The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Gordon’s death at the time and afterwards was seen as a martyrdom. If it could be used to justify later atrocities that is not Gordon’s fault. If Joy’s canvas suggests not so much a martyrdom as a Passion, it was not alone. He who gave Stead his Imitation of Christ was seen as something very close to Christ by his contemporaries. The day of his death was commemorated annually with special sermons. In 1898, preaching in Sandringham parish church, the bishop of Ripon, William Boyd Carpenter, said of Gordon, ‘his name is a summons to all to live more courageously towards ill, more unselfishly towards men, and more simply towards God’.27 The previous year at Sandringham the bishop of Thetford had exclaimed, ‘Oh brethren, we have known others like him, with that beautiful combination of courage and tenderness, the reflection of Him who was and is the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Lamb of God.’28

  Warrior of God,

  Tennyson called him,

  man’s friend, not here below,

  But somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,

  Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know

  This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.29

  It was this quality which Stead noted during his pioneering ‘interview’ with Gordon. Gladstone completely failed to grasp the public mood, while all along Queen Victoria had understood it. ‘If not only for humanity’s sake, for the honour of the Government and the nation he must not be abandoned,’ she had instructed Gladstone when she urged him not to delay sending relief to Khartoum.30 When Gordon was killed, she wired Granville, Harrington and Gladstone in an uncoded telegram – so that all the Press knew her hectically expressed indignation – ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.’

  There is no doubt that Gladstone’s perceived callousness to Gordon, and his inability to see why the death in Khartoum caught the imagination of so many people, was a symptom of his having lost political grip. Five days after the news of Gordon’s death reached London, Gladstone went to the theatre, a gesture of indifference which caused public fury. ‘No single event in Gladstone’s career made him more unpopular.’31 Quite apart from anything happening in Ireland, it was the beginning of his coming adrift and a major cause of his electoral failure in 1885. Of course, within six months of Gordon’s death, the Pall Mall Gazette had forgotten the hero of Khartoum and moved on to something even more exciting.

  There can be no doubt that in the eyes of Stead himself, his greatest journalistic coup was his exposé of child prostitution, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’.

  Josephine Butler, the wife of a Cheltenham schoolmaster, George Butler, had been stung into public good works by bereavement, her agony following the death of her little daughter Eva in 1864. (She fell downstairs.) Mrs Butler never recovered her own health fully, but decided to reach out of her own suffering to help others. (‘I had no clear idea beyond that, no plan for helping others; my sole wish was to plunge into the heart of some human misery, and to say to afflicted people, “I understand. I too, have suffered.”’)

  She began by visiting the workhouse in Liverpool. (To escape the associations of their home in Cheltenham the Butlers had moved to Liverpool, where George had become principal of Liverpool College.) Sitting among the women of the workhouse, and picking oakum with them, Josephine Butler began to understand the conditions of working-class women – and above all to feel anger at the Contagious Diseases Acts. The Report of the Royal Commission of 1870 to inquire into the workings of the Acts (of 1864, 1868 and 1869) saw the behaviour of those who visited prostitutes as ‘the irregular indulgence of a natural impulse’. The law institutionalized the notion that to use a prostitute’s services was ‘natural’ even though the woman who provided the service was wicked. In order for this institutionalized rationale of prostitution to be effective, it required, in the Contagious Diseases Acts, giving to the law the right to apprehend, and to examine, women at will.

  Men have, from time to time, attempted to deal with this disorder and disease by regulation or suppression. Both methods have been aimed solely at the women who were alleged to be prostitutes, and no attempt was made to deal with the vastly greater body of men who consorted with them, and who were, if only by reason of their greater numbers, a far greater source of danger to the general community.32

  It is hard to overstate the courage of Josephine Butler in bringing this abuse to the attention of the public. Decent women did not talk about sex in public – still less about sexual diseases, or the double standards employed by men when legislating about them. At the Colchester by-election of 1870, when Mrs Butler spoke in support of the Abolitionist who challenged Sir Henry Storks, Tory, a keen supporter of the Acts, her hotel was mobbed and its windows smashed. But Storks lost by 500 votes – ‘bird shot dead’ as Josephine Butler was told by a telegram. A Royal Commission was set up to review the Contagious Diseases Acts, to which Mill gave vital evidence, emphasizing that this was a matter of basic civil liberty. After years of campaigning by Mrs Butler and friends, the Acts were eventually repealed in 1886.

  Fascinatingly, although Gladstone did preside over the ultimate repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, he was not much of an ally to Mrs Butler over the years. He used to regret her intensity. Before he died, he admitted in a pamphlet, ‘It has been my misfortune all my life, not to see a question of principle until it is at the door – and then sometimes it is too late!’33 In the case of the Contagious Diseases Acts, it was late, but not ‘too late’, after all. They were repealed, but it is odd that a man whose divine calling was to reclaim prostitutes should have been so blind as to the moral principles at stake in legislating for state-registered brothels. For this is what the Contagious Diseases Acts provided in garrison towns. In order to check the spread of disease, the state had brothels which were regularly checked by doctors. Any woman found in the street could be picked up by the police and forced to submit herself to intrusive medical inspection, whether a prostitute or not.

