by Roy Jenkins
Harvard evoked from Dilke the curiously premature comment that it showed an air of classic repose which was lacking in the English universities. Cambridge, Massachusetts, he thought much more conducive to quiet study than the intolerable noise of Oxford High Street. But he found New England academic life sadly lacking in a proper respect for athleticism, and rowing assigned a place far below that which it deserved. This he saw as one facet of an excessive regard for brains as opposed to brawn, and, in consequence, of a generally declining standard of health, which he believed to be a feature of New England and to some extent of America as a whole. “The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men,” he added, “and the high undulating tones which are affectation in the French are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in overheated rooms.”9 Part of the trouble he was prepared to attribute to the fact that the Americans as a people were prospectors of virgin land. The turning of untilled soil he believed to be one of the unhealthiest occupations in the world. The first beams of sunlight upon hitherto untouched mould were apt to release harmful, malarious gases.
After New England and his short visit to Canada, Dilke moved about the Middle West until, in late August, he went to St. Louis to meet Hepworth Dixon, who had just arrived from England. Dixon was at that time forty-five years of age and the editor of the Dilke family journal, the Athenœum. He had come out in order to travel across the great plains with Dilke and to penetrate as far into the mountains as Salt Lake City. This was a more vital point in his itinerary than in Dilke’s, for he was particularly concerned to study the position of women in American society, and the Mormons offered important even if peripheral evidence. By the beginning of the following year—1867—Dixon had published in London a two-volume account of his travels.[1] This was a tolerably shrewd and interesting account of what he had seen, but it was hardly a book of outstanding quality. Nevertheless it was a great success, and ran into five editions during its first year of publication. It was in the hands of the public long before Dilke himself could publish anything, before he had returned to England indeed, and it is doubtful whether he regarded a warm dedication as an adequate recompense for this jumping of the gun. In 1869 he dismissed Dixon from the editorship of the Athenœum, citing as a reason that the latter wrote books without leave. But in 1866 this trouble was all in the future. Dilke and Dixon found each other agreeable enough travelling companions under very difficult circumstances, although Dilke thought that Dixon’s insistence on changing his shirt once a fortnight betrayed an excessive rigidity of mind.
From St. Louis they went, mostly by rail, to Atchison on the Kansas bank of the Missouri, which they believed to be the starting-point of the overland mail to Salt Lake City and San Francisco. On arrival they were told that, by a sudden decision of Congress, this route, the Platte route, had been abandoned in favour of the shorter but more hazardous Smoky Hill route. They therefore moved south to Leavenworth, the new starting-point. While waiting in this Kansas town Dilke wrote two important letters. In the first he told his father of his intention, conceived but not announced before he left home, to extend his journey to Australia and to make a complete circle of the globe before returning home. In the second, with more than a touch of the old priggishness, he gave his brother Ashton a great deal of advice on his Cambridge career, and in the course of doing so announced his own plans for the longer-term future. “My aim in life,” Charles Dilke wrote, “is to be of the greatest use I can to the world at large, not because that is my duty, but because that is the course which will make my life happiest—i.e. my motives are selfish—in the wide and unusual sense of that word. I believe that, on account of my temperament and education, I can be most useful as a statesman, and as a writer. I have therefore educated myself with a view to getting such power as to make me able at all events to teach men my views, whether or not they follow them.”[2]10
On August 28th Dilke and Dixon left Leavenworth. The journey across the plains took place first in an old Concord coach and then in a light prairie wagon, with no doors and very bad springs. Their only companions were the driver and forty-two unsealed bags of United States mail. The former was an inadequate substitute for the impressive mounted guard which they were promised would join them at Junction City, but which never arrived. The latter made the interior of the coach still more uncomfortable than it would otherwise have been. For the opportunity of travelling in such circumstances they were charged the enormous fare of 500 dollars a head, from Leavenworth to Salt Lake City. It was a high price to pay, as they both observed, for the privilege of guarding the mail.
