The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Palmerston was adept at self-promotion. The peace-loving free-trader John Bright could complain that 50,000 men died to make Palmerston prime minister, but with his eye to the populace, the war prime minister could make even this objection seem unpatriotic. Bright, he replied, reduces everything to pounds, shillings and pence. If confronted with the threat of imminent invasion, Bright would ‘sit down, take a bit of paper, and would put on one side of the account the contributions which his Government would require from him for the defence of liberty and independence of the country, and he would put on the other the probable contributions which the General of the invading army might levy upon Manchester’.28

  Sir Henry Layard was a radical MP with a fervent anti-Russian view who had been in the Foreign Office (like Urquhart he had been attached to the British embassy in Constantinople and was regarded by Palmerston as a clever middle-class upstart). His speeches about the inefficiency of the British aristocracy, and their bungles in the Crimea, made a great impression and were cheered on by The Times. Palmerston’s instinct was to silence Layard by giving him a post in the government, but the Queen was so horrified by his attacks on the aristocracy that she refused. Layard proposed sending MPs to the Crimea who should have the power to overrule and dismiss incompetent commanders. ‘I have no doubt that a Cavendish in the Cabinet is a very important thing, but the public think more of 20,000 lives than they do of a Cavendish.’ However true this seems in retrospect, the popular mood at the time was against Layard and behind Palmerston.

  The Crimean War seems like the archetypical example of Cobden’s view that war is an extended form of aristocratic sport. Certainly, the notion of aristocratic superiority would have been hard to sustain in its aftermath. It is probably significant that Samuel Smiles’s Self-help failed to find a publisher before the war, and became the ultimate self-defining bestseller of the mid-Victorian age when it was published at the end of the decade.29 But England was and is a very odd place. Those Samuel Smiles businessmen and inventors and manufacturers who appeared to be so much at odds with the aristocrats of Lord John Russell’s generation did not invariably establish themselves as democrats and men of the people The tendency was that they aspired to use their money to send their children to the same schools as the aristocrats, to acquire large houses and estates, just like those of the old upper class, and, where possible, to marry into it. ‘What is most coveted in this country,’ said The Times in September 1851, ‘more than wealth, more than talent, more than fame, more even than power, is aristocratic position, to obtain or improve which other things are only sought as the means.’

  Palmerston, as long ago as 1831, giving a very cautious support to Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill, had said that the English people are not fond of political change. ‘They formed a striking contrast to their neighbours on the Continent … who boasted of the newness of their institutions, while the English were proud of the antiquity of theirs.’30 A quarter of a century later, Palmerston could turn round Layard’s complaints against the atrocious bungling of upper-class army officers in the Crimea and create a picture of aristocratic heroism which made 300 MPs stand up and cheer:

  Talk to me of the aristocracy of England! Why, look to that glorious charge of the cavalry at Balaklava – look to that charge, where the noblest and wealthiest of the land rode foremost, followed by heroic men from the lowest classes of the community, each rivalling the other in bravery, neither the peer who led nor the trooper who followed being distinguished the one from the other. In that glorious band there were the sons of the gentry of England; leading were the noblest in the land, and following were the representatives of the people of this country.

  The disastrous cavalry charge has become a political template. The English, to this day, are capable of holding directly contradictory views of the class system. On the one hand they believe in egalitarian notions of no one being better than another just because he is born rich or noble, and they take vindictive delight in the prospect of royal or noble personages whom they dislike being ‘brought down a peg’. On the other hand, the same people will flood into the Mall to cheer the Queen or pay money to go round some ducal palace – those such as Chatsworth which contain a real live duke being a much greater tourist attraction than those which are mere museums. ‘Their neighbours on the continent’ might well form into two camps – the haters and the lovers of aristocracy. In England they are one and the same.

