One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Like the Medical Act, the Oaths Bill, intended to allow Jews elected to parliament – in particular, of course, Lionel de Rothschild – to take their seats without having to swear on the ‘true faith of a Christian’, had been round the block a few times over the years, and kept popping up in this parliament, supported by Lord John Russell (Rothschild’s fellow elected MP for the City of London) and Disraeli, and tolerated as a necessary act of justice by Derby. The Lords blocked every version sent to them by the Commons, and there were a few diehard objectors in the Commons too. The most notable of the latter was Charles Newdigate Newdegate, owner of Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, the estate managed until 1849 by Robert Evans, father of Marian Evans, who had just begun to make her mark as a writer of fiction with Scenes of Clerical Life. Newdegate was a Tory traditionalist, an upholder of the Church of England as the national religion, and a fervent opponent of Roman Catholicism and Judaism. He led the opposition to the Oaths Bill, writing letters to the press declaring that Jews had been ‘among the office bearers’ of the Spanish Inquisition. He was supported by some strongly anti-Semitic rhetoric in the St James’s Chronicle, which professed to believe that ‘the hatred of the Jew towards Christianity’ was alive and well. The paper attacked Rothschild directly on 20 May 1858, when the Oaths Bill was being batted to and fro in parliament:

  Baron Rothschild seeking admission to the British Parliament in the nineteenth century, with professions of religious liberalism upon his lips, is playing precisely the same game as the ‘gentlemen of the Hebrew persuasion’ who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries qualified in Spain as ‘familiars of the Holy Office of the Inquisition’. In both cases the object, as well as the result, is the same – to inflict a ‘heavy blow and great discouragement’ upon the hateful creed of the ‘Nazarene’.111

  Most newspapers supported the bill as a matter of justice to a man who had been elected to parliament several times but was unable to take his seat, though there was a good deal of casual joking about Jewishness. When the Lords finally conceded on 1 July that the Commons could bring in an act to allow Jews to sit in their house, while the House of Lords would remain stubbornly closed to them, the newspapers enjoyed the embarrassment of all sides at such a laborious compromise. The Era on Sunday, 11 July toyed with the idea that ‘we may one day see a Hebrew Lord Chancellor’, a sly dig at the current lord chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, who, as Sir Frederick Thesiger, had been Newdegate’s predecessor as chief gatekeeper against admitting Jews into the House of Commons.112 Punch offered a poem, ‘The Triumph of Moses’, on the same weekend, which ridiculed the Lords, while reminding them that Rothschild had a foreign baronetcy, not to mention fabulous wealth:

  In the Commons ’tis certain that Moses will meet

  With no opposition in taking his seat,

  Which he’ll firmly endeavour with credit to fill,

  For economy, measures, materials, and skill …

  Then room for Lord Moses, ye proud Barons, yield,

  With his crest on his carriage, and arms on his shield,

  And his pedigree, higher than Normans can run,

  And his business – which he can entail on his son.113

  Two weeks later Punch reported on the further proceedings in parliament which the Lords were inflicting on the Commons before they conceded the point; on 24 July, with an allusion to Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it hailed the ‘final triumph of Isaac of York over Front de Boeuf Alamode, and all the rest of the Feudal Lords’.114 The Illustrated London News was scathing about the Lords’ apparent terror that a flood of Jews would soon be rushing into parliament; yes, says the paper sarcastically, the number of likely representatives has already doubled from one, Rothschild, to two, with David Salomons likely to be the next Jew to take his seat.115 (In the general election in summer 1859 Salomons was returned for Greenwich, as before, and Lionel de Rothschild’s younger brother Mayer was elected as Liberal MP for Hythe, bringing the total number of Jewish MPs to three.) It was clear by now that the curious compromise bill would pass into law, but its opponents, including most of the bishops in the House of Lords, continued to wrangle until the last moment before the bill finally passed on 21 July and received the royal assent, along with all the other bills, on 2 August.116 Even on Monday, 26 July, the day Rothschild was introduced to the Commons by Lord John Russell and the Liberal banker John Abel Smith, there was one last division before he was allowed to take his seat. It was lost by sixty-nine votes to thirty-seven, with Newdegate and the home secretary Spencer Walpole among the dissenters.117