  In the course of her campaigns to repeal the Acts, Josephine Butler came across many abuses in England and abroad. In her investigations into the abuses of the French system, in 1874 she had confronted the notorious M. Lecours, Prefect of the Police des Moeurs, the vice squad, who attributed the huge increase in the numbers of Parisian prostitutes since state regulation was brought in to the influence of the Commune and to ‘female coquetry’.34 She went to Brussels, and exposed the kidnap of British children and young women for use in Belgian brothels. And what she found out so scandalized her that she decided to approach Stead and expose the fact that you could purchase a child on the streets of London for the purposes of sexual abuse. In Liège, she had been told, ‘waggon-loads of girls had been brought into Belgium’.35

  It was, from the point of view of those English puritans with a taste for such things, sublime ‘copy’. But in order, as they say in the trade, to make the story stand up, it was necessary for an actual man to purchase an actual child-prostitute and be prepared to admit that he had done so. Who better than our Northern crusader himself, W.T. Stead?

  Readers of the Pall Mall Gazette during the first week of July 1885 were warned not to buy the issue of 6 July, since it would contain matters to upset the squeamish. Even without these inducements, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ would have been a sell-out – a full account of the sale or violation of children, the procuration of virgins, the international trade in little girls and the unnatural vices to which they were subjected. Headlines such as ‘THE FORCING OF UNWILLING MAIDS’ and ‘DELIVERED FOR SEDUCTION’ had all the hallmarks which this type of journalism has had ever since. That is, while professing to deplore what it describes, it offers the readers the pornographic thrill of reading all about it. Stead described a clergyman calling regularly at a brothel to distribute Christian literature, but with equal regularity succumbing to the erotic allure of the little girls. Whether or not this reverend gentleman existed in f
act, he was an emblem of Stead and his readership, hovering self-righteously about unsavoury places to which they were irresistibly drawn.36

  On Derby Day, 1885, Stead claimed he had witnessed a girl being purchased from her mother for £5. In fact, this sale was a masquerade. The girl was called Eliza Armstrong. She was taken to a brothel in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, and rested on the four-poster bed while Rebecca Jarrett, a retired prostitute now under the protection of the Salvation Army, administered chloroform. Around the curtains of the bed there now appeared our puritanical editor, Stead, holding a glass of champagne and a cigar as tokens of his status as a roué. He paid his money, and Liza was bundled off to a Salvation Army hostel in Paris, then on to Drôme in the South of France, before being returned to Stead’s house in Wimbledon. But Stead in his zeal had overstepped the law, and Liza’s father, who did not have a part in the proceedings, brought a prosecution for abduction. During the trial it emerged that Rebecca Jarrett worked as a housemaid for Josephine Butler and that the whole story was a fabrication. George Bernard Shaw wrote of Stead:

  I was a contributor to the Pall Mall under his editorship; but as my department was literature and art, and he was an utter Philistine, no contacts between us were possible. Outside political journalism such as can be picked up in a newspaper office he was a complete ignoramus. I wrote him a few letters about politics which he acknowledged very sensibly as ‘intended for his instruction’, but he was unteachable except by himself.

  We backed him over the Maiden Tribute only to discover that the Eliza Armstrong case was a put-up job of his. After that, it was clear that he was a man who would not work with anybody; and nobody would work with him.37

  Rebecca Jarrett was sent to prison, the others involved in the fraud being let off – except Stead, who went to jail for three months. For every year afterwards he wore his prison clothes on the anniversary of his imprisonment, attracting some notice as he paced over Waterloo Bridge to his office in a jacket and trousers covered with arrows, and a badge with his number. The gesture, like the offence for which he was originally sentenced, was an expedition in the cause of some higher truth into the realms of fantasy. Although Stead had worn prison uniform on his first day in prison, as a ‘first class misdemeanant’ he was in fact allowed to wear his own clothes for the remainder of his sentence.38

  The childhood custom of regarding novels as the Devil’s Bible had probably resulted in the habit of mind, very common among newspaper editors, where the distinction between truth and falsehood had grown so blurred as to become indiscernible. Other things remained from the chapel – the glow of righteous indignation, and the essential vindictiveness of the elect when contemplating the more enviable sins of their fellow-mortals. Stead became obsessed, for example, by Sir Charles Dilke’s supposed adulteries, and even gave Mrs Crawford a job on the Pall Mall, presumably hoping that some salacious confession would fall from her lips as she sat at her desk: but she saved that for Cardinal Manning.

  Stead was not a bad man. He was that much more dangerous thing, a morally stupid man doing bad things which he believed to be brave because they made a stir. He and his like predetermined the essentially unserious nature of modern journalism: determined, that is to say, that particular kind of moral silliness whose unseriousness is disguised from the practitioners themselves. Spreading misery and embarrassment, mostly they leave actual abuses unaltered. The repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886 really owed far more to James Stansfeld than to Stead. Stansfeld, who had been a Cabinet minister in Gladstone’s first government, gave it all up to become a ‘one-issue’ campaigner from the back benches, he was so impressed by Mrs Butler. She – and he – had far more influence on the raising of the age of consent than did Stead.