  Palmerston appealed to this somewhat brutal schizophrenia by himself being an odd mixture of populism and hauteur, insensitivity and genuine good-hearted altruism. The only obvious political belief which you can trace from his long career is the conviction that he had the right to be in the government, whether it called itself Tory, Whig, Peelite or Liberal. Praed had mocked him as a sort of political Vicar of Bray (‘I’m not a Tory now!’) when he had thrown himself behind the Reform Bill. His ambivalence was unaltered in 1852 when, as a Whig and friend of Radicals, he seriously contemplated taking the post of chancellor of the Exchequer in Derby’s first Cabinet – the job which in the event was given to Disraeli.

  A comparable double standard applied to his views. After his marriage, Palmerston found himself stepfather-in-law to Lord Ashley – that is, Ashley was married to Lady Palmerston’s daughter by a previous union (the former Lady Cowper). It was undoubtedly for this reason that Palmerston supported the Ten Hours Bill. When some trade union leaders called at his house in Carlton Gardens unannounced, he consented to see them. They tried to demonstrate to him the sort of work expected of a child. Surely, he airily suggested, the advent of machinery had hugely improved the conditions even of child labour in a factory. The working men indicated such work was like pushing two large lounging chairs round and round his drawing-room. Calling for the assistance of a footman, Palmerston tried pushing the chairs – to the astonishment of his wife, when she came into the room and remarked, ‘I am glad to see your Lordship has betaken yourself to work at last.’31 Out of puff after a few circumambulations, Palmerston was told that factory children walked as much as thirty miles per day behind their machines. That shocked him and converted him to the Ten Hours Bill. He was equally horrified by slavery. Yet, as we have seen, he treated his Irish tenants abominably, and in spite of the obvious need to reform the army he resolutely refused to do so. He went to his grave believing that flogging was absolutely necessary to maintain military discipline, and the purchase of commissions was not abolished until 1870. Yet this old man, who really belonged to the aristocratic (and high diplomatic) world depicted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was ten years old when his father’s friend Gibbon died, and who was an MP before the death of Napoleon, became a popular prime minister in the era of photography and modern newspapers. He was voted in by the middle class.

  Palmerston was cynical enough to know that the Crimean War could be popular so long as it could be represented as serving the interests of Great Britain. The army consisted entirely of aristocratic officers, most of them buffoons, and working-class men driven to the dire expedient of soldiering by poverty. Many, therefore, were Irish or Scots. The battles took place far away. No English town was reduced to rubble, as was Balaclava. It was an armchair war, fought, as far as the English bourgeoisie was concerned, by classes as remote from their own lives as the Sultan and his entourage in the Topkapi palace. Yet war is a Pandora’s box, even when fought at a distance of over a thousand miles. Palmerston’s complacent belief in the love affair between the English and the aristocracy was, like most things in England, only half true.

  For most Englishmen, hatred of the enemy was not really enough to fuel war fever. It would have been absurd to suppose that the subjects of Queen Victoria in 1854, whether mill operatives or farmers, clergymen or railway engineers, felt so natural a kinship with the Turk that when the Sultan declared war against Russia, they longed, to a man, to fight the Tsar. What happened was more muddled and, from the point of view of the collective consciousness – that mystic unity beloved of Maurice –
more complex. A war puts a society on its mettle. While fighting Hitler’s war, the British – through the experience of coalition government, rationing and the like – were also working through the dreadful social legacy of the 1930s and determining to refashion a welfare system and their whole attitude to the state. Many on both sides of the political spectrum saw the Crimean War as a comparable test for the British. As fast as the chancellor of the Exchequer throughout the war – through two administrations – William Ewart Gladstone – was trying to pay for it by temporary impositions of income tax, events were challenging even his laissez-faire economic certainties. A modern state, and this was what post-Crimean England was becoming, could not without calamity allow the untrammelled market free rein. Fiscal controls – and a taxation system – arose willy-nilly.

