The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Critics divide over this story. For Edmund Wilson, for example, the story is ‘about’ the governess’s own sexual repression: the ghosts are mere hallucinations, the products of neurosis. One can be fairly certain that Henry James himself wanted to make his readers shiver with the sense that these apparitions were real: ‘Only make the reader’s general vision intense, I said to myself … and his own experience, his own imagination … will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself …’46

  *

  One could put this another way.

  My way of contact with Reality is through a limited aperture. For I cannot get at it directly except through the felt ‘this’, and our immediate interchange and transfluence takes place through one small opening. Everything beyond, though not less real, is an expansion of the common essence-which we feel burningly in this one focus. And so, in the end, to know the Universe, we must fall back upon our personal experience and sensation.47

  The words are those of F.H. Bradley (1846–1924), the weightiest and most influential of British philosophers of the period, who was in correspondence and dialogue with Henry James’s philosopher-brother William, whose ‘pragmatism’ stood at variance with the ‘idealism’ of the British school. It is tempting to see The Turn of the Screw as a contribution to this discussion, since, fairly obviously, to equate the imagination of the governess with delusion, as Edmund Wilson does, is to lose not just the terror, but the very kernel of the story. Idealists did not deny the outward reality of things. They were setting out to demonstrate that, pace Locke, the human mind is not a blank on to which sensations are projected as magic lantern slides might be shown on a screen. Rather, the human mind – and more, our capacity to perceive – edits and to some degree creates what we see. The sense in which any statement or proposition can be wholly true; the degree to which any human mind can escape the subjective – these are the matters with which Idealism was engaged. The very basic question – is there any reliable criterion by which we may distinguish between the truth and falsehood of propositions? – must be primary. If no such criterion exists, then we might as well not open any book of mathematics, science or history. Most of us, even if philosophers, recognize that we can distinguish between statements we call true and statements we call false, but our metaphysical justification for doing so is more complex than might appear to the common-sense layman.

  It would be quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into, still less to pronounce on, such high themes. But it will be obvious that they are of more than passing importance to non-philosophers. From a narrative point of view, the big story in the philosophical history of the 1890s is how G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell broke with the Idealists and adopted the philosophy of ‘realism’: how they escaped what they termed a ‘hot-house’ and laid the foundations for the analytical school of philosophy.

  When he was an undergraduate, Russell was told by his tutor, J.M.E. McTaggart, that Bradley’s Appearance and Reality ‘says everything that can be said on the subject of metaphysics’. By 1900, Russell had completely thrown off his belief in Idealism, and in The Principles of Mathematics he adopted what amounts to a Platonic-mystical belief in the reality or truth of mathematics independent, it would almost appear, from human minds.48 Moore’s influential and confidently titled article, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, published in 1903, is ‘widely believed to have given the coup de grâce to idealism’.49

  In so far as Moore was the godfather, or rather non-God-father, to the Bloomsbury set, and Russell was an influential academic philosopher and a popular opinion-former and journalist for the second half of his long life, we can see that the abandonment by these two of the principles of the English Hegelians is of more than academic concern.

  The Hegelians based their metaphysics on a conviction that Truth was a unity. They were, on the whole, non-theists but their lucubrations possessed a quasi-religious flavour, especially if you accept McTaggart’s definition of religion as ‘an emotion resting on a conviction of a harmony between ourselves and the universe at large’. It is easy to see from his many autobiographical writings that Russell found the notion of such a harmony comforting, but felt forced to reject it on intellectual grounds. There is therefore in his career a violent disjunction between the belief in vast impersonal realities – logical or mathematical truth – and the vacillations of his wholly irrational, often self-contradictory views on free love, the education of children, or war and peace. In 1897 he was candid enough to admit:

  I am quite indifferent to the mass of human creatures; though I wish, as a purely intellectual problem, to discover some way in which they might all be happy. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself to them, though their unhappiness, at moments, about once in three months, gives me a feeling of discomfort, and an intellectual desire to find a way out. I believe emotionally in Democracy, though I see no reason to do so.50

  We have travelled as far as possible here from the socially engaged philosophy of T.H. Green, which in the twentieth century would have its followers in such influential figures as Collingwood.51 By then, Wittgenstein really had refuted Russell’s ideas about the foundations of mathematics, and the analytical school with which Russell is sometimes associated was very much detached from him.

  Russell was in every sense a Victorian. He was brought up by his grandparents, Lord and Lady John Russell. The Cabinet made the decision to invade the Crimea in Pembroke Lodge, the house where his grandparents were still living when Russell went to live there. This aristocratic child whose godfather was John Stuart Mill and who had dinner with Gladstone (one of the funniest episodes in his childhood) lived deep into the twentieth century as a controversialist, anti-war demonstrator and television pundit. ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,’ he claimed at the beginning of his autobiography: ‘the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’52 By his own admission the pity was actually sporadic. His philosophical journey by the end of the 1890s made it seem pointless, even illogical. This detachment in Russell, so influential to the whole of the later generation, between the demands of the ethical, and of logical truth, is the true Decadence of the 1890s.

