The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Ruskin did not limit himself to baby-language in private correspondence. The 1860s, which saw him emerge as a self-appointed social prophet with Unto this Last – a tract on the meaning of labour which enjoyed quasi-scriptural status in the old British Labour Party, pre 1980s – also saw him developing his talents as an educator of females. He taught at a girls’ school in Winnington, Cheshire, and the lectures he gave there were chiefly on crystals and geology.

  No one could call The Ethics of the Dust a dry textbook. Its subtitle is Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallization. There is much brilliance in these lectures, particularly when he expounds the fact that diamonds and coal are chemically all but identical, and moralizes about the capitalist greed for both. But the whimsy is absolutely overwhelming.

  Lecturer: (perceiving various arrangements being made of footstool, cushion, screen, and the like). Yes, yes, it’s all very fine! and I am to sit here to be asked questions till supper-time, am I?

  DORA: I don’t think you can have any supper tonight: we’ve got so much to ask.

  LILY: Oh Miss Dora! We can fetch it him here, you know, so nicely!

  Lecturer: Yes, Lily that will be pleasant … Really, now that I know what teasing things girls are, I don’t so much wonder that people used to put up patiently with the dragons who took them for supper …

  Ruskin and Dodgson came to know one another, through the Christ Church connection. Dodgson took a fine photograph of Ruskin but, we are told, ‘Ruskin never appreciated the odd, puckish personality of Dodgson.’13 Perhaps there was not much personality to appreciate? The author of the Alice books has been the subject of innumerable biographical studies, quack psychiatric examinations, and bogus in-depth analyses. He has been shewn to be crypto-homosexual, crypto-atheist, crypto-more or less anything. The evidence for these speculations is usually sought – and being sought, conveniently discovered – not in his letters or diaries but in the pages of a whimsical story about Alice. Since the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll (as Dodgson styled himself) has been much the most celebrated ‘children’s author’ in the English language. The stories have never been out of print, and they have been translated into almost as many languages as the Bible.

  The secondary literature on Carroll and the Alice books – vast, and mostly more nonsensical than the stories themselves – tells us much about the commentators from generation to generation. Some try to enter into the Carroll whimsy. Others offer joke ‘explanations’ of the tales – such as Sir Shane Leslie’s brilliant spoof, purporting to have made the discovery that Carroll was writing about the religious controversies of the day: the Cheshire Cat is Cardinal Wiseman, the Blue Caterpillar Benjamin Jowett, the battle between the Red and White Knights the controversy between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. Others have taken such jokes seriously and attempted different interpretations – political, philosophical, psychoanalytical and so on. Or there have been the attempts to link the events in the book to actual events in the course of its composition. The royal visit to Christ Church – Queen Victoria coming to visit the Prince of Wales when he was an undergraduate – has as much absurdity as anything in the pages of Carroll’s fantasy: ‘I had never seen her so near before,’ noted Dodgson, ‘nor on her feet, and was shocked to find how short, not to say dumpy and (with all loyalty be it spoken) how plain she is.’14

  Likewise, commentators have found real-life, or rather real dead, hatters, who died as Victorian hatters tended to, of mercury poisoning – symptoms of which included rushing manically about stuffing bits of bread and butter in their mouths. Others, not all medics, have joined sides and tried to prove that Alice’s Hatter does not demonstrate the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

  When Carroll first showed the story to George MacDonald, however, we can safely assume that none of these qualities were what arrested the greater writer’s attention. MacDonald will have seen that Carroll was in some ways borrowing the techniques of his own Phantastes of 1858. MacDonald was a master myth-maker, intuitively aware of the way that fantasy works precisely by not having specific allegorical or symbolical equivalence. Just as the ‘originals’ of the story were all ‘recognized’, so one can see, particularly in their published form with the Tenniel illustrations, that the tales bristle with contemporary allusion. The Reverend Robinson Duckworth, who was present at the picnic in July 1862, afterwards ‘saw’ himself as the Duck, the Lory as Lorina, the Eaglet as Edith Liddell and the Dodo as poor stammering Do-do-dodgson. But it would be mad to read the Alice books as autobiography, any more than the clear resemblance between Disraeli and the gentleman sitting opposite Alice in the train in Chapter 3 of Looking-Glass has any satirical significance. The liberating thing about reading Alice – both Wonderland and Looking-Glass – is that they are games: they are what Wittgenstein called language-games, playfully and brilliantly exposing the fact that signifiers such as words and numbers will not bear the weight or fixity which systems of language, theology, metaphysics or logic often wish to place on them. To this extent, they represent an intellectual holiday for the author, a teacher of mathematical logic who as a devout churchman did think that theology was important, and voted against giving a proper salary to Professor Jowett because of his supposed heresy.

  What many of the serious commentators miss about the Alice stories is their surface-obviousness. They do not work – if they do work for us, rather than embarrassing us by their archness – on a secret level but on a superficial level. The failure of language-games to do their work, the very simple failure of human beings of the same language-group to understand what one is saying to another, this is the essence of the Carroll comedy, found in the relentless puns, double-takes and double entendres of the dialogues. There is also the additional ‘comedy’ of children being kept out of the grown-up world by language-games. This is perhaps the least attractive feature of the books as far as real children are concerned.