The first major stage of the journey, to Denver, took just over four days and nights. During this stage they were subjected to the constant danger of Indian attack. The Platte route to the north and the Santa Fé route to the south had both been accepted, but the use of this central Smoky Hill route was still bitterly contested by the Cheyennes. It ran through excellent buffalo country, and the Indians rightly thought that the coaches would be merely the forerunners of a railway. In the event Dilke and Dixon saw nothing of marauding tribes, but several of the posts at which they stopped were to be wiped out within a few weeks. Despite the teeming animal, bird and reptile life of the plains, food was a great problem. They got no full meal between breakfast on their first morning out and their arrival in Denver. Occasional rather inadequate helpings of prairie dog were the best that they could do. Great herds of buffalo, each about three hundred strong, were in sight most of the time, but their hides could not be pierced with ordinary rifles.
Once in Denver, Dilke’s health and spirits recovered rapidly under the influence of the mountain air and “the heaven-blessed climate,” as he expressed it. He was soon in a sufficiently buoyant mood to assure the Governor of Colorado, who pressed him to settle in Denver with the offer to name a mountain peak after him, that this was not enough. “I told him that unless he would carry a constitutional amendment allowing a foreign-born subject to be President of the United States, he would not receive my services,”11 he wrote.
From Denver to Salt Lake City the journey took five days. Here, after interviews with Brigham Young and other appropriate investigations into Mormonism, Dixon and Dilke separated. The former made his way back to the East Coast and to England. The latter pushed on to the Californian gold-workings and eventually to San Francisco. He began by reducing himself to a state of desperate tiredness with another sleepless five days and nights stage across Nevada to Virginia City. “The brain seemed divided into two parts,” he wrote, “thinking independently, and one side putting questions while the other answered them; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether disagreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual by an imagined ideal scene.”12 Later, however, the going was much easier. First, between Virginia City and Carson City, he struck a reasonable road, with grades and bridges. Then, from Placerville to Sacramento, he was able to take a train for the first time for 1,800 miles. Finally he steamed down the Sacramento River to reach San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. California, he decided rather surprisingly, was “too British to be typically American.”
From San Francisco he continued to follow “England round the world.” By November he was in New Zealand, by the end of December in Sydney, and by April in Calcutta. He remained a vigorous traveller and a keen observer, but his descriptions, his judgments and his comments lost something of the sharpness and spirit they had possessed in North America. Perhaps he was growing tired of being away, perhaps the scenes he now saw would at any time have been less interesting to his eyes. Whatever the reason, his writings lost something of their earlier verve. There were occasional familiar Dilke touches, however. In New Zealand he saw in the gradual replacement of the native fly by the imported English fly a parallel with the relative performances of the indigenous and immigrant races. In Victoria and South Australia he accumulated a great deal of detailed and useful information on
the working of the secret ballot and the machinery of registration. In the Ganges Valley he expatiated on the ill-health of the British in the sub-continent, and decided that most of it was due to a combination of carelessness and over-indulgence. “If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea,” he concluded, “he need not fear India.”13
He returned from Bombay by way of Egypt—where he thought he saw French influence overseas at its worst—and Italy. In June, 1867, he was back in London. He had been away a full year. His general summing-up was that the future belonged in an unrealised degree to the Anglo-Saxon race. “No possible series of events,” he wrote, “can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300 millions of beings—of one national character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pigmies by the side of such a people.”14
Immediately upon his return, Dilke set to work to construct out of the letters which he had written home a book of travel reminiscences and political judgments. The work took him a year, being a good deal interrupted by ill-health. He had been infected with malaria in Ceylon,[3] and this led to a long period of weak appetite and delirious sleeplessness at night. Finally, in the summer of 1868, he developed typhoid, but by that time the book was already in the press, and the only permanent result was that, in consequence of the proofs being corrected by his father, the first edition contained what Charles Dilke regarded as a gross crop of errors. Dilke had signed an agreement with Macmillans in March, 1868, under the terms of which they were to print a first impression of 1,500 copies, and the author was to receive an advance of £200 and no less than 200 free copies. The terms were highly favourable to a young man of twenty-four, publishing his first book, but they were more than justified by the success which was achieved. Greater Britain, the title chosen by Dilke to sum up not only his itinerary but a large part of his political philosophy, was extremely well received by the Press. It quickly ran through four editions in England, and remained a widely read book for nearly fifty years. In America it sold even more copies, but as the editions were pirated this brought no financial benefit to Dilke. A truncated version was translated and published in Russia.