  The very lack of political definition at home, and the lack of distinction of the two war Cabinets, in fact points up the questions which Victorian Britain was asking itself of itself during this war. ‘We working-class and professional men are only listeners in the trial going on between merchants, manufacturers and tradesmen and aristocracy,’ F.D. Maurice complained to an audience at the Working Men’s College on 31 May 1855. This was to be one of the political conundrums which would preoccupy the British for a hundred years – how to find political representation both for intelligent non-commercial middle-class opinion and for the working classes. The result would be that fascinating political hybrid, the Labour Party.

  Until that hybrid had grown, however, society was to pass through many transformations, some directly political – to do with parliamentary reforms, extension of the franchise, and so on – others more nebulous, but no less interwoven with the fabric of life.

  The war as theatre, as spectator-sport, as tragic absurdity, came to a close. Having reduced Balaclava to rubble, with great loss of life, the British invited the Russian commanders to dinner en plein air. M. Soyer describes the scene:

  Early the next morning all the people in authority were astir. Generals, colonels, officers, and men in light marching order, might be seen quickly crossing and re-crossing the plateau in every direction. I had, with my brigade of cooks, been busy since daybreak, and a white stream of communication had established itself between the general’s palazzo, built of fine white stone, and the villarette of your humble servant, so conspicuously erected in almost the centre of the plateau. This was no other than my cooks in their white culinary attire, running like mad to and fro, fetching and carrying the portions of the collation which I had prepared in my kitchen. At ten, to the minute, the party were to sit down; at five minutes to ten the collation was on the table, and in military order. The bill of fare was as follows:

  DÉJEUNER POUR VINGT-QUATRE PERSONNES,

  Offert au Général Vassileffsky par le Général Garrett.

  Filets de turbot clouté à la Dame Blanche.

  Cotelettes de mouton à la vivandière.

  Relevées chaudes.

  Les hanchettes de mouton à la Bretonne.

  Pièces froides.

  Le dindonneau farci à l’anglaise.

  Les poulets demi-rôtis.

  Le gros jambon de Westmoreland glacé.

  Le gannet garni d’ortolans à la Victoria.

  La Macédoine Lüdersienne à l’Alexandre II.

  Petits hors-d’oeuvres.

  Les escalopes de mortadelle de Verone.

  Le thon italien mariné.

  Les olives de Provence farcies.

  Les lamproies et sardines marinées.

  Les anchois.

  Les cornichons à 1’estragon.

  Indian pickles.

  Entremets de douceur.

  Gelées d’oranges.

  Idem au marasquin.

  Plum-pudding à la Exeter.

  Un turban Savarin au Madère.

  The Crimean cup à la Marmora.

  Dessert assorti.

  Salades d’oranges.

  Compotes de poires.

  Figues, raisins, amandes, &c.

  My engineer, Tom Shell-proof, as we afterwards called him, undertook to gallop round to the various regimental kitchens, and see that all was in order … At ten to the minute, the Russians arrived. After the introduction, the guests sat down, and every jaw was soon doing its best; for in less than twenty minutes there were only the names of the various dishes to be seen, and they were upon the bill of fare – which was not eaten. The Russian general, who has only one arm, ate as much as two men with the use of both. A servant waited upon him, and carved his meat. Better-looking men I have seen, but not more military. He seemed as hard and as round as a cannon-ball. Between three and five was the general’s hour of rising in time of peace. When he told me this, I said, ‘Then I suppose in wartime you don’t lie down at all, general?’

  ‘Very little indeed,’ was the reply.

  ‘That I can conceive. But in time of peace you must admit four or five to be rather an early hour to call upon a friend, as you proposed doing to General Garrett.’

  The general was a man of very agreeable manners – spoke French rather fluently – had a very quick eye – was no sooner seated than he took a survey of the company. The lunch was much relished – the speeches were short and to the point, and all went on to everybody’s satisfaction. The Russian general was particularly pleased, and highly complimented his host upon the dainty repast, which he could not conceive was to be had in the Crimea.

