The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press, exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity assures parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized. TheDaily News, theDaily Telegraph, the halfpenny press, morning and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.
The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press, exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity assures parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized. TheDaily News, theDaily Telegraph, the halfpenny press, morning and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.
‘Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.’ Such, in reference to the then editor of theTimes, was the remark made a year or two after the Victorian age had begun by Lord Lyndhurst, himself an ex-journalist,[93]to Charles Greville, the Diarist. Like opinions by equal authorities as to the successors of Barnes have been delivered frequently since, but are less known because the memoir-writer has not yet stamped them with immortality. No attribute of skill or power belonging to Barnes was wanting to Delane. To his weight with the public a characteristic tribute was once paid by a shrewd judge of editors as of men generally, Lord Beaconsfield. ‘I think,’ were that statesman’s exact words, on a social occasion to Lord Granville, ‘I had better postpone giving you my views of Delane till he is dead.’
On her accession the Queen was congratulated by some 479 newspapers representing the collective press of the United Kingdom and its outlying islands. Her sixtieth commemoration gives a theme to 2396 journals published within the same area.[94]The English newspaper press which in effect began under one Queen, reached its final term of greatness under another Queen. 1837 is a landmark in newspaper history, because it was the first year in which the public press published the parliamentary division lists, and thus made another stride towards equality of influence with the legislature. Its effect was to increase the usefulness of Members of Parliament, as well as of the press itself. The Long Parliament made English freedom, but gagged the press.
In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one shilling for each advertisement. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851.
Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes political opinion. Existingconvictions are deepened. But the average reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a secondTimes, as since 1788 the olderUniversal Registerhas been called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion.
So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected with the name of the first proprietor of theAthenæum, like its latest, a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age theDaily News, to which the short editorship of Charles Dickens gave literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors, Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S. Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, theDaily Telegraph, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired, enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners. It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds, notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to theTimesfrom the Crimea of William Howard Russell, firstcaused the Sebastopol enquiry;—then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion[95]and with it the fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the great London dailies be below the mark of that of the twoCouriersand some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker, a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which other periodicals of Europe can show.
The Jubilee Year of 1887 witnessed the completion of a revolution in the public press, that had in fact begun a twelvemonth earlier. Hitherto the great London broadsheets had either been affected really if not professedly to one of the great political parties; or had, as in the case of theTimes, not less than of the chief weekly journals, made some show of impartially criticizing both parties alike. In 1886 the Liberal party was rent in twain by the Irish policy of its greatest member. The result with the press was to divest political writers of all show of independence. Those journals which accepted the great leader’s view were converted into uncompromising champions of the scheme that their opponents said would dismember the monarchy. Those, on the other hand, which resisted the great statesman’s plan found themselves by the force of events they couldnot control detached from their earlier traditions of independence and converted into the enemies of political Liberalism not only on one issue, but on all.
From that day newspaper criticism of men and measures has practically ceased. With a few able exceptions, signally that of theDaily Chronicle, the paramount task of the press in the sixth decade of the epoch is to support a combination of groups rallied not under a party flag, but an Imperial banner. About the same time another newspaper change may be said to have taken place. Hitherto, the anonymous system had been fairly preserved. The names of newspaper writers were not known beyond their office, or at least beyond Fleet Street. Now, however, English journalism was undergoing two distinct and mutually antagonistic processes. On the one hand it had by the agency of the great newspapers with their enlarged staffs and various departments been organized into a liberal profession, attracting specialists of all kinds to its columns. On the other hand its pleasures and its profits had gathered a host of camp followers who as amateurs vied with the older professionals. Next, persons of fashion or of quality took to the proprietorship or editorship of new journals, as, till then, they had taken to the owning and management of theatres for the benefit of personal friends. InLothair, someone advises the hero to amuse himself with theatre proprietorship ‘as being the high mode for all swells.’ The paper next enjoyed the same vogue as the playhouse.
The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new editor’s chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names. If their signatures were suppressed, the authorship, as it was intended it should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.
What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, theEcho, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of John Passmore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up like mushrooms after rain.Evening NewsorStarat night, theMorning, theLeaderare only a few of the fresh notes added to the music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not proclaim the printed wares of a millionairein esseorin posse. Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press of thecountry has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special representatives of their journal stationed abroad.
Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C. Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed three-line paragraph has come in. TheDaily Mailhas shown a busy generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a buffet, that the essence of the day’s news of the world can be read in a few odd minutes as easily as theIliadand theOdysseywere once packed into a nutshell.[96]
For this new journalism new men have been needed. In most cases very young men; generally fresh from Balliol or Trinity where they have perhaps won Fellowships as well as First Classes, but in appearance often not much older than a public school sixthform boy. Youth is an error which unfortunately time too soon corrects.