The book gave Dilke not only a considerable politico-literary reputation, but also a wide range of new contacts. Perhaps the 200 free copies helped here, for throughout the winter months of 1868-9 a steady stream of letters of thanks and commendation poured into 76, Sloane Street. The most important came from J. S. Mill, then at Avignon. On February 9th, 1869, Mill, who had never met Dilke, wrote in the following terms:
“It is long since any book connected with practical politics has been published on which I build such high hopes of the future usefulness and distinction of the writer, shewing, as it does, that he not only possesses a most unusual amount of real knowledge on many of the principal questions of the future, but a mind strongly predisposed to what are (at least in my opinion) the most advanced and enlightened views of them.”15
This letter, which went on to make some criticism, including the point that the author attributed far too exclusive an influence upon national character to race and climate, was the beginning, for Dilke, of a most valuable and formative relationship. As soon as Mill returned to England he invited Dilke to dine at Blackheath. On Easter Day, 1869, the meeting took place. Thereafter the acquaintance rapidly developed into a close friendship, with Dilke happily accepting the role of disciple. In May of the same year Mill secured Dilke’s election to the Political Economy Club, his candidature prevailing over that of such distinguished if heterogeneous rivals as Shaw Lefevre, Louis Mallet, Monckton Milnes and John Morley. At that time Mill was endeavouring to lead the club away from the rigidly individualist doctrine which it had been taught by Ricardo, Malthus, and his own father and towards his own, recently developed, semi-socialist views. He was strongly opposed by Henry Fawcett. Dilke, however, had little difficulty in deciding to support his new master rather than his old teacher. “I gradually deserted Fawcett,” he wrote, “and, more and more influenced by Mill’s later views, finally came to march even in front of Mill in our advance.”16
For the remaining four years of Mill’s life, Dilke was constantly in touch with him. When Mill was at Blackheath there were frequent meetings. When he was at Avignon there was regular correspondence, with Mill pouring out advice to Dilke on the widest possible range of subjects. Women’s suffrage, the position of trades unions, land reform, colonial policy, and opposition to the Cowper-Temple approach to denominational teaching in schools were all issues on which Mill wrote to his disciple, and on which Dilke saw almost completely eye to eye with his master. Even on foreign policy there was substantial agreement, Mill being little more attracted by a peace-at-any-price approach than was Dilke. “If Gladstone had been a great man,” he wrote about the Franco-Prussian conflict on September 30th, 1870, “this war would never have broken out; for he would have nobly taken upon himself the responsibility of declaring that the English navy should actively aid whichever of the two powers was attacked by the other. This would have been a beginning of the international police we are calling for.”17
Dilke, both in his speeches and in his private writings, always used Mill’s name with a respect that was little short of reverence. Discussing the payment of members of Parliament at a public meeting, he expressed a preference for the plan of payment by the constituency put forward by “Mr. Mill, the great leader of political thinkers.” Considering his own attitude towards the trades unionist, George Odger,[4] he settled the matter by noting that Odger was “a man of whom the highest opinion was entertained by Mr. Mill.” When Mill died, in May, 1873, it was a severe loss to Dilke. Throughout his life he retained his respect for Mill’s memory, and was always eager to rush to the defence of the latter’s reputation. He took a curious pride in the fact that 76, Sloane Street was the last house at which Mill dined out, and derived a less curious satisfaction from the completion in the last few weeks of the sitter’s life of the portrait of Mill by G. F. Watts, which Dilke had commissioned and which at present hangs in the Westminster City Hall.