  Though Disraeli was often treated to anti-Semitic rhetoric and caricature in the press, most of them left him out of the picture when discussing the erratic course of the Oaths Bill, perhaps because he kept a low profile, despite being in constant liaison with the bill’s main proposer, Lord John Russell. An exception was the deliberately provocative Reynolds’s Newspaper, which opened its column ‘Gossip of the Week’ on Sunday, 1 August with the following clever paragraph, in which Disraeli is credited with (or blamed for) getting the ‘Jew Bill’ through:

  The Jew egg, which many supposed addled, is at length hatched. Lord John Russell cackles, and fain would crow; which, no doubt, he would, as well and as lustily as an antiquated political capon of his pigmy capacity could, were it not that he is deterred by the very natural terror inspired by the presence of another game bird, of oriental extraction, who wields a fiercer beak and claw, and displays a more gorgeous plumage than the Bedford bantam, even in his palmiest days, could sport. This game bird is not only cock of the walk, but master of the best and richest dungheap in Mr John Bull’s farm-yard. We need scarcely say that we allude to Mr Disraeli … There can be no doubt that to the more vigorous and skilful incubation of Mr Disraeli is now due the fact that Baron Rothschild is enabled to display his new-fledged senatorial pinions … We may be quite certain that if the Derby–Disraelites had been in Opposition the whole session, the Jew Bill had not yet been carried.118

  The diminutive Russell – his lack of height was the chief detail fixed on in those newspapers which were unsympathetic to his politics – came in for due praise in December in the pantomime Tit, Tat, Toe, put on in one of the unofficial theatres, the Effingham Saloon in Whitechapel. Thanks to ‘Little Lord John Russell’, the Jews, ‘once despised of races’, will ‘prove to brave old England / The right men in the right places’, since ‘they ever lend a helping hand – don’t talk of milk or honey / For many a Sovereign would have lost a Crown / Had it not been for Jewish Money’.119 The Illustrated London News for Saturday, 24 July noted that some members of the House of Commons, despite being ‘in the last stage of physical exhaustion’, fought the battle to the end. Mr Newdegate was particularly ‘vigorous’ in his opposition, but was being taught a lesson, says the paper, ‘in the art of Conservative government on Radical principles’.120 Rothschild finally took his seat eleven years after first being elected to parliament.

  Reynolds’s Newspaper and the Illustrated London News were not alone in noticing that the Derby–Disraeli administration passed a remarkable number of reforming measures for a Tory government. Derby was praised by a late nineteenth-century historian of his illustrious family for his moderate reformism in addition to his ‘matchless eloquence’, ‘scathing sarcasm’, and ‘lofty bearing’.121 Only days after he regained power at the end of February 1858, he spoke in the House of Lords of the need for ‘constant progress, improving upon the old system, adapting our institutions to the altered purposes they are intended to serve’, and ‘judicious changes meeting the demands of society’.122 One minor piece of reform legislation went through parliament quietly during June 1858 and was given the royal assent on the 28th of that month. This was the Property Qualification Bill, like the Oaths Bill an enabling measure. It abolished the requirement that men standing for parliament had to prove they owned a certain amount of property in money or land. As The Times said on 7 June, ‘a law that can always be evaded’ was ‘not worth retaining’.123
Many a serving MP could be proved to have perjured himself on this point. The Times was keen to welcome the abolition of the property law, wondering aloud on 11 June, ‘Can we trust the evidence of our senses when we see a Tory millennium inaugurated by the admission of the Jews [and] by the abolition of the Property Qualification? … What next?’124

