After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  They are the godparents of the Labour party – and yet Beatrice had signed Mrs Humphry Ward’s petition. Her comments about it in her autobiography, My Apprenticeships are almost more baffling than the signature itself:

  In the spring of 1889, I took what afterwards seemed to me a false step in joining with others in signing the then notorious manifesto, drafted by Mrs Humphry Ward and some other distinguished ladies, against the political enfranchisement of women, thereby arousing the hostility of ardent women brain-workers, and, in the eyes of the general public, undermining my reputation as an impartial investigator of women’s questions.

  There are many very strange things about this sentence. First, she does not tell us why she signed the petition in the first place. Then, there is the curious use of the word ‘brain-workers’: as the woman who drafted the constitution of the Labour party, she made the notorious distinction, displeasing to later socialists, between those who worked with their hands and those who did so with their brains, implying – what she no doubt believed – that such a distinction existed, and that whatever passed through the ‘brains’ of the toilers need not be considered too carefully by the intellectuals of the party. Then again, there is the curious egotism of the idea of herself, in 1889 aged thirty and almost unknown, having a public reputation which either could or could not be damaged. She goes on in My Apprenticeship to say that Millicent Fawcett protested against Mrs Ward’s anti-suffragist manifesto, and that the magazine editors then asked her, Beatrice, to pen the riposte to Mrs Fawcett. It was then ‘I realised my mistake. Though I delayed my public recantation for nearly twenty years, I immediately and resolutely withdrew from that particular controversy.’20

  Odder and odder. No explanation is given for her silence, until the period of the struggles, both of Fawcett-inspired moderates and Pankhurstian railing-chainers, for women’s votes shamed her into writing a formal recantation of her previous position. (‘I shall be thought, by some, to be a pompous prig,’ she told her diary.) Perhaps she feared that the very unpopularity of feminism would put off likely male converts to ‘municipal socialism’? The early Chartists had wanted the vote for women but had been dissuaded in the 1840s from making it part of their public platform for similar reasons. Perhaps it happened to be low down on Beatrice Webb’s political agenda, though if so, this is strange. The painstaking cataloguing work she did for Charles Booth – the number of rooms occupied in tenement buildings, the number of persons per room, the sanitary arrangements of over a million dwellings, the working hours of women (and children) – all suggested a world where not merely the poor but the females especially of the species were downtrodden in part because they were not considered, by the system, to exist on the same level as the male. Yet, she was right to see it as a peripheral issue. Unless or until the egalitarian party she was helping to create had actual political power – and in spite of two Labour governments in 1924 and 1929, that would not happen until 1945 – it did not much matter who was elected to the House of Commons.

  Behind Beatrice Webb’s signature, though, there surely also lurked that attitude so commonly displayed by power-obsessed females, a dislike of her own sex. Witness the exclusion of women from positions of power by Golda Meir, or Margaret Thatcher.

  When H. G. Wells (1866–1946) felt drawn towards the Fabians, Mrs Webb felt some misgivings. This was partly because she disapproved of his sexual morals, but chiefly because she feared he might have ideas of his own which did not conform to the carefully formulated diktats of the two-person Webb Politburo. ‘It is more for “copy” than for reform that he has stepped out of his study,’ she remarked sniffily of the popular novelist. ‘When he has got his “copy” he will step back again.’21 She found his Cockney accent and his general commonness hard to cope with, noting: ‘It is a case of “Kipps” in matters more important than table manners.’22 (Kipps was one of Wells’s many autobiographical novels about a perky, intellectually curious, emotionally chaotic young man.)

  In July 1906 Mrs Webb was especially disconcerted by Wells’s fondness for the United States. ‘Two months rushing about from New York to Washington, Philadelphia to Chicago, has convinced him that America is much nearer the promised land of economic equality than we in England are: that ideas are understood by a great number of people and that all else is unimportant.’23 She seems, however, more concerned that Wells, by his conversion to American democracy, will try to foist these ideas on the Fabian Society. ‘He seems confident that Sidney [Webb] and GBS will also have to retire if they do not fall in with his schemes,’ she writes with the irony of one confident of her unshakeable position, ‘and is constantly apologizing to us in advance for this sad necessity.’24 After one of their quarrels with him Beatrice told her diary: ‘Sidney had long had a settled aversion to H. G. Wells.’25 They object to his being ‘a sensualist’, ‘blown out with self-conceit’. ‘He began to look on Webb and Shaw as back numbers.’ This was bad enough, but one suspects that one of the things about Wells which the Webbs found hardest to stomach was his expressed belief in ‘votes, votes, votes’.

  ‘The Webbs were elitists,’ the editors of her diaries write, ‘with a conventional belief in the superiority of the civilized races and especially the educated classes which emerges in many thoughtless asides.’26 The charge that the Webb scheme for reform of the Poor Law was ‘undemocratic as well as bureaucratically complex and expensive was to be made repeatedly’.27

  Novelists or poets, particularly of a leftist disposition, who fancy themselves as political pundits are so thick on the ground in the history of the twentieth century that the reader may wonder why we pause to consider Wells. It is because, although very little he wrote after the age of forty is worth reading (and he lived to be eighty), he was a genuine artist, and his response to his times is often memorable, instructive, reflective of something bigger than Wells and his own life, even when he is not on top form. It is a mistake to think that artists respond to the world intuitively, in contrast to scientists, economists, political theorists or statisticians who somehow ‘gradgrind’ into existence a more accurate world of ‘fact’. On the contrary, all human impressions of a general character are intuitions, programmed by the character and circumstances of that very imperfect instrument the human consciousness. One reviewer of my book The Victorians complained that it was too ‘literary’, implying that a vision of the world compiled from Hansard or Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable or Smiley’s Lives of the Engineers might have given a truer impression of what was happening in Britain than the poetry of Tennyson, the novels of Dickens, the reflections of Carlyle and Ruskin.

  H. G. Wells had the humiliating kind of early life that Dickens might have written about. His hopeless father, an unsuccessful shopkeeper in Bromley, Kent, specializing in cricket goods – bats, balls, pads, etc. – was no role model. At the earliest juncture, the mother returned to her favoured avocation, that of a housekeeper at Uppark, the Fetherstonhaugh seat where in her girlhood 120 years earlier Emma Hart – one day to be Nelson’s mistress – had danced on the table. Bertie – H.G. – was sent to be a draper’s assistant, but escaped through cleverness, and studied science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s representative on Earth, at the Normal School. ‘I had come,’ he wrote later, ‘from beginnings of an elementary sort to the fountainhead of knowledge.’

  Wells shared most of the late Victorian illusions about science – believing that it had disproved religion, and so forth – but his intuitive response was much more double-edged than that of some Victorian apologist like Huxley. In his scientific fantasies and romances – the first, and the best, things he published – Wells could see not only that science was the religion of his own, and the coming, age, but that it was a greedy Moloch of a god which would need to be fed children to remain satisfied. It is hard, reading The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), to realize it was written years before Nazi doctors experimented with just such cross-species unions between human and bestial.

  In his scientific fab
les, Wells was able to see that the optimism of Victorian progressives was thoroughly misplaced. The Time Machine, in the story of the title, takes the traveller so far into the future that he has left the comforts of a cosy Victorian dinner party in Richmond and ended in an impersonal Darwinian horror. The Eloi are not, as the traveller at first supposes, cultivated persons like ourselves. They are being farmed as cattle to feed the machine-minders, the Morlocks, children of darkness and earth who live underground, only emerging to feed on human flesh. The cannibalistic theme is repeated in The War of the Worlds, in which the Martians invade and ‘all those damned little clerks … The bar-loafers and mashers and singers’ are to be turned into food for the voracious Martians, barbecued by heat-rays. In The First Men in the Moon the human race has in effect come to an end, since those who survive are the Selenites, a little like the Morlocks, subterranean and completely amoral. Wells’s stories, dashed off at tremendous speed when he was a young man, place into grisly perspective his worthier, more optimistic political and historical writings. They are in the best sense catastrophic. He could feel, know almost, the destructive effects which science was going to have in the new century.

  In a book which already enjoys something of classic status, The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford notes with some horror the response by those he terms ‘intellectuals’ to the population explosion at the close of the Edwardian period. He quotes, and evidently enjoys quoting, a letter written by D. H. Lawrence from Croydon in 1908 after a woman, Daisy Lord, had been sentenced to death for the murder of her illegitimate child, a sentence which was later commuted to life imprisonment. (Women’s suffragists campaigned unsuccessfully for her complete release.)

  ‘Concerning Daisy Lord, I am entirely in accord with you’, he wrote to Blanche Jennings, one of those young women with whom he enjoyed platonic and intense conversations. ‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus”!’28

  ‘What else would softly bubble out in order to make the lethal chamber lethal, Lawrence even here does not specify, but maybe his later interest in poison gas gives a clue to the direction of his imaginings,’ writes Professor Carey. He finds many comparable sentiments in the works of H. G. Wells, concentrating especially upon Wells’s notorious Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, which was published in 1901. In that chilling book, Wells had prophesied: ‘for a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence’. Carey goes on to say that for Wells, genocide is the only answer to the problems of world overpopulation, especially in Africa and Asia, where the ‘swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people’ will ‘have to go’.29

  You can’t fail to be shocked by these passages, but there are two shocking things about them. The first, naturally, is that those who were intelligent enough to write books which we have all admired and enjoyed should have such very ‘unenlightened’ views. This, one suspects, is Professor Carey’s chief area of concern in his hilarious book. Had Wells and D. H. Lawrence and the other writers excoriated by Professor Carey lived in Dean Swift’s time, we should merely be able to enjoy the luxury of condemning their poor taste. The doubly shocking thing about such ideas is that we know that within a few short decades of these science-fiction fantasies being expounded the human race was actually to encounter real Dr Moreaus, real genocidal tyrants. One of the scientists who worked on the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Leo Szilard, said that the idea of nuclear chain reaction first came to him when reading Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), in which atom bombs falling on world cities during the 1950s kill millions of people. These things were not possible when Wells wrote about them. We know that the twentieth century would see them happen. And the horrors were so often perpetrated by just such small-town suburban types, nonentities, as H. G. Wells made the subject of his comedies such as Kipps and Mr Britling Sees It Through. It was not some Napoleonic tyrant who authorized the bombing of Hiroshima but a small-town lawyer, President Harry S. Truman, whose face could easily have been used to adorn the jacket of an H. G. Wells suburban comedy.