Some part of the notice which was attracted by Greater Britain may have been due to the fact that its publication coincided, within a week or so, with Dilke’s election to the House of Commons. In November, 1867, while in the middle of his work on the book, he had been adopted as a Liberal candidate for the two-member parliamentary borough of Chelsea. This was a new constituency, created under the Reform Act of that year, with the enormous electorate, for those days, of 30,000. Its size enabled Dilke to announce proudly, if a little rhetorically, at his opening meeting, that he “would willingly wait any time rather than enter the House of Commons a member for some small trumpery constituency.” The Chelsea division contained Dilke’s family house in Sloane Street and the whole of the present metropolitan borough, but it contained a great deal else as well. It covered the prosperous residential districts of South Kensington and Notting Hill, as well as the more working-class areas of Fulham, Hammersmith and Kensal Green.
Despite his temporary ill-health and the competing claims of his work on Greater Britain, Dilke was a vigorous campaigner. He spoke all over his constituency, and he never skimped his speeches. He believed that the electorate should hear his views “not upon any one subject or upon any two subjects or any three, but as nearly as might be upon all.” The platform upon which he stood might be described as one of moderate radicalism. He was in favour of the ballot and of removing election petitions from the House of Commons to the Courts of Law. He wanted triennial parliaments and the payment of members. He believed that the onus of proof must be on those who wished to exclude anyone from the suffrage, but he also put forward the balancing view that he saw sufficient proof at that time for the temporary exclusion of certain classes. On Ireland, he advocated church disestablishment, land reform, and a wide measure of parliamentary reform. Then, when “we have done our duty . . . we may well call upon the Irish to do theirs.” He disassociated himself
from the violence of the Fenian approach. Army reform, including the abolition of flogging, of the purchase of commissions, and of the office of an independent commander-in-chief, was also prominent in his programme.
Dilke later indicated that his true position at this time was well to the left of his platform. “I tried to be moderate, in order to please my father, and not to lose the general Liberal vote,” he wrote; “and my speeches were more timid than were my opinions.”18 Despite these efforts Sir Wentworth Dilke was disturbed, and wrote a letter of remonstration within a month of the commencement of his son’s candidature. The reply which he received was uncompromising.
“For my own part,” Charles Dilke’s letter ran, “though I should immensely like to be in Parliament, still I should feel terribly hampered there if I went in as anything except a Radical. Now I have spoken against Fenianism in spite of my immense sympathy for it. Radicalism is too much a thing of nature with me to throw it off by any effort of mine. If you think it a waste of money for me to contest Chelsea, I will cheerfully throw the thing up and turn to any pursuit you please.”19
The offer to abandon his candidature was not perhaps to be taken too seriously (it is certainly difficult to imagine Charles Dilke cheerfully turning to any other career nominated by his parent), but it served its purpose. Little more complaint was heard from Wentworth Dilke, who paid the election expenses of his radical son with a good deal more cheerfulness than his son would have obeyed his instructions.
The dissolution came in the autumn of 1868, and polling in Chelsea was on November 18th. The other Liberal candidate was Sir Henry Hoare, who had already been in the House of Commons for a short time as member for Windsor, and whose views at that stage of his life were almost as radical as those of Dilke. There were two Conservatives in the field, C. F. Freake, a Kensington contractor, who had built the Cromwell Road, and W. H. Russell, who had achieved fame as the correspondent of The Times in the Crimea. The result was a decisive victory for the Liberals, and a personal triumph for Dilke, who polled nearly 200 votes more than the much older and politically more experienced Hoare. The figures were:
