The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  He concludes his damnation of Peel with the words, ‘You have excluded the profound thinker; you must be content with what you can obtain – the business gentleman.’20 This has the cleverness and unfairness of journalism at its best – and there was no better political journalist than Bagehot. It supposes that the realistic alternative to ‘the business gentleman’ was the deep thinker. Politics, though, does not attract deep minds. In the early nineteenth-century Cabinets there were plenty of clever men like Gladstone and Macaulay, but no one we would call profound. Is profundity an asset in politicians?

  Anyway, as Bagehot knew perfectly well, writing six years after Peel’s death, the alternatives to Peel as prime minister were not Aristotle and Hegel. They were – in succeeding order – Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley/Derby, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston. Those who saw Aberdeen trying to keep alight the flickering flame of Peelite moderation and common sense might have saluted his courage or condemned his vacillation; but they would have known who waited in the wings – not a philosopher, but the loud, ludicrous figure of ‘Pam’, who, as Disraeli remarked, ‘really is an imposter, utterly exhausted, and at best only ginger-beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon’.21

  Those who criticized the Great Exhibition – Carlyle, Colonel Sibthorp, the Mechanics Magazine (a Radical periodical), the Chartists (what remained of them) – tended to be those who criticized Free Trade. The Times blew hot and cold, first supporting it, then claiming that the exhibition would ruin Hyde Park, finally compelled to acknowledge that in its own terms the exhibition was hugely successful. The sheer scale of it all makes any description, either of the opening ceremonies, or of the visitors, or of the 100,000 exhibits, become a catalogue of hyperboles. Twenty-five thousand season tickets were sold in advance, at 3 guineas each for gentlemen, 2 guineas for ladies. For ten days after the opening, admission cost £1 and was thereafter reduced to five shillings. After 24 May, Mondays to Thursdays cost 1s., Fridays half a crown, Saturdays 5s. There was no opening on Sundays, no smoking, no alcohol and no dogs. On 1 May there were 6,000 extra police on duty and five cavalry regiments on standby in the Tower of London in case of trouble.

  By 11 o’clock in the morning, 500,000 people had assembled in the Park to watch Charles Spencer the great aeronaut go up in his balloon at the moment the exhibition was declared open. The jam of cabs and carriages stretched back to the Strand – 1,500 cabs, 800 broughams, 600 post carriages, 300 clarences … At noon, the Queen and Prince Albert arrived and were saluted with guns. The great organ struck up ‘God Save the Queen’. The archbishop of Canterbury offered a prayer and a choir sang Handel’s Hallelujah chorus.

  Albert had chosen as the motto ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’. It was not intended as a reference to Lord Palmerston, Pilgerstein as Albert playfully called him, whose foreign policy he so much deplored. The Times said it ‘was the first morning since the creation of the world that all peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act’. The Queen was equally ecstatic:

  The glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I can never forget and I felt much moved … The sight as we came to the middle where the steps and a chair (which I did not sit on) were placed, with the beautiful crystal fountain just in front of it, was magical – so vast, so glorious, so touching. One felt – as so many did whom I have since spoken to – filled with devotion, more so than by any service I have ever heard. The tremendous cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains, the organ (with 200 instruments and 500 voices; which sounded like nothing) and my beloved husband, the author of this ‘peace Festival’ which united the industry of all nations of the earth – all this was moving indeed, and it was and is a day to live for ever.22

