, but engaged in acts of propaganda against the failure of society to improve or alleviate the conditions of the poor: Dickens most notably, but also Kingsley, Ruskin and other writers. There was a predisposition to help the deserving poor, not least because when there was so much poverty and misery it would have been heaping a further injustice on the deserving poor to help the undeserving first: and means were limited.

  II

  No person of celebrity campaigned for the poor so much as Dickens. He did so not out of religious duty – he had an advanced scepticism about religion – but out of a sense of personal outrage that became politically motivated. Dickens is important to an understanding of mid-Victorian Britain not simply because he was a pre-eminent cultural figure, shaping the minds of his readers by his subtly propagandistic tone; but also because his enduring popularity has ensured that he remains a prism – for many people, indeed, the only prism – through which the period from about 1837 to 1870 is viewed today. His world contains all human life – from the malevolence of Bill Sikes and the sadism of Mr Murdstone to the naivety of Copperfield, Pip and Chuzzlewit and the benevolence of Peggotty, the Cheerybles, Mr Brownlow and Mr Pumblechook; via the repellence of Merdle, Uriah Heep, Squeers and Pecksniff. He shows us the poverty, the rigidities of class, the easy disposition to criminality, the injustices and the hypocrisies that we associate with the period.

  Dickens was perhaps the most famous man in England by the 1860s – indeed, given his celebrity in America, perhaps one of the most famous men in the world. He had made his name in the late 1830s with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Capitalising on the expanding literate population, Dickens edited and wrote for two successive publications – Household Words and All the Year Round – that serialised his novels, and also those by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. Dickens’s life is often discussed in the context of his having to work pasting labels on pots in a blacking factory in 1824, at the age of twelve, when his father was imprisoned for debt; and, related to that experience of going down in the world, campaigning for humane treatment of the unfortunate and impoverished.

  Before the blacking factory Dickens had had a happy and stimulating childhood spent mainly in Chatham, where his father had worked as a clerk in the Navy pay office. He had been an insatiable reader, and the everyday life of Chatham and Rochester provided him with the types and characters that would populate his novels; but so too did his time in poverty, and his outrage against the fecklessness of his father and his failure to provide for his son and family. When finally Dickens’s father was discharged the young Dickens only left the blacking factory because his father had an argument with the proprietor. His mother tried to smooth things over so the boy could return, which caused Dickens to detest her as well.

  This connection with life’s hardships would become the main inspiration behind much that he wrote. His novels either reminded his readers of whence they too had come, or allowed his more genteel audience to console themselves with the thought that they had avoided such a life altogether. He succeeded, above all, in representing to his readers a life they could all identify with and recognise. The caricatures that are so many of his characters, and the usually inevitable happy endings, are sufficiently well crafted not to provoke what would be a fatal failure to suspend disbelief.

  After the blacking factory he resumed his schooling, at an establishment that presaged Dotheboys Hall. It ended permanently at the age of fifteen, after which he became a solicitor’s clerk, a vantage point from which he later constructed Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. That soon bored him.
He taught himself shorthand and became a parliamentary reporter. In his spare time he devoted himself to self-improvement: often in the reading room of the British Museum, where he devoured such English classics as had escaped him in a childhood of exceptionally wide reading. In his early twenties he began to contribute short stories to periodicals under his pseudonym, Boz, and established himself at the handsome wage of five guineas a week as a reporter on the Morning Chronicle. It was from this base that his brilliant career took off.

  His first Pickwick story appeared at the end of March 1836, two days before he married his wife, Catherine Hogarth. Pickwick was the engine of his fame. By the time its monthly serial ended in November 1837 it had a circulation of 40,000. Dickens started to work at a rate that would eventually kill him: he wrote Oliver Twist while writing Pickwick, and started to write Nicholas Nickleby while writing Oliver Twist. His first trip to America was in 1842, though Dickens found it, like all his subsequent voyages, utterly exhausting: but as with every experience it provided food for his writing, notably in Martin Chuzzlewit. As he made money he continued to champion the needs of the poor. His politics were radical, and when his friend John Forster (who would later be his biographer, and was principal consultant on all Dickens’s literary projects) was running the radical newspaper the Examiner, Dickens wrote for it, anonymously, on social issues that angered him. When after 1850 he edited Household Words he took his polemicising there, both in his novels and in his essays. His serialised Child’s History of England showed a disregard for deference and hierarchy, and especially for the idle rich.

  As Britain grew more prosperous after the early 1840s, he became steadily angrier that the new wealth was not used to alleviate the most scandalous suffering. His assault on the Poor Law had begun in 1837, with Oliver Twist. In Hard Times in 1854, Mr Bounderby caricatured the heartless and unfeeling attitudes of new money towards those further down the ladder, a contrast to the outlook adopted by the landed gentry and aristocracy, conditioned by centuries of feudalism in the care of their tenantry. Bounderby finds the demand for a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work as the equivalent of the poor demanding to be fed on turtle soup and venison with gold spoons. The character of Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–5, is drawn by Dickens to show the determination an elderly washerwoman has to find a way of earning a living without, in extreme old age, having to throw herself on the parish. In his Postscript to Our Mutual Friend, dated 2 September 1865, Dickens wrote that ‘I believe there has been in England, since the days of the Stuarts, no law so often infamously administered, no law so often openly violated, no law habitually so ill-supervised. In the majority of the shameful cases of disease and death from destitution that shock the Public and disgrace the country, the illegality is quite equal to the inhumanity – and known language could say no more of their lawlessness.’3