by Simon Schama
Not everyone was persuaded, however, especially when it was revealed that half the proceeds from the ball were going to meet the expenses of the occasion. One newspaper printed lists of workers said to have starved to death in May 1842, and alongside it the expenses of the Plantagenet Ball. A minister preached a sermon warning that ‘when Charity took to dancing it ceased to be charity and became wanton’. And for the seer of Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock and Chelsea, Thomas Carlyle, it was a monstrous case of medieval dilettantism, all the more offensive because medievalism was not, in his view, something to be toyed with as a fashion. It was the ideology of resistance to the despotism of the machine age.
In Past and Present, written in 1843, a year after the Plantagenet Ball, Carlyle reiterated his argument that the sacred relics of medieval Christian England were not just material for dressing up and dancing, much less bucolic reveries of ‘Merrie England’. They were a reproach to the inhumane soullessness of an age in which everything was determined by material calculation; in which the engineers of felicity greased the cogs of power and profit, and people got trapped between the flywheels. Travelling through East Anglia (where the young Victoria too had made a tour, wrinkling her nose at the sub-human specimens she found amidst the turnips and the brussels sprouts) while beginning research on his hero Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle visited the ruins of the great Cistercian monastery at Bury St Edmunds. The overpowering sense of another world, removed from the present not just by the passage of centuries but by a universe of morality, was what drove him to write Past and Present; part tract, part historical novel, it evoked the actual chronicle of the monk Jocelin of Brakelond. On the same trip Carlyle had visited the poorhouse at St Ives and had waxed wrathful at the inhumanity of systems that kept men either idle or, under the New Poor Law, in places designed to be like prison.
So Carlyle had the Plantagenet Ball squarely in his sights when he wrote, feelingly, of old Bury that
these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and a dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling first saw the sun as walls long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven’s Watchtower of our Fathers …
Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates? Yes, – and that is but a small item of the matter. Does it never give thee pause, this other strange item of it, that men then had a soul – not by hearsay alone and as a figure of speech; but as a truth they practically knew and practically went upon! Verily it was another world then … Another world truly and this present poor distressed world might get some profit by looking wisely into it, instead of foolishly.
That world was dead and gone now, for sure. But Carlyle wanted to rescue its moral force, its lesson for the present, from the antiquarians and the fake medievalists; somehow to reinstate its spiritual power amidst a culture otherwise capitulated to godless machinery. He had grown up in southwest Scotland, one of the most intensely Calvinist corners of the country, listening to perfervid preachers call down the wrath of Providence on the vain and the profligate. To the summer thunder of their eloquence Carlyle had added German metaphysical philosophy, especially its musings on the historical Spirit of the Times, the Zeitgeist. Together they gave him his voice. And it was the voice of a modern Moses, exhorting the worshippers of the new Golden Calf to fall on their faces in front of the revealed light of truth before they were consumed in wicked self-destruction. In 1829, while still perching on his ‘Hawk’s Crag’ at Craigenputtock, Carlyle had burst on the polite rationalist pages of the Edinburgh Review with a tirade against the tyranny of the machine and its destruction of the work of the hand. It was, in effect, a counter-blast to the jubilant mechanical triumphalism of the Brunels, the Cubitts and the Stephensons; and to the ethos that would produce the Great Exhibition.
Nothing is now done directly or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness…. On every hand the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail and lays down his oar, and bids a strong unwearied servant, on vaporous wings [steamships] bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-King has visited the fabulous East.… There is no end to machinery.… We have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains and make seas our smooth highway. Nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature, and by our resistless engines, come off always victorious and loaded with spoils.