  Two things to emerge from the Pandora’s box of war, and which could hardly have been predicted when the Powers began their quarrel about the ancient sites of Christian pilgrimage, were the importance of photography, and a change in the Western world’s smoking habits.

  We do not know why a Scotsman called Robert Peacock Gloag was in the Crimea, but while he was there he saw Turks and Russians smoking cigarettes. ‘In them, he found an idea and an ideal. From the war a purposeful man emerged.’

  The first Gloag cigarettes on sale in London were cylinders of straw-coloured paper into which a cane tip was inserted and the tobacco filled in through a funnel. These are what Russians call little scorchers, papirosi. You can still buy them in Russia. Gloag filled them with strong Latakia tobacco.

  By 1860–1, a Greek captain in the Russian army, John Theodoridi, had set up a shop in London – Leicester Square – selling Turkish cigarettes. Four other cigarette-makers followed. Theodoriki Avramanchi, another Greek, opened a shop in Regent Street in 1865, Caranjaki in Great Winchester Buildings, D. Mazzini in Union Court and A. Zicaliotti in Bloomfield Street. Gloag settled in Peckham, a south-eastern suburb of London. He made cigarettes called ‘Moscows’ for Theodoridi (these had a piece of wool in the end to act as a filter) and ‘Tom Thumbs’ – ‘penny lines to be smoked to the bitter end’. From one room, he expanded to his whole house, then to another. Then he had six houses. He sold his ‘Don Alfonso’ in bundles of 25 for 1 shilling. This ‘Whiff’ was introduced in 1871. In 1870 he had founded the church of St Stephen, Peckham, in gratitude for his profits. By now, he had a factory, 40 Boyson Road, Walworth. The text over the door of his ‘tobacco church’ was – ‘But when the blade was sprung up, And brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.’

  This seemed an intelligent recognition of the fact that, from the first, the habit of cigarette-smoking was seen as both a blessing and a curse. Arthur E.J. Longhurst, assistant surgeon to HM (Prince Albert’s) Light Infantry, attributed the decline of the Ottoman Empire itself specifically to the Turkish fondness for cigarettes. Having noted the ‘imbecile progeny’ of native American tobacco-addicts, Dr Longhurst adds, ‘We may also take warning from the history of another nation, who some few centuries ago, while following the banners of Solyman the Magnificent, were the terror of Christendom, but who since then having become more addicted to tobacco-smoking than any of the European nations, are now the lazy and lethargic Turks, held in contempt by all civilized communities.’ An American contemporary of Dr Longhurst’s, William A. Alcott, noted that ‘the slave of tobacco is
seldom found reclaimable’. He added that smoking damaged teeth, lungs and stomach, as well as the morals of the addict.

  What Gloag had introduced to the West, however, was a narcotic so addictive that social attitudes were forced to change, in order to accommodate the cigarette compulsion. In the pre-cigarette age, smoking was chiefly regarded as a ‘low’ activity. In 1861 a notice was pinned on the board at the Travellers’ Club ‘respectfully requesting’ members to refrain from smoking, except in one specified area – this was because someone had lit a cigar in the hall.32 It was not until the 1880s that smoking was generally permitted in the public rooms of London clubs. In respectable households men either had to smoke out of doors or else ‘sneak away into the kitchen when the servants had gone to bed and puff up the chimney’.33 Smoking was first allowed in railway carriages in 1860.

  The real smoking revolution happened in the generation after Gloag’s, when the Bristol tobacco firm of W.D. and H.O. Wills pioneered the first Bonsack cigarette-making machine, bought from America in 1883.fn1 34 It enabled them to manufacture approximately 200 cigarettes per minute. Between 1860 and 1900, Britain became a smoking nation, its consumption of tobacco rising 2.4 per cent in 1862, 4.7 per cent in 1863 and an average of around 5 per cent per annum for the rest of the century.