  41

  Utopia: The Decline of the Aristocracy

  UTOPIA LIMITED OPENED at the Savoy Theatre on 7 October 1893 and ran for 245 performances. It marked the reconciliation of Gilbert and Sullivan after one of their celebrated tiffs. Perhaps the reason that it is not performed as often as some of their other operas is that Sullivan was not really on form: the music does not match the amusing plot, in which a South Sea island – Utopia – decides to improve itself by modelling its constitutional and political arrangements on ‘a little group of isles beyond the wave’.

  O may we copy all her maxims wise,

  And imitate her virtues and her charities;

  And may we, by degrees, acclimatize

  Her Parliamentary peculiarities!

  By doing so, we shall, in course of time,

  Regenerate completely our entire land –

  Great Britain is that monarchy sublime,

  To which some add (but others do not) Ireland.1

  The Utopians make themselves into a Limited Company, convinced by this commercial expedient that they will turn into a democracy. Merely by passing laws intended to make things happen, they believe that improvement is round the corner. They are a ‘Despotism tempered by Dynamite’ – on the first lapse by their ruler, he is denounced by two Wise Men and blown up by the Public Exploder. They do not realize that they have already achieved perfection, with no crime, no disease, and the jails let out ‘as model lodgings for the working-classes’: they are persuaded, as many another tried to persuade themself in 1893, that Britain’s in these areas is an example to follow.2

  The audiences of this satire would have returned to their suburban homes reminded that the late Victorian political scene was an extra
ordinary phenomenon. If Professor Bradley had been looking about for an example of the ambiguous relationship between Appearance and Reality, he might well have been satisfied by attending election meetings in the constituencies newly formed in 1884, or by going to the Houses of Parliament and asking whether the Honourable Members there – all men (as were the electorate) – offered a fair or realistic representation of the 38 million or so people in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.

  The 1884 Reform Act had extended the possibilities of parliamentary democracy. The electorate was now enlarged to 5 million (or thereabouts), and included agricultural labourers and the urban working classes. Such was the cleverness with which Lord Salisbury had negotiated the borders of constituencies with the Liberals that this did not materially threaten his party’s dominion over Parliament, nor his class’s dominion over his party. The radicals and socialists made a little headway in the late Eighties, but the suburbs had been conquered by the Conservative Party. The split in the Liberal Party over Home Rule went very much in favour of the Unionists – as witnessed by the fact that when Gladstone resigned as prime minister in 1894 he was replaced by a Liberal Unionist, Lord Rosebery. Lord Salisbury formed a government in June the following year and the Conservatives remained in office for the next ten years.

  While the Independent Labour Party, formed in 1893, raised many hopes, it did not do very well electorally. One of its founding fathers, Philip Snowden, believed that its formation was ‘the most important political event of the nineteenth century’.3 The three ILP candidates – John Burns, Keir Hardie and James Havelock Wilson – who won as independent socialists seats in the 1892 election lost them again as ILP candidates in 1895. That election saw Hardie himself, the leader of the ILP who had so movingly taken his seat in the Commons wearing his working clothes and his tweed cap and his boots, defeated by the Conservative at West Ham. The ILP fielded 28 candidates in that election, the Social Democratic Federation 4. They were all defeated.

  Now, of course, the Labour Party would one day – after the disintegration of the Liberals during and after the First World War – become the equivalent party of the Left in British politics. Old ILP men like Ramsay MacDonald and Snowden would find themselves forming a Labour government in 1924, though by then neither of them retained any of his socialist ideas and Snowden, as chancellor of the Exchequer, was a tax-cutting Free Trader who had more in common with Thatcherite Conservatives of later times than with the tweed-capped, home-knitted leftist ideologues of the 1890s. The years in which MacDonald was prime minister were ones of excessive economic crisis and hardship, but they ended in spectacular failure, with the former illegitimate farm-labourer from the north-east of Scotland cutting unemployment benefit and forming a National Government with the Tories. While the beginnings of the ILP were important, then, some might question whether it was ‘the most important political event’ of a century which contained three very major reforms of parliamentary franchise; three major (and innumerable minor) wars; the extension of the British Empire to a position of previously unimaginable extent, scope and strength; and the beginning of the parliamentary career of David Lloyd George.

  It was the failure of socialism to take hold in Britain which was really of significance. As for the strength of the aristocracy, or its apparent strength during the years of Lord Salisbury’s premiership – this too is not all that it seems. Any simplistic, or blanket, explanation for the political climate in the 1890s is going to distort reality. Had England ceased, since the passing of the 1884 Reform Act, to be a country governed by the aristocracy? Was it now a true democracy? Were the poor, the working class and the lower middle class represented by the political system? And what had happened to the Liberal Party since the split over Home Rule?

  Utopia, Limited or otherwise, Lord Salisbury’s Britain certainly wasn’t. Viewed in many lights it seems like a country in crisis: at the very least a deluge which that consummate Conservative was postponing until he had left the stage.

  In My Apprenticeship, published in 1926, Beatrice Webb drew on the diaries and punctilious records which she kept in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to explain the question ‘Why I became a Socialist’. Since, with her husband Sidney Webb, she was one of the greatest architects and prophets of the British Labour Movement, the question is broader than the merely personal. This was not just the question of how one clever, guilty rich young woman chose to become left-wing to appease feelings of awkwardness about her father’s wealth. It was the exposition, by a deeply informed political intelligence, of the nature of the nineteenth-century problem, and the most plausible solution – as she came to see it. It is all the more interesting because of her character – its innate conservatism, its essentially religious bent, and its intense seriousness. This was the woman who in her youth had enjoyed the friendship of old Herbert Spencer and painfully discarded Christian belief, while remaining ‘in search of a creed’; who had been painfully in love with Joseph Chamberlain; and who, by her first-hand investigation of the lives of the poor with Charles Booth, had made herself one of the best-informed social observers in Europe.

  Slowly, during the late 1880s, Beatrice (still Potter) had become involved with trade unions and with the Co-operative Movement (which had begun in 1844 in the small Lancashire town of Rochdale). The twenty-eight flannel weavers known as the Rochdale Pioneers pooled a proportion of their earnings to buy groceries at wholesale prices. The more people who joined the Co-operative the wider the range of goods offered and the lower the prices. This in turn developed into a nationwide English Co-operative Society, with department stores and simple banking arrangements for its members, and, since it was run on a non-profit-making basis, a dividend (or ‘Divvy’) handed back to members each year in proportion to their contribution.

  For Beatrice Potter, the Co-operative Movement was not merely an ideal blueprint for the way that a Socialist Society could work. It had actually, as a matter of practical and observable fact, demonstrated an economic truth about value which significantly modified the previous theories accepted by Ricardo, or Marx. Their doctrine had been that Labour is the Source of Value. Versions of the Socialist Dream in England had revolved around the ideas of Robert Owen, that workers might have a ‘self-governing workshop’ in which they undid the prime injustice and evil of the capitalists. The Industrial Revolution removed from fourth-fifths of the population the tools of their trade and the product itself. Power looms ruined the home weavers. The ‘self-governing workshop’ would hand the joint ownership of the machines and the workshop to the workers.

  As Beatrice Potter saw, however, there was a perversity about this, since it placed some mythic ‘value’ in the manufactured product itself rather than recognizing that things possess value only if people want them. What the Co-operative Movement had done was to treat all its members not as Nibelungs toiling to produce some supposed value, but as consumers. ‘To organize industry from the consumption end, and to place it, from the start, upon the basis of “production for use” instead of “production for profit”, under the control and direction not of the workers as producers, but of themselves as consumers, was the outstanding discovery and practical achievement of the Rochdale Pioneers.’4

  If it had been possible to construct society as a whole on the model of the Co-operatives, using compulsory tax rather than voluntary contributions of ‘Co-op’ members, then there might be the means to alleviate poverty, and to provide public services.

  ‘Man does not live by bread alone’; and without some ‘socialism’ – for instance, public education and public health, public parks and public provision for the aged and infirm, open to all and paid for out of rates and taxes, with the addition of some form of ‘work or maintenance’ for the involuntarily unemployed, even capitalist governments were reluctantly recognizing, though hardly fast enough to prevent race-deterioration, that the regime of private property could not withstand revolution.5

  This, then, was her blueprint; and when she h
ad abandoned her unfocused radicalism and joined herself quite definitely – and literally, by marriage – to Fabian socialism, she had not merely discovered her aim but agreed the best means of achieving it. By 1898 she and her husband had founded the London School of Economics as the seminary of the new creed. The New Statesman and Nation was its unfolding scripture, disseminated to 2,500 subscribers in the first issue, and soon to be much the most influential of all left-wing periodicals in the English language. Like the islanders in Utopia Limited, the Webbs were gradualists. They wished to substitute for the language, and tactics, of the wilder leftist revolutionaries a slow progress towards the Promised Land. But the end was the same – a capitalist jungle rescued from the cruel excesses of individualism by means of a slowly imposed collective medicine.

  The Labour Movement’s strength was not simply in its alliance between ‘workers’ and ‘intellectuals’. Such supposed friendships were the commonplace of all continental revolutionary or democratic movements. What solidified the Labour Alliance in Britain was the perception that the underlying idea, the Co-operative Movement, derived from the working classes themselves. In its own ‘personal myth’, therefore, the Labour Party could not have been more different from Marxism. The communist faithful absorbed their wisdom from the sacred texts written by Marx and expounded by Engels. In the Fabian socialist movement Mrs Webb attributed her conversion to socialism to the Rochdale pioneers (though she did so with backhanded condescension, believing they did not realize the economic or political implications of what they had demonstrated).

  It is not in a spirit of satire that one uses religious language to describe the early days of organized parliamentary socialism. The Independent Labour Party was founded in Bradford in 1893. Keir Hardie, who had won the parliamentary seat of West Ham, chaired the first conference and was elected its first leader. Shaw came up for the conference, to establish from the first the Fabians’ condescending desire to take the thing over, and Engels sent his glad greetings. But the atmosphere of the conference and of many Labour meetings in the 1890s was that of the Chapel.