  5

  Love in the Suburbs

  The spread of suburbs brought perhaps unforeseen emotional restrictions. Human beings have, historically, devised strict rules for sexual conduct. Whether these rules derive from the utilitarian requirements of protecting children, and women of child-bearing age, from neglect; or whether they have some more spiritual origin, is not to the purpose here. The fact remains that the existence in all societies of variations on these rules – a suspicion of sexual deviancy, a condemnation of same-sex relationships, the moral (or even actual) outlawing of adultery – points to a near-universal moral chaos, which human beings, as individuals and as societies, have felt the need to correct. It is because the sexual impulse is so strong that the rules, whether of churches, mosques, senates or parliaments, have been so fierce.

  Sociological research would suggest that where the possibility exists of sexual errancy, it will be vigorously pursued. The sexual licence of the coal miners in Zola’s Germinal would seem to have been widespread among the European proletariat, with men and women seizing gratification in the unlikeliest settings, as opportunity arose. Only a proportion of the English working class married during the Victorian and early twentieth-century periods. Many cohabited, and changes of partnership were commonplace. Likewise the upper classes, with large houses and boundless leisure time, hardly knew habits of restraint, as Henry James’s shocked novels subsequent on the Dilke scandal – What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age – suggest. Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie was twenty when he was born. The daughter of a New York financier called Leonard Jerome, she brought £50,000 as a marriage dowry to the impoverished family of the Duke of Marlborough. (Winston’s father, the Tory politician Lord Randolph Churchill, was the Duke’s second son.) This produced £2,000 per annum. It was perhaps, even by the standards of the time, an extreme case, their marriage. The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore guessed that Jennie had over 200 lovers, including, it was thought, King Milan of Serbia and the French novelist Paul Bourget.1 When Lord Randolph died in 1895 aged forty-six, Jennie Churchill married a Scots Guard subaltern twenty years her junior, George Cornwallis West. After fourteen years, the marriage ended in divorce and he married Mrs Patrick Campbell. Churchill’s mother married a West Country gentleman named Montague Porch who lived until 1964.

  It might have been very unlike the home life of Queen Victoria, but adultery was regarded as the norm by Bertie as Prince of Wales, and continued being so after he had become head of the Church of England in 1901. His favourite mistresses as a young married man had been Lillie Langtry, the actress, and Daisy, Countess of Warwick. But in 1898, when he was fifty-six, Bertie met the enchanting 29-year-old Mrs George Keppel, the ‘delectable Alice’. She was stylish and stunningly sexy. Petite, fleshy, when she lifted the veil on one of her ostrich-feathered hats, men gasped. Like her great-granddaughter Camilla Parker-Bowles, she smoked, and had a husky voice. Her lustrous chestnut hair was piled on her head. There was something almost Mediterranean about her appearance (she had a Greek grandmother) and she had a vivacious and delightful manner.

  Her husband was the handsome son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. His hopelessness with money was one of the factors which probably led to his acquiescence, quite early in their marriage, in her adulteries with very rich men who pa
id the bills. One of these, the future Lord Grimthorpe, Ernest William Beckett, almost certainly fathered her daughter Violet. As Mrs Trefusis, Violet was destined herself to have a celebrated love affair with Vita Sackville-West; before that, the two had been childhood friends. Vita would recollect returning to the Keppel house in Portman Square after an afternoon’s walk. Papa – the Hon. George – would discreetly have retreated to his club. A little one-horse brougham would be waiting by the kerbstone. When the little Vita walked into the hall, she was hustled by the butler, Mr Rolfe, into a darkened corner of the hall. ‘One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs.’ Trailing a whiff of unguents and cigars the gentleman would come downstairs, collect his hat, gloves and cane from the butler and be shown to the waiting brougham.

  To Violet and Sonia Keppel, their mother’s lover was known as ‘Kingy’. Violet remembered that he was ‘very kind to us children. He had a rich German accent and smelt deliciously of cigars and eau de Portugal. He wore several rings set with small cabochon rubies and a cigarette case made of ribbed gold, no doubt by Fabergé.’ Sonia, the younger sister, liked to play a game with ‘Kingy’. Two pieces of bread and butter, buttered side down, would be placed on his check trouser legs, and bets would then be placed to see which piece slithered down fastest.2