Machinery, for Carlyle and those increasing numbers who thought like him, was, moreover, not just moving metal parts. It was a state of mind: the utilitarian mentality that believed in a finely calibrated science of happiness. The scientists would detect a social or economic misfortune, an aberration from the mean of human felicity; then they would statistically measure its magnitude, devise the necessary correction, draft a report, lobby parliament to make it law and create the necessary administrative machinery (the word could not be avoided) to see it implemented and inspected for efficiency. ‘Has any man or society of men’, wrote Carlyle in Signs of the Times (1882) in a pitilessly exact anatomy of the procedures of modern social benevolence, ‘a truth to speak, but must first call a public meeting, appoint committees, issue prospectuses, eat a public dinner, in a word construct or borrow machinery, wherewith to speak it and to do it.’
It would be easy to write off Carlyle as a prophet crying in the wilderness, were it not for the fact that so much of his attack on materialism, on the government of the world through material satisfaction and the calculus of outward appearance, found an extraordinary response inside the Victorian world, ostensibly so frantic in the pursuit of speed, goods and power. To catalogue the very greatest, the most richly eloquent voices of the Victorian world – Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and, later, Matthew Arnold – is to enumerate the apostolic succession of Thomas Carlyle’s preaching. And it was a gospel – voiced against the degradation of the division of labour, the reduction of humans to automata; against the stultifying captivity of mindlessly repeated tasks, all so that some manufacturer could reduce unit costs – that endured. Perhaps not enough people read John Ruskin today. But no one reads Samuel Smiles’s runaway success, Self-Help (1859), and his paeans to the heroic age of the industrial engineers.
Whatever else might be said about the Victorians, it is impossible to accuse them (unlike later empires of material self-congratulation) of complacency. The more Carlyle berated them for preferring the physical over the spiritual, easy comfort over difficult beauty, social engineering over individual redemption, the practical over the profound, the more they lapped up the punishment and took it to heart. Whether they took the tongue-lashing in their stride, bowed their heads in a gesture of regret on Sundays and then got on with making more money is another matter. But at least their favoured architectural style – Gothic Revival – made a gesture towards this ‘lost’ world of medieval virtue, grace and hand-fashioned integrity that Carlyle and Ruskin lamented.
That the look of Victorian Britain went directly against the grain of its gung-ho lunge for profit was due to an extraordinary degree to the intense, proselytizing genius of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the greatest of all the Gothic Revivalists. The son of a French immigrant stage-set designer and part-time architect, Pugin was a prodigy who, at the age of 15, had been summoned by George IV to design furniture for his Gothic Revival apartments. He shared Ruskin’s rhetorical demand, voiced later, that when we look at a building and wish to judge its true value we should ask not how much or how little it cost to make or buy, but a quite different question: was the worker happy when he built it? Pugin devoutly believed that when the builders and craftsmen of the 14th c
entury – in his book the last great age of English architecture – created their churches and guild halls, flooded them with the colour of tapestries and stained glass, sent buttresses flying and spires soaring, there was an instinctive communion between maker and user, bonded by shared Christian purpose. Those buildings, even the few that survived, were statements of a coherent community, not the expression of fatuous social grandeur seen in an aristocratic country house or a plutocratic mansion.
Contrasts (1836), with its systematic line-up of invidious comparisons between then and now – the beauty and coherence of the medieval town at the flowering of English Perpendicular against the chaotic mess of bastard Greek, bastard Roman and even bastard Egyptian town halls, cemeteries, workhouses and prisons – was Pugin’s devastating visual correlate to Carlyle’s Past and Present. Unlike Carlyle, however, Pugin did not despair that the lost Christian age was irrecoverable. He believed that some of the spirit, at least, survived in Britain, waiting to be given a new lease of life against the dead hand of classicism – the gaunt child of soulless geometry. Providence might always supply an opportunity for the work of revival. Just such an occasion delivered itself in 1834 when parliament burned down and a debate ensued about whether it should be rebuilt in the Gothic or neo-classical styles. The winner of the competition, Sir Charles Barry, had made drawings that amounted to an almost fantastic vision of a Gothic medieval palace; not, in truth, a structure that owed its precedent to anything truly medieval, but a decorated ‘module’ of pointed Gothic, extended indefinitely along the Thames as far as money and the needs of government dictated. It was a far cry, in fact, from Pugin’s beautifully crafted fit between form and function.