  It would be fascinating to know how we, visitors from the twenty-first century, would have regarded the Great Exhibition had we joined the 20,000 visitors on that opening day, or the 6,039,195 visitors (more accurately one should say visits, since many, like the Queen, returned again and again) before the exhibition closed in October. Would we perhaps regard it as the very emblematic epitome of England in its time? The variety and ingenuity of the exhibits would no doubt astound us. Hibbert, Platt and Son’s fifteen cotton-spinning machines demonstrated in anodyne, clean conditions, in a southern exhibition chamber, the kind of machinery which had done the home-weavers out of a living, and to which the northern working classes were now attached like slaves. But here, they seemed like gleaming incarnations of progress and progressivism. The machine section of the exhibition was always the most popular.23 They were ‘the epitome of man’s industrial progress – of his untiring efforts to release himself from his material bondage’, as James Ward wrote in The World in its Workshops. Here could be seen Nasmyth’s steam hammer, invented (‘after a few moments’ thought’)24 to forge the proposed paddle shafts of the Great Britain; here were locomotives, talking telegraphs, steam turbines, printing machines, envelope machines; and a wide variety of scientific instruments – air pumps, microscopes, printing telegraphs, cameras and photographic equipment of the most up-to-date kind. J.A. Whipple, a Boston photographer, exhibited a daguerreotype of the Moon, the result of a collaboration with W.C. Bond at the Observatory at Harvard. The Exhibition Jury considered it ‘perhaps one of the most satisfactory attempts that has yet been made to realise, by a photographic process, the telescopic appearance of a heavenly body and it must be regarded as indicating the commencement of a new era in astronomical representation’.25

  In all this, we visitors in a time machine from the twenty-first century would find harbingers of Victorian triumphs – we will see these great inventions used for good and ill in the coming years, cameras capturing for us everything from the Crimean War to Mrs Cameron’s Arthurian fantasies; telegraphs playing a crucial role in the establishment of Empire. (The British use of the telegraph was vital in subduing the Indian uprisings in 1857–8.)

  But as we have accustomed ourselves to seeing this exhibition as the symbol of nineteenth-century industrial progress and materialism, we turn the corner and – what is this? We are standing in the Medieval Court designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, in which we are confronted with Gothic High Altars, hanging lamps, and statues of the Virgin. So strongly did the Medieval Court offend Protestant sensibility that complaints were made to the Prince Consort and the prime minister and a flood of letters to The Times regarded the erection of a Crucifixion on the Rood Screen as an ‘insult to the religion of the country’.26

  While twenty-first-century time visitors, unless from Northern Ireland, would find such complaints bizarre, they might need to remind themselves that ‘No Popery’ was still a live issue for senior politicians in Britain in 1850–1.

  In 1847 the new pope (a liberal called Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti – he had been elected in 1846 and took the name Pius IX) had approved in principle the idea, put to him by Nicholas Wiseman, that English Roman Catholicism – hitherto organized as a mission Church under the care of vicars-apostolic – should be administered differently. England should be divided into Catholic dioceses, taking their names not from the ancient or medieval sees of York, Exeter, Salisbury etc. but chiefly from the modern industrial centres – Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Northampton, Plymouth and so on. Wiseman, who was rector of the English college in Rome until 1840 and thereafter a vicar-apostolic, who had been consecrated bishop, was a genial fellow on the whole better liked by non-Catholics than by his coreligionists. (He has his ‘lobster-salad side’,27 complained one puritanical Catholic.) Browning used him as the model for Bishop Blougram in his fascinating poem on the subject of doubt and faith. Macaulay, visiting Rome in 1839, had found that Wiseman reminded him of Whewell, master of Trinity, Cambridge – ‘full of health and vigour �
�� He was extremely civil.’28

  The Year of Revolutions delayed the scheme for the creation of an English Roman Catholic hierarchy. The pope himself fled Rome to Gaeta, the new secretary of propaganda, Monsignor Barnato, who was to set the English schemes in hand, was hidden in an Armenian monastery under Turkish diplomatic protection. When it was safe to emerge, ‘Pius IX re-entered Rome in March 1850, a pope who had lost his liberalism.’29