  Carroll’s painstaking New York biographer, Professor Morton Cohen, quotes with approval a seventeen-year-old student of his, who wrote:

  Lewis Carroll gives equal time to the child’s point of view. He makes fun of the adult world and understands all the hurt feelings that most children suffer while they are caught in the condition of growing up but are still small.15

  To which the reader must respond – Well, yes and no. Carroll understands children being baffled and upset by grown-ups, but we can seek in vain in either of the Alice books for the kind of soppy empathy with children discovered there by this college student of 1995. Carroll’s is a merciless eye, as cold as the collodion spread on the glass plates of his camera. Innocent of full paedophilia in the physical sense, he has the paedophile’s habit of viewing children as objects: the suffering and bewilderment of Alice is preserved in the stories as funny – just as funny as the antics of the grown-up creatures, and just as unreasonable. The Reverend Charles Dodgson jokes about the little girls’ failures in comprehension in the same callous way in which Mr Murdstone and his friends joke about ‘Brookes of Sheffield’, laughing all the more merrily when David Copperfield, unaware that he himself is being guyed, tries to join in the joke. To compare Carroll with Dickens is to recognize the essentially callous quality of the mathematics don’s humour. Far from empathizing with little children everywhere, as his various saccharine postscriptsfn1 to the books suggest (as the tales went into their endless bestselling reprintings), the evidence of his letters, diaries and photographs suggests that he did not really have sympathy for children at all – still less the obsession with his own boyhood without which it would be difficult for the biographers to enflesh the essentially dull life of this shy, dry old stick of a man.

  fn1 e.g. ‘To all my little friends, known and unknown, I wish with all my heart, “A Merry Christmas”: … May God bless you, dear children, and make each Christmas-tide, as it comes round to you, more bright and beautiful than the last – bright with the presence of that unseen Friend, who once
on earth blessed little children,’ etc. etc.

  22

  Some Deaths

  OUR DECISION TO use children’s literature as a prism through which to view the Sixties of the nineteenth century has helped, perhaps, to focus the decade as one which was indeed an ‘age of equipoise’. That the mid-Victorian era knew a special flowering of literature for children is itself, as we have seen, a fact of sociological reverberations and significances.1 So, too, is the fact that books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which were not meant for children in the first instance, could so easily and so soon have found a place on the shelf beside The Children of the New Forest (1847), Tow Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Eric, or, Little by Little (1858), Goblin Market (1862) or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). This was also the period when Hans Christian Andersen’s tales were first translated into English (1846 onwards) and began their prodigious world popularity. All these books differently reflect the ways in which the world was changing, and some reflect how it was not.

  While the gerontocracy lasted, England resembled one of those arrested families where, the ancient parents still living, the grown-ups, even in middle age, continued to see themselves as ‘the children’. Hence, perhaps, in large measure, the truth of Disraeli’s view that the era was like a fairy-tale, and hence too the fittingness of so many of its great writers being the authors of books for children.

  But in the 1860s the older generation at last began to die off. Palmerston died on 18 October 1865. ‘Gladstone will soon have it all his own way,’ he had said to Shaftesbury, ‘whenever he gets my place, and then we shall have strange doings.’ But he was succeeded as the Liberal prime minister, not by Gladstone, aged fifty-six, but by Russell, aged seventy-three. Russell (Earl Russell since 1861) was determined to deal with the matter of electoral reform. The author of the first Reform Act in 1832 was prime minister in 1865: no more potent symbol could be found of the gerontocratic nature of early to mid-Victorian England. The first Reform Act had done little enough to enfranchise the middle classes. Now, the bourgeoisie, both haute and petite, was huge. And five out of six adult males in the population were voteless.2 How far this mattered, and how far the population as a whole really minded about the vote per se, may be an open question. At the time, the extension of the franchise was the great object of political debate. ‘It was the flag and shibboleth of the new nation against the old.’3

  At this historical distance, it seems extraordinary, if an electoral process was accepted at all, that the franchise should not be extended to all, regardless of income or gender; but this is not how it appeared to those in the thick of the debate, either inside or outside Parliament. The order of events was dramatic and exciting. In 1866, Russell’s Liberal government brought in a very moderate Bill to extend the franchise to householders of a certain level of wealth. There was a right-wing revolt within the Liberal ranks at the notion of such a concession to Radicalism, and the Bill was defeated. Russell resigned, to be defeated in the general election by Lord Derby. The (minority) Conservative government then surprised everyone by bringing in a more far-reaching Reform Bill. The diehards in Derby’s Cabinet – General Peel, the Earl of Carnarvon and Viscount Cranbourne (the future prime minister, as the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury) – resigned in protest. This in itself helped the purposes of Derby and his political genius of a leader in the Commons – Disraeli. What Disraeli and Derby were able to do, by an apparently more radical extension of the franchise, was to have a much greater say over the distribution of constituencies and, without open gerrymandering, to make it likely in the future that they would have a good chance of forming majorities in the House of Commons. This is what was going to happen – Conservatism, of a sort, was the dominant political creed of the second half of Victoria’s reign. ‘Disraeli was educating his party, and preparing it for the inevitable future.’4