But the arguments rehearsed to justify a Gothic Revival parliament must undoubtedly have appealed to the romantic historian in Pugin. For they were all about acknowledging that the distinctive characteristic of the ‘ancient’ British constitution – its liberty and the rule of common law – was a medieval inheritance. The pediments and columns, the dominant squatness of classicism, were thus made to seem, somehow, not only ‘foreign’ but also the expression of authority, in a way in which the pinnacles and pointed arches of Gothic building were not. Classicism was top down; Gothic was bottom up. Classical architecture was the visible declaration of hierarchy, built by slaves, in Ruskin’s view; Gothic was about the community of craft, designed by free men. Inside a classical legislature, rulers would lay down the law; inside a Gothic parliament, they would make it accountable to the people. Such a building would not only be a dignified convenience for the law-makers; it would, by connecting them intuitively, with the world that had produced Magna Carta, also ensure that they would legislate in a spirit of freedom, justice and virtue.
This was indeed a work in which Pugin could rejoice, should he ever get the chance to participate in it. In 1836, at the age of 24, the same year that he published Contrasts, he joined Barry in the crucial role of designing much of the interior of the House of Lords and a good deal of the fabric of Big Ben. Here, his spiritual intoxication with colour, with the happy richness of ornament, was allowed full expression in the encaustic tiles, wallpaper, hangings, woodwork and furniture he designed and whose creation he supervised. And, already alert to the dangers of pastiche, Pugin avoided merely replicating medieval design in the rendering of flowers, for example. Instead he aimed at stylized, flattened, brilliantly coloured forms that created almost mesmerizing patterns; a true evocation of the essence of what he thought was medieval decoration, rather than a dumbly literal repetition of it.
What Pugin wanted for secular building, he wanted even more urgently for Britain’s churches. In 1819 a commission, responding to the evangelical tenor of the times and a burgeoning urban population, had recognized the crying need for a systematic rebuilding programme after decades of stagnation. But Pugin and other Gothic Revivalists were determined that new churches were not going to be constructed in the relentless Palladian idiom that they believed had sucked the spirit out of the houses of God in a vain, essentially secular preoccupation with light and proportion. Pugin wanted to dim the lights, the better to flood churches with stained-glass illuminations in which the worshipper could again feel himself in proper communion with the Saviour, a quality lost since the Reformation. And that, of course, was precisely the problem. Pugin’s crusade to restore ornament was not theologically innocent. It was immediately and correctly seen as a campaign to drag Protestant faith, with its aversion to papist ‘baubles’, back to the idolatries it had left behind in the 16th century. And Pugin confirmed these suspicions when he himself converted to Catholicism in 1834.
The apostasy should have killed off his budding career. It certainly cramped it, but he was too obviously gifted to be left by the wayside. Brazening it out, Pugin went to live in Salisbury to be close as possible to the cathedral – glorified, of course, in the great, shimmering canvases of Constable – which more than any other embodied his vision of the pure and perfect Christian past. Later still he moved to Ramsgate, where Victoria had spent some of her childhood. Here he worked for high-minded, well-to-do Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic patrons, and continued to publish his manifestos against the debasement of contemporary taste. On the frontispiece of The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), Pugin himself appears in the guise of a late medieval Christian builder, surrounded by altarpieces, lecterns and finely wrought crucifixes, wielding that ancient instrument the compass to craft his design. His last hurrah, before dying at the brutally early age of 40, was the creation of the Medieval Court for the Great Exhibition; an ensemble of some of the most perfect work produced by his own shop and his favoured craftsmen, brought right within enemy-occupied territory. But all the newspaper reports make it clear that, while the Medieval Court was treated with reverence and respect, the crowds were distinctly thin compared to the throngs who hurried past to gawk at the locomotives and the steam hammers.