  It was now part of the pope’s need, in the face of widespread anticlericalism and atheism, to rally the Catholic troops, and the act of making ‘bishops’ of Hexham, Shrewsbury or Birmingham became part of a more general scheme to strengthen Catholic Europe, of which England, for the first time in centuries, was seen to be a part. Wiseman was presiding over a Church which had grown in numbers enormously, but this was to bring its own problems. The English ‘Catholic Church’ was divided into three quite different groups who did not mix, or sympathize, with one another. By far the largest group was the new influx of Irish immigrants, hugely increased by the Famine. Second, there were the High Church malcontents who had followed John Henry Newman and his other friends from a position of attempting to see the Church of England as a Catholic remnant to a belief that true Catholicism could be found only in the Church of Rome. Some of these converts, most notably F.W. Faber, who built the London Oratory in the flamboyant baroque style of a Roman church – the Via Veneto come to Knightsbridge – gloried in the trappings of contemporary European Catholicism, but most of Newman’s converts were swayed by the literature of an earlier age – the early Greek and Latin Fathers, the lives of the medieval saints – and took in effect their Anglo-Catholicism with them to Rome. In terms of ethos they were like travellers who brought with them the English apothecary, travelling library and chaplain on a continental sojourn.

  There remained the tiny handful of old Catholic families who had not altered their religious allegiance since penal times and who had lived through times of persecution and prejudice as recently as the Gordon Riots. They feared that the creation of Catholic bishoprics in England would cause an anti-Catholic backlash, and they also took the view that it was unnecessary. The old organization under vicars-apostolic worked perfectly well and cost very little. Wiseman’s scheme of new cathedrals which no Catholic could afford was to condemn English Catholics to a century and a half of fund-raising, tombolas and bingo. The older Catholics, the kind romanticized in Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, who called their priests Mister, not Father, and who disliked the extremism and bad taste of continental piety purveyed at the Brompton Oratory, felt that something approaching a new religion was being foisted on them in terms which compromised their positions as British citizens.30

  Though Catholic Emancipation had come in 1829 there were still a few anomalies on the statute books. Wiseman’s florid manner of announcing the new hierarchy – he did so as a newly created cardinal, and wrote ‘from out of the Flaminian Gate’ – was too much for some of his flock. ‘Your beloved country has received a place among the fair churches, which normally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion; Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished.’31 Lord Beaumont, a Catholic peer, said it was impossible to accept the new hierarchy and remain loyal to the Queen. The premier Catholic nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, agreed with him and publicly became an Anglican by receiving holy communion in his parish church.32

  As the old Catholics had predicted, the creation of the unpoetic sees of Liverpool and Birmingham provided the No Popery brigade with the excuse for mass hysteria. The papal brief reached the English press in the second week of October 1850. By Guy Fawkes Day the crowds were ready to express their anti-Catholic sentiments in traditional fashion. Some Catholic churches had their windows broken. In many places, Wiseman – or the pope – or both – were burnt in effigy.

  These displays were not limited to the uneducated classes. The lord chancellor, at the Mansion House dinner of 9 November, quoted Shakespeare’s lines

  Under our feet we’ll stamp thy Cardinal’s hat

  In spite of Pope or dignities of Church.33

  He was thunderously applauded. Lord John Russell did not see it as his prime ministerial role to urge moderation. He deplored not only Roman Catholics but also those Anglo-Catholics within the Established Church. In fact he regarded these Puseyites, as they were now called – after the venerable Dr Pusey of Oxford, their High Church champion – as even more dangerous than the real thing. Writing to the Queen he quoted with approval the views of the late Doctor Arnold of Rugby, on the Catholics within the Established Church compared with the RCs – ‘The one is the Frenchman in his own uniform and within his own praesidia; the other is the Frenchman disguised in a red coat, and holding a post within our praesidia, for the purpose of betraying it. I should honour the first, and hang the second.’34

  As so often, the Queen surprises us with her compassion, broadmindedness, common sense. She shared Lord John’s horror of unmanly High Church mummery, but as to the outbursts against her Catholic subjects, she wrote, ‘I must regret the unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public meetings. I cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion, which is so painful and cruel towards the many good and innocent Roman Catholics.’35

  Lord John, however, the author of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the pioneer of British Liberalism, had no compunction about abusing the Roman Catholic religion; and he went further. On the tide of prejudice which Wiseman and the pope had provoked, Lord John brought before Parliament legislation to make the new Catholic dioceses illegal. ‘I disapprove of such legislation very much,’ Earl Grey wrote in his diary, ‘and most reluctantly assent to its being attempted, but the country has got into such a state that I believe still greater mischief would result from doing nothing.’36 A very great deal of parliamentary time in the first half of 1851 was devoted to the promotion of Lord John’s bill, with hours of time given to the backwoodsmen to air their anti-Romish prejudices in the chamber of the House. No doubt it gave them great pleasure to vote to fine £100 anyone who claimed to be an archbishop or bishop of any diocese other than an Anglican one. The law they passed – the Ecclesiastical Titles Act – was so absurd that no-one was ever prosecuted by its terms and Gladstone easily, and necessarily, repealed it in 1871.