  As Shaw implied, after Stead’s fraud over Eliza Armstrong was exposed, he was not so highly regarded, and took to editing something called the Review of Reviews. There were a few attempts to revive the old sensationalist magic, some of which sold very well – especially If Christ Came to Chicago of 1892, in which Stead ‘named and shamed’ the brothel-owners. In latter years he became more and more obsessed by spiritualism and – as befitted a man with an eye for the headline – he did not die in his bed at home: he went down with the Titanic in 1912. He was last seen helping women and children on to the lifeboats.

  Yet, having said that one must add that like so many sentences about Stead, it is not completely true. It remains to be tested when he will be last seen. After his body sank with the transatlantic liner in the icy waters of the Atlantic, Stead made a number of manifestations of himself to those with faith enough to see him. Speaking through the medium of Mrs Coates of Rothesay, he announced on 3 May 1912 that he was glad to have given help to so many on board the Titanic and to pray with them. He was, he promised, surrounded by friends in Spirit-land.39 In London, he was actually seen by Mrs Harper and Mr Robert King. He dictated messages via automatic writing, suggesting that since he passed over he had not lost that journalistic fizz which made Maiden Tribute and If Christ Came to Chicago into bestsellers. ‘Thank you for understanding – the human Marconigram – strange, strange, strange.’40 Not limiting his manifestations to Blighty, Stead appeared in Melbourne and Toledo.41 Most remarkable of all, perhaps, are Mr William Walker’s Spirit Photographs of Stead, when he manifested himself in Kingston-upon-Thames about a year after he was drowned.42 Another, even more striking manifestation shows Stead peering over the shoulder of one Archdeacon Colley. The archdeacon, in an academic square cap or mortar-board, stares firmly at the camera, apparently unaware of Stead hovering in the background. Stead’s earnest expression is a moving testimony to the essential irrepressibility of the Fourth Estate.

  fn1 The man who actually killed Gordon did not so much as know who he was. The Mahdi had decreed that he wanted Gordon taken alive. This did not stop the death of Gordon achieving instantaneous iconic status at home.24

  32

  Politics of the Late 1880s

  THE DENSELY KNOTTED drama of British political life from June 1885 to August 1886 will perhaps interest only the addict of the parliamentary roulette wheel. The general effect of what emerged from those crisis-ridden months, however, reverberates through British political life until the Second World War – arguably beyond it.

  In outline what happened was this. Gladstone’s second administration, which had been dogged by so many problems from the start – the Bradlaugh affair taking hours of parliamentary time, the unignorable Irish crisis, the problems of Egypt and the Sudan, the question of extending the franchise at home – ran into terminal trouble in the summer of 1885. The Cabinet was split over Ireland. But the ostensible reason for the collapse of the government was the budget which proposed a tax on beer and liquor. Behind the shield of this comparatively minor issue the shattered Liberal Party tried to disguise from itself the irreconcilable nature of its differences over the larger matter of Ireland. When Sir Michael Hicks Beach – what we would call the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer – moved an amendment on the budget, 76 Liberals abstained. The Irish members voted with Gladstone, giving him the tiny majority of 264 to 252 in the Commons. But the warnings were clear and Gladstone – who, remember, had not yet had his conversion to Home Rule and was still trying to hold the party together – resigned.

  He went to Osborne to do so, and the Queen did not even offer him luncheon. Still less, during what both must have assumed to be his last audience in fifty-five years of political life, did she express one word of regret at his departure. On his way home across the Solent by the early-evening ferry, Gladstone was too absorbed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, just published, to feel much grievance.1

  The Conservatives formed a minority government on 24 June 1885, but they knew that it could not last long. Parliament had voted the previous year to increase the franchise by 2 million individuals, and this could not fail to favour the Liberals. The procedures – establishing the names and addresses of the new voters, and the boundaries of the
new constituencies – would take until November. In December 1885 the election led to a Liberal victory, as anyone could have predicted. A deep paradox was now going to unfold. Chamberlain, leader of the Liberal Radical wing, could boast that ‘government of the people by the people … has at last been effectively secured’.2 He could believe that a great programme of democratic reform would unfold – including abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy. But as the election came to its slow conclusion, his leader, Gladstone, flew the Hawarden Kite and announced his conversion to Home Rule – anathema to Chamberlain, and to a significant proportion of Liberals, both old Whig and new Radical. When the results were counted in December 1885, the Liberals had 334 members, the Conservatives 250 and the Irish 86. It was clear that with the profound fissure in Liberal ranks caused by the Irish issue, Gladstone was never going to collect enough votes to secure Home Rule in the session of 1886. His Home Rule Bill came before the Cabinet in March 1886 – Chamberlain and Trevelyan resigned. In the Commons the Home Rule Bill was defeated by 30 votes – 341 noes against 311 ayes. Chamberlain had voted against his chief and changed sides – with extraordinary results both in his own career and in the history of politics. The short-lived third Gladstone government resigned, and Salisbury took office as prime minister in August 1886, and would serve a full term until the summer of 1892.