Pugin did not despair, however, of making some impression on industrial Britain. At Cheadle in Staffordshire, a community of miners and textile workers, he was commissioned by the Roman Catholic Earl of Shrewsbury to restore and redecorate the parish church of St Giles. The result was arguably his greatest masterpiece and the only building, he said, about which he had no regrets: a glowing vault of intense, radiant colour.
Yet not many miles away in Manchester, Pugin’s heaven-on-earth had been replaced, decisively, by what Sir Charles Napier described as ‘the entrance to hell realised!’ Napier was more used to fighting on the northwest frontier of India than on the northwest frontier of England, but had been commissioned in 1839 to keep order in what had come to be seen as an endemically violent and criminal city. Here, instead of heaven-reaching spires there was a mass of chimneys. Together they made the entire city one vast ‘chimney of the world, rich rascals, poor rogues, drunken ragamuffins and prostitutes form the moral soot made into paste by rain … and the only view is a long chimney: what a place!’ A succession of reports (beginning with Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth’s The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), had exhaustively documented Manchester’s reputation as the ‘shock city’ of the industrial century, the very worst and the very best crammed into the ‘Cottonopolis’ of 150,000 souls. If the population of Britain had been multiplying at its fastest rate ever in the first decades of the 19th century, nowhere had this expansion been more spectacular (or terrifying) than in Manchester, where its numbers grew 600 per cent in less than 60 years, the vast majority by immigration from the countryside.
Not surprisingly, dwelling conditions were horrific. A government Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain published in the year of the costume ball, 1842, when between a quarter and a third of Manchester’s male population was unemployed and when, according to a Salford newspaper, ‘haggard and half-clothed men and women are stalking through the streets, begging for bread’, described a
typical lodging house in the city:
Six or eight beds … contained in a single room … it seems to be the invariable practice to cram as many beds into each room as it can possibly be made to hold … the scene which these places present at night is one of the most lamentable description; the crowded state of the beds filled promiscuously with men, women and children, the floor covered over with the filthy and ragged clothes they have just put off and with their various bundles and packages containing all the property they possess, mark the depraved and blunted state of their feelings … the suffocating stench and heat of the atmosphere are almost intolerable.
One result of this overcrowding and primitive sanitation was the lightning spread of infectious diseases like typhus, typhoid and cholera. Statistically, the average life expectancy, the report stated, for ‘mechanics and labourers’ in 1842 was 17 years. (For ‘professional persons’ in Manchester, it was 38.)
A long-term optimist might have supposed that the era of change ushered in by the Reform Act of 1832 would also have been more sensitive to the hardships of cotton spinners and handloom weavers – the latter beginning to feel the pinch as power looms replaced artisanal labour. If so, a bitter disappointment was in store, for arguably the ‘new’ political class empowered by the Act in fact took a tougher view of the plight of the unemployed. Kay-Shuttleworth’s report on Manchester, issued the same year, may have documented poverty but also made much of the ‘moral degeneracy’ of those who wallowed in dirt (especially, of course, the population of ‘little Ireland’). The New Poor Law enacted by the Whig government in 1834 was designed expressly to deter these habitually slothful types, as they were perceived, from sponging off the rates by making the regime inside the workhouse so close to that of a prison that no one remotely capable of gaining any kind of legitimate work would submit themselves to it. Inmates of the ‘Bastilles’ (as they were popularly known) were brutally shorn, so that they were instantly recognizable on the ‘outside’, and dressed in uniform drab. Husbands were strictly separated from wives and both from their children – the most heartbreaking aspect of the institutions. In a society supposed to value the family as the school of social morality, it was the first casualty of misfortune. But of course, most of the Poor Law Guardians solemnly believed that that misfortune had been earned through some sort of moral failing. Weakness of backbone, then, had landed the reprobate in the workhouse. It would do him or her no favour to make the place flow with the milk of human kindness.