  But all this was going on while Pugin erected his Madonnas and crucifixes, his roods and dossals and reredoses in the Crystal Palace in 1851. For those who had come to share Pugin’s – and Newman’s – faith there undoubtedly was a ‘Second Spring’ of English Catholicism in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the year of the Great Exhibition, the former archdeacon of Chichester, Henry Manning, one of the most dynamic churchmen of the age, was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by Wiseman.

  Whatever the religious significance of all this, the visitor to the exhibition – particularly a twenty-first-century visitor coming to the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in a time machine – might see the outbursts of irrational prejudice against Catholics less in metaphysical than in political terms. The paradox of the exhibition was that while being international in scope, it was fundamentally designed as a demonstration not merely of British superiority to other nations but, in some way, of British independence and isolationism.

  We should not fail to notice the internationalism of the displays, and if we read the Illustrated London News of 26 April 1851, with its pictures of Bengalis busily carving ivory for the Great Exhibition, we might also see in it signs of colonial exploitation. We might gasp with delight at the stuffed elephant and howdah from India, or at the exoticism of the Tunis Room. As we wandered from the Turkish stalls, the Greek stalls, the French, German and Italian exhibits we might indeed feel that ‘the exhibition turned the Crystal Palace into, in the words of so many visitors, a fairyland, a tour round the world’.

  Yet it has to be said that the presence of so much exotic foreign material, and so many
foreigners, did not diminish the natural xenophobia of the English. Quite the reverse. The Home Office, and the Duke of Wellington, seen as the natural defender of England against foreign foes, were inundated with paranoid letters. ‘Woe to England. All the French Socialists it is understood are coming over to the Exhibition!!!! It will be well if London is not destroyed by Fire!!!! The Pope has successfully thrown the Apple of Discord amongst us!!!!’ was one letter. A broadsheet printed and published by E. Hodges warned:

  Look out, look out, mind what you’re about

  And how you go on, sirs,

  Mark what I say in the month of May,

  Eighteen hundred and fifty-one, sir,

  In London will be all the world,

  Oh, how John Bull will shrill then,

  The Russian, Prussian, Turk and Jew,

  And the King of the Sandwich Islands …

  It goes without saying that E. Hodges did not thrill to the prospect. Broadly speaking the internationalist minority, including Prince Albert, rejoiced at the number of foreigners, and the xenophobic majority saw the exhibition as exacerbating trade rivalries rather than emphasizing the harmony between trading partners.

  To most twenty-first-century eyes, the majority of artefacts in the exhibition would seem lumpen and hideous. For every laugh we might have at a stuffed animal (and Plouquet’s famous stuffed rabbits, squirrels, weasels playing cards, holding tea parties and playing the pianoforte were among the great losses when the Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in the twentieth century) there would be dozens of Birmingham-made epergnes, overmantels, clocks and tables which would not seem beautiful to our contemporaries. The Jewel Cabinet designed for Elkington and Co. by Albert’s artistic mentor Louis Gruner, and adorned with panels depicting the Queen and her consort in medieval costume, with silver statuettes at each corner, is a good example: can one ever envisage an age which thought it lovely? It is still treasured in the Royal Collection. As Ruskin bitterly but appositely reminded his readers, ‘In the year 1851, when all that glittering roof was built, in order to exhibit the petty arts of our fashionable luxury-carved bedsteads of Vienna, glued toys of Switzerland and gay jewellery from France – in that very year, I say, the greatest pictures of Venetian masters were rotting at Venice in the rain, for want of a roof to cover them, with holes made by cannon-shot through their canvas.’37