  Derby, his leader and prime minister, had seen that the Liberal Bill of 1866 – the one they defeated – was ‘the extinction of the Conservative Party and of the real Whigs’. As a man who had actually been a member of the Whig government which brought in the 1832 Act, Derby knew whereof he spoke. What we are able to see more clearly was how remarkably successful the Conservatives were in preserving some element of aristocratic government down to, and even after the First World War. There was at least an alliance between the landed classes and the new bourgeoisie, and that large portion of the population, the working-class Tories. How much Disraeli foresaw all this, how much he was even its architect, there will always be room to debate. Though, in the short term, the Second Reform Act did not do the Tories any good – the Liberals won the election of 1868, bringing in Gladstone as prime minister for the first time – there is no question that without it the Conservative Party would have been annihilated. Gladstone would eventually have come in, come what may, and ‘strange doings’ would have been the ineluctable consequence.

  Yet to diehards, the extension of the franchise by some 938,000 voters was all a disaster. Carlyle put it more trenchantly and gloomily than anyone in his pamphlet Shooting Niagara: and After, in which he imagined civilization plummeting over the rapids. ‘That England would have to take the Niagara leap of completed Democracy one day’ was now regarded as an inevitability. ‘Swarmery’, he called it, the swarming together, not even of mobs, but of Constitutionally Reformed Majorities. The notion that things could be changed or reformed by the holding of elections, by making speeches on the hustings, by the return to Parliament of Honourable Members for this borough and that, was palpably absurd to the author of Heroes and Hero-Worship:

  Inexpressibly delirious seems to me, at present in my solitude, the puddle of Parliament and Public upon what it calls ‘the Reform Measure’; that is to say, the calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article. The intellect of man who believes in the possibility of ‘improvement’ by such a method is to me a finished-off and shut-up intellect, with which I would not argue.

  Carlyle wrote, as he said, in solitude. His wife was dead. She had died in April 1866, when Carlyle was making one of his periodical visits to his ‘ain folk’ in Scotland. Mrs Carlyle, who had received numbers of visitors at Cheyne Row in his absence, had continued her London life which, as so often, featured the exercise of a little dog. Nero, the dog who had shared some of the more intensely depressing of the Carlyles’ years together in Chelsea, was long since dead and buried in the garden. She took his successor to exercise in Hyde Park, holding it in her arms in the back of a brougham until they reached Victoria Gate. There she had released the dog, and it had had its paw run over accidentally by another carriage. She leapt out of her own carriage to rescue it, and took the dog back into the brougham, sinking on to the seat. The coachman trotted on round the park, twice round the drive, down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and up again. Receiving no directions from his passenger in the back, he had turned round. Something was amiss. He stopped the carriage and asked a gentleman to look into the back. The gentleman told the cabby to take the lady at once to St George’s Hospital – now an hotel – opposite the Duke of Wellington’s Apsley House, at the south-east corner of the park. They opened the door of the brougham when they reached the hospital, and found Jane Welsh Carlyle sitting upright on the back seat with the dog on her lap: she was dead.5

  Carlyle’s anguish for the death of his wife, his guilt for the things done and undone during their long shared pilgrimage together, deepened the misery of that already miserable man. He often walked to the spot where she must have died, and reverently removed his hat – ‘in rain or sunshine’ – the gesture implying a form of penance, comparable to Samuel Johnson standing hatless and wigless in the rain at Uttoxeter market where he had been unfilial towards his father (who had a stall there).6 Froude was criticized for making public so many of the details of the Carlyles’ marriage; and twentieth-century authors have been
further able to piece together the non-evidence and evidence of such friends as Jane’s lifelong confidante Geraldine Jewsbury, who was with her on the day she died, and who allegedly had been told that the marriage was unconsummated. Sometimes it is not the secrets of a marriage but its obvious surface life which tell the truest story. The Carlyles had a miserable time quite visibly, often at odds, often snarling and snapping at one another in the presence of friends. Equally, in the presence of friends, they were intellectual soulmates and enjoyed a similar acerbic sense of humour; and many friendships there were.

  They had been the centre of ‘literary London’ in the 1840s. Small wonder that Carlyle in his seventies found the new age little to his taste; the ‘Niagara’ rapids of ‘Swarmism’ nothing short of ridiculous. ‘The Aristocracy, as a class, has as yet no thought of giving up the game,’ he wrote, ‘or ceasing to be what in the Language of flattery is called the “Governing Class”; nor should it until it has seen farther.’ That was his view. Some readers in the twenty-first century would find it bizarre, as a positive suggestion for the way the future might shape itself. What is easier to agree with in Carlyle’s pamphlet is his negative assessment of the English. ‘We are a people drowned in Hypocrisy; saturated with it to the bone – alas, it is even so, in spite of far other intentions at one time, and of a languid, dumb, ineradicable inward protest against it still … Certain it is, there is nothing but vulgarity in our People’s expectations, resolutions or desires in this Epoch. It is all a peaceable mouldering or tumbling down from mere rottenness and decay …’7