In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical. The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary. When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established, there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing what is really a fourth estate.[97]
TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE
Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors, with particular instances.
Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.
Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and curative medicine also entitled to credit. General course of medical progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors, with particular instances.
Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.
The last instance of that wholesome truth was the Dilke Commission for the better housing of the poor aptly presided over by the Prince Consort’s eldest son in 1885. Exactly forty-five years earlier than this, Colonel Slaney’s[98]motion in the House of Commons produced an enquiry into the health of towns. Local Improvement Acts had been multiplied to the number of 500. There was still no proper drainage. The Duke of Buccleuch’s Commission of 1848 led to the Public Health Act of the same year. As the cholera invasions of 1853 and of 1865-6 showed, the Local Boards established by the Act of 1848 were too permissive in their operations to be fully effective. Edwin Chadwick, and Southwood Smith had from the first co-operated with the Queen’s husband. Their activity did not cease when the earliest steps to reform had been taken: 1858 witnessed fresh improvements.[99]
It was not till 1875 that the confused mass of sanitary laws was consolidated. Then the Local Government Board which, with the powers of the superseded Poor Law Board, had been established in 1871 was in full and in most beneficent work. Still the Commission that last investigated the matter, due as it was largely to Lord Shaftesbury, showed many evils still to remain. Overcrowding was worse in the West London rookeries than it had been in the East. In 1885 the Dilke Commission Act gave fresh power to local authorities to destroy unhealthy dwellings.
The machinery which thus exists as the sixthdecade of our epoch draws to its close, is therefore tolerably complete. Guarantees for its promptly being put into motion are still wanted. Not only the credit, but the very conception of this wholesome function of the State belongs entirely to our era, and arises out of the enlarged idea of Royal service which fills the modern mind.
Strictly consistent with family tradition is the effort of the Prince of Wales to help those who are only one degree more helpless than the dwellers in city and suburban alleys and courts in time of need. To free the London hospitals of debt will crown the edifice of sick relief that in Crimean days the Queen and her husband began.
From the departure of Miss Florence Nightingale[100]and her trained staff for the Crimea in 1854 must be dated the birth of nursing as a polite profession. But for that mission of mercy one would hear nothing of the contemporary parade of nurses in the height of the London season in the grounds of Marlborough House. The fashionable vogue of the vocation may sometimes attract modish recruits who have not counted the cost.
Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs. Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most quick to observe. Not a few ofthe sick whom the ministering angel of the new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances at herself as she passes the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of Dickens. They arose from the rumoured hastening of the sick man’s death by the scriptural practice of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse (new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency.
Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in training for the medical profession have nothing about them left ofthe lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious—‘Evil be to him who evil thinks.’
Hospital management is the subject not for a few pages in a single book, but for a library in itself. One or two not controversial facts may be given. Throughout the Victorian age a marked feature in medical charities has been the supplementing of the historic hospitals with many new dispensaries and establishments for special diseases. If the latest hospital endowments are smaller than those originating in an earlier century, the explanation is less a decline in eleemosynary purpose or power than the development of the value of the property assigned to the older foundations.[101]Thus the revenue of St Bartholomew’s in the middle of the sixteenth century seems to have been only £371 a year. Towards the close of the nineteenth century it is £32,000 a year. During our own era hospital benefactions approaching a quarter of a million are far from unknown. These do not include such special and comparatively recent hospitals as that for consumption, with the 40 new dispensaries connected with it.
To epitomize the facts; the total of London hospitals or infirmaries with wards for the sick amounts to 49. The movement still goes forward. So vast is the scale on which these buildings, less houses than towns in themselves, were first plannedthat in many of them there is yet room for fresh beds. This is only a specimen of what has been, and is being, done throughout the kingdom. There thus seems a fresh argument in favour of continuing to London itself an institution like St Thomas’s, Southwark, the removal of which to the country was not long since suggested.
Like all gracious works, these places are twice blessed. They relieve those who are in need. They humanize those whom prosperity and comfort might make callous. Before our age began, no one thought of sending game or fruit to the sufferers or convalescents within these places of refuge. Now it is the exception for the millionaire not to make the spoils of his fashionable battue pay tithe to those for whom such food is often the best of physic. The costly flowers that decorate the drawing rooms or dining rooms during the season are not discarded as rubbish when the festivity is over. They are scrupulously tended so as not to lose their freshness. Presently their hues and fragrance will relieve the bleak expanse of white-washed wall in those places where our sick are nursed away from their own homes.[102]
The contrasts of our age include a marked connection between the organization of the healing art andthe advance of medical science on the one hand and the reduction of the death rate on the other. In 1855 the mortality of the United Kingdom was 23 per 1,000. In 1875 it was 21 per 1,000. In 1895 it had fallen to 18 per 1,000. The figures,[103]and the conclusions to which they point, are tributes, not only to medical skill in healing disease, but to sanitary reform in preventing it.
Before the Victorian age began the whole population of these Islands awaited the periodical onsets of pestilence with the resigned fatalism of the Turk, or with the passive submission of latter day London to the incubus of snow. The notorious consequences of unhealthy living prompted no preventive measures. Divine wrath was believed to express itself in deadly epidemics. When that anger was assuaged health would return. Till then human remedies could do little. Meanwhile, the truth that Providence helps those who help themselves was being scientifically shown. Hence in 1838, a State enquiry into the whole matter was instituted. In 1848 the legislation began which, by promoting cleanliness, at once disarmed disease. John Simon proved the propagation of pestilence to proceed by impure particles. In 1858-65, on his initiative, the Government strengthened the defences of public health. The entrance of foreign plagues was stopped at our ports. Three sons of a clever West of England doctor named Budd[104]hadbeen trained from their childhood in practical medicine by their father. These doctors showed the connection between impure water and typhoid fever, as before them Snow had shown between cholera and water. When the improvements suggested by these researches were adopted health generally benefited. Consumption statistics became less alarming every year. Fevers of all kinds were successfully combated. Since vaccination had become general, smallpox cases had fallen by at least one-half.
Meanwhile, the discovery of anæsthetics, of chloroform by Professor J. Y. Simpson of Edinburgh in 1848, of ether in 1846 by Morton and Robinson of the United States, at once robbed surgical operations of their terrors, and rendered them practicable in cases where till then they could not safely be tried. In 1860 came the antiseptic treatment of Sir Joseph, since Lord, Lister. Before then, the nervous system had been explored successfully by Carpenter.[105]Instruments for examining by reflected lights the hidden parts of the human frame had been invented by several English surgeons. Operations for certain internal tumours, that had hitherto defied removal, were first performed by Cæsar Hawkins, born 1798, brother of the famous Oriel Provost, a pupil of Brodie at St George’s; and more recently by Spencer Wells.
More than a half of the medical discoveries of theperiod are English. The latest perhaps, certainly not the smallest if the least known, was the treatment by the late Sir William Gull of the swellings technically known as myxœdema by an entirely new process, that of supplementing deficiences of the thyroid gland with matter taken from animals. The throat specialists of Germany found much to learn from the late Morell Mackenzie. Not till 1860, was the scheme of medical education perfected in its present shape by the College of Physicians, which to-day, under its President and two Censors, arranges all examinations; while the Medical Association represents the whole profession, bringing its grievances and needs before the legislature. The average of ability throughout the practitioners of the country is as noticeable as the achievements of its scientific pioneers. The treatise onHeredityin disease by Dr Douglas Lithgow, on gout and allied complaints by Dr Robson Roose, and on the medical uses of electricity by Dr W. S. Hedley, are instances of permanent contributions by busy practitioners to the scientific knowledge of their daily labours.
The late Dr Quinn, the late Oscar Clayton, are men who have improved the status of their calling by their social services and gifts, and have helped to extend the authority of the physician over every department of life. We have long since shaken off the rule of priests. Some may think we have already placed ourselves under a despotism of doctors, who by their word can make or mar the reputation of places and climates if not of characters and of men;and on whom the obligations of professional etiquette seem at least equal to their sense of responsibility to the public.[106]
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on the new High Church critics,e.g.Lux MundiandThe Sermon on the Mount.
The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on the new High Church critics,e.g.Lux MundiandThe Sermon on the Mount.
A verger at St Mary’s Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without, at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human knowledge. Hence nothingin agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to, need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes no proselytes.[107]
Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich. The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been largely due to the influence of the Court. From theentourageof the later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof. Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have shared the fate of continental crowns.
The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation’s religious life naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble’s Assize Sermon five years before the Queen’s accession. Its full results were not to be seen till 1846.
Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declaredEssays and Reviewsheretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so, to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no binding power. But the days when theTimes, long since convinced of its Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as ‘a clerical debating society with a long name’ are altogether gone by.
Many who are by no means ardent Churchmen, or are outside the Church Communion, are interested to know the actual opinion of Convocation on social and industrial questions of the hour, as this opinion is expressed by educated men who reflect the views of their cloth at least as faithfully as the House of Commons reflects the views of the people. Thus, during the recent sittings of a single year, Convocation in its two provinces with their divisions into lower and upper Houses, has discussed and suggested solutions of subjects so varied as sisterhoods and deaconesses, betting and gambling, popular education, soldiers’ marriages, marriage law amendment Bills, spiritual provision for workhouses, clergy discipline Bill, the relations between the Church and State in the Colonies. Even in its unreformed condition, this body can scarcely fail to be of some use in officiallytelling Parliament men the opinion of the Church, which, on any view of it, is at least a considerable corporation, on matters affecting clerical interests or popular morals. In the remote event of the Church being disestablished, Convocation is a useful drilling ground on which Churchmen of all degrees can be trained to collective action.
What are the facts relating to the Church to-day? At the opening of this age, the beneficed clergy were often unfit for their posts; they were very largely indifferent to their duties. The attacks on the Establishment led by the Lord Henley of that day and others, shortly after the 1832 Reform Act, were more organized and plausible than anything which has been witnessed since. There are, after all, not many things more national in England than the Church. Even the differences of the clergy, and the professed desire of some among them to be free from State supervision, have not lessened the national regard for the Established Faith. The attack from within, therefore, seems likely to be weathered not less successfully than the attack from without.
The parochial system of the Church—its clergy resident in every village where the squire is often an absentee, has struck its fibres too deep into the soil of English life, to be rooted out by any sectarian agitation. The best proof that Church endowments do not check, but rather encourage, private beneficence is the amount of money donations to the Established Church during the present age. Gifts to the Church, whether in the shape of lands, tithes, otherrent charges, stock or cash, represent roughly a sum of £5,500,000, yielding a perpetual yearly income of £181,940.
The second of the two Acts establishing the Ecclesiastical Commission is of Victorian date. The operations of this body have increased the incomes of Church livings by £1,016,775 a year, or by a capital sum of £30,599,100; and this during the twelve years ending 1896-97. Queen Anne’s bounty does not, indeed, seem to have been uniformly administered with such wisdom. Its funds have sometimes been granted to incumbents to enlarge houses, schools, and other buildings beyond the point at which there was an assured income for the maintenance of these fabrics. The Tithes Commutation Act is not blamed for the periodical return of hard times for the clergy. The distress itself is partial, sometimes exaggerated. Still, there seems to have been a general reduction of incomes in rural districts by 25 per cent. No offertories, which in towns greatly help the clergy, can make the country deficiency good. The suggestion of repealing the Act which put down pluralities so as to concentrate several poor preferments in one incumbent is not likely to be acted on. But some relaxation of the Act might be a feasible concession to a growing opinion. Rich livings are sometimes the worst served. Some re-adjustment of stipends after a new enquiry seems, therefore, likely to be proposed.
So much for the purely English aspect of clerical activity in our age. The alliance in the foreign enterprise of the Church with the State coincides exclusivelywith the Victorian reign. In 1841 the Colonial Bishopric fund was begun. By 1851 the Colonial episcopate was fairly organized. Four years after the Queen’s accession there were 10 Anglican dioceses out of England. Sixty years after that accession there are 92.[108]These sees are grouped into provincial Synods. This foreign Church, one in doctrine with the Established Church at home, is modified in its agency and development to suit the soil to which it is transplanted. The late Sir J. R. Seeley, with respect to its calming influences amid jarring faiths, has in a familiar passage dwelt on the Christianity of the English Church as a reconciling element between the rival creeds of the Eastern world. Add to this the organization of episcopal Protestantism of the Anglican type, not only in the West Indies and in our Canadian Dominion, but in the United States themselves.[109]
A fair idea may thus be formed of the State Church in its character of a veritable catholic, not less than a national, power. Improved organization does not always argue increased efficiency. The machinery of the Roman Empire was never more elaborate than when it was in a state of atrophy. Coinciding, however, with the unmistakable signs of spiritual life at home and abroad, the domestic resources and the foreign work ofthe national religion are tributes alike to the efficacy of the Church as a world-wide instrument of righteousness, and to the increased motive power of religion during the Victorian age. With the spiritual work that has been done, certain names very briefly must be associated. The Oxford Tractarianism between 1832-46 is only one of many manifestations of religious life which mark that epoch, and which nearly perplexed into infidelity the Oxford verger aforesaid. In extreme Evangelicalism outside our Church, the followers of Wesley, regardless of their founder’s injunction not to form a separate sect, were perfecting their system when the reign began. In 1833, an English clergyman at Plymouth, J. L. Darby, left the National Church and founded the sect of ‘Brethren’ who take their name from the Western seaport where he had officiated. Fifteen years later, in 1848, Plymouth Brethrenism was itself divided by one of Darby’s followers, named Newton; he created a clique of his own now called by their rival religionists, the loose, or open, Brethren. The missionary and literary activities of this little sect are really remarkable. In 1843 Presbyterianism across the Tweed had a schism of its own. The secession of Chalmers on the issue of State patronage resulted in the founding of the Free Kirk. The religious activity of the epoch has been universal. Among the older dissenting bodies, Congregationalists, in point of numbers, influence, in national repute of their leaders, perhaps come first. These in 1837, numbered 170,000 full members. Now they number nearly 400,000. Of the Baptists there were, in 1837, 125,000. Sixty years laterthey are 340,000. This increase is due to the single agency of C. H. Spurgeon, whose personal influence is