  CHAPTER SIX

  July–August 1858

  Hot heads at the Garrick Club

  WHEN JOSEPH IRVING CAME to compile Annals of Our Time in the 1870s, he noted all the significant public events of 1858: the launch of the Great Eastern and the Orsini bomb plot of January; the change of government in February; the Ellenborough crisis over India, the result of the Derby, and Disraeli’s famous speech to the electors of Slough in May; the Puseyite scandal of St Barnabas in June; the passing of various pieces of legislation, including the act to purify the Thames, in July. Irving also drew attention to two striking events in the literary world during the hot months. These were not the appearance of a great work of fiction by Dickens, who published nothing in 1858, or Thackeray, whose Virginians was limping along its slow serialised way, and not yet George Eliot’s runaway success, Adam Bede, on which she was working throughout 1858, with publication following early in 1859. The two matters which caused a stir were private problems which became public, and which lingered on for months, to the embarrassment of the protagonists. The first was Dickens’s separation from his wife and the statement that announced it to the world; the second was the absurdly magnified rift in the Garrick Club caused by the callow Edmund Yates’s casually malicious article on Thackeray. The main event in this saga occurred on 10 July, when the Garrick held a special meeting of its members to decide what to do about Yates. After much ado about not very much during the summer, the chief result, as Annals summed it up, was ‘the temporary estrangement of Mr Thackeray and Mr Dickens’.1

  The relationship between Dickens and Thackeray had always been strained, with Thackeray jealous of Dickens’s success, and Dickens irritated by his fellow novelist’s snobbery. As Vanity Fair began its serialisation in January 1847, Thackeray had been well aware of Dickens’s established position as the great novelist of the day. In March of that year, with his own novel in the early stages of publication and not yet sure to be a favourite with the reading public, he is said to have gone into the offices of his publisher Bradbury and Evans, holding a copy of the latest number of Dickens’s Dombey and Son containing the celebrated death of little Paul Dombey, banged it down on the table, and exclaimed, ‘There’s no writing against such power as this – one has no chance! Read that chapter describing young Paul’s death: it is unsurpassed – it is stupendous!’2 By the time Vanity Fair was approaching the end of its serialisation in January 1848, it was beloved of both readers and critics. Thackeray wrote self-consciously to his mother, telling her, ‘I am become a sort of great man in my way – all but at the top of the tree: indeed there if the truth were known and having a great fight up there with Dickens.’3

  As the years went on the two men published their novels serially, and, as it happened, often simultaneously. David Copperfield competed with Pendennis in 1849–50; both novels contained a large element of autobiography and both were published by Bradbury and Evans. Dickens always edged ahead in the opinion of the public and the majority of critics, but both had their enthusiastic advocates, and it was widely recognised in the literary world that there were two distinct ‘factions’. The Dickens faction consisted of the great mass of readers throughout the country and the young Bohemians in London, among them Sala and Yates. On Thackeray’s side were readers who admired the knowing satire of human vanity and hypocrisy which his novels shared with those written by Henry Fielding in the previous century, and Thackeray’s fellow writers on Punch, public school and university-educated men like John Leech and Henry Silver. Punch was also published by William Bradbury and Frederick Evans, the two genial hosts of the weekly Punch working dinners, where, as Silver recorded in his diary, the talk was frequently of Dickens’s vulgarity and lack of ‘class’.4 The critic David Masson wrote about the literary rivalry in his book, British Novelists and their Styles (1859), that ‘there is no debate more common, wherever literary talk goes on, than the debate as to the respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray’.5 Thackeray, as the writer who achieved fame a decade after his rival, was much more alert to the competition than Dickens, who did not need to feel threatened, so assured was he of his place in the public’s affection. Nevertheless, Dickens felt vulnerable in the summer of 1858. What if his adoring public believed the unwelcome stories in circulation about the breakdown of his marriage? Anxiety about this no doubt drove him to publish his explanatory statement in Household Words; it also underlies the audience-orientated rhetoric of the piece.

  As regards that statement, Thackeray had tried to be helpful when asked by Dickens in late May 1858 to contradict rumours going round which were, as Thackeray reported to a friend, ‘derogatory to the honor [sic] of a young lady whose name has been mentioned in connection with his’.6 Yet Dickens soon heard that Thackeray had been gossiping about the affair at the Garrick Club and elsewhere, a fact confirmed by Thackeray’s 21-year-old daughter Anny in a chatty letter later in the year in which she mentioned ‘all the stories Papa was telling of Mr Dickens’ in the ‘smoking room at the G’.7 When the Garrick Club affair arose out of Yates’s foolish article in Town Talk on the same date as the personal statement in Household Words, Dickens, who had enough on his mind, ought to have kept clear of it, but his state of mental hyperactivity, combined with annoyance at Thackeray’s loose talk and his awareness that Thackeray looked down on him as ‘not a gentleman’, meant that he became unnecessarily involved by taking Yates’s part.

  Having written his pompous letter to Yates on 13 June and received in return an unrepentant reply on the 15th, Thackeray – as we have seen – hot-headedly sent the correspondence to the committee of the Garrick Club, appealing melodramatically for its concurrence in his opinion that such articles as Yates’s were ‘intolerable in a Society of Gentlemen’.8 When Thackeray told him what he had done, Yates in turn addressed the committee in a letter of 19 June, asking its members to ‘suspend your judgment until I have consulted my friends, and been able to prepare my own version of the matter for submission to you’.9 The club’s secretary, Alexander Doland, replied immediately, saying that a special meeting of the committee would take place the following Saturday, 26 June, ‘to take the subject of Mr Thackeray’s complaint into consideration’.10 The chief friend consulted by Yates was, of course, Dickens, who wrote to Thackeray to suggest that the row was not the business of anyone other than Yates and Thackeray.11 Whether the great heat of that middle week of June was instrumental in pushing all these men into extreme positions or was merely an appropriate backdrop, there was certainly a general loss of any sense of proportion among them.

  Yates appealed once more to the committee, explaining, reasonably enough, that his article, though perhaps written in ‘bad taste’, did not break the unspoken rules of the club which Thackeray had invoked in his complaint, since it ‘makes no reference to the Club, refers to no conversation that took place there, violates no confidence reposed there, either to myself or to anyone else’. (The strong syntax and emphatic repetition of negatives suggest that Dickens may have drafted this sentence.) If Yates had stopped there, he might have won over the committee to his point of view. Instead, he continued by saying that the matter was not an appropriate one for the committee to concern itself with, that to his knowledge club members had in the past made ‘very strong remarks’ in print about fellow members (he meant Thackeray himself in his satirical writings), and that he owed no apology to Thackeray.12 This confirmed the committee in its support of Thackeray; the secretary told Yates on 26 June that the committee believed that it was the proper forum for considering Thackeray’s complaint and that in its opinion ‘Mr Yates is bound to make an ample apology to Mr Thackeray, or to retire from the Club’. If Yates refused
to apologise, the matter would be discussed further at a general meeting of the whole club on Saturday, 10 July.13

  The highhanded attitude of the committee can be explained in part by some previous discussions of the leaking of conversations to the burgeoning popular papers, with their ‘Gossip of the Week’, ‘Lounger at the Clubs’, and ‘Lounger at the Theatre’ columns. One such article had appeared in the Literary Gazette in March, raising discussion at the committee, which resolved that such writings gave ‘offence to members of this Society’ and transgressed ‘the laws which regulate the social intercourse of gentlemen’.14 Perhaps emboldened by the knowledge that the committee was on his side, Thackeray aimed a dart at Yates in the ninth number of the Virginians, published by Bradbury and Evans on 1 July. There he wrote of ‘young Grubstreet, who corresponds with three penny papers and describes the persons and conversation of gentlemen whom he meets at his “clubs”’.15 Yates read this before writing on the same day to the Garrick declaring that he would not retire from the club and would not apologise to Thackeray.16

  Since Thackeray was a popular frequenter of the weekly Punch dinners, where, according to Henry Silver, the talk was a combination of smut and snobbery, with Thackeray and Leech recounting stories of sexual exploits and dirty jokes at their old school, Charterhouse, it was natural for the magazine to join in on Thackeray’s side.17 On Saturday, 3 July Percival Leigh’s parody of Yates’s ‘Lounger’ articles in Town Talk appeared, highlighting the kind of gossip about people’s appearance and about their earnings from their writings in which Yates had indulged in his piece on Thackeray: ‘The popular novelist, Mr Jenkinson, is about five ten or eleven in height; he is stout, has red hair, and green eyes, in one of which he sticks a glass. He receives a thousand pounds a month from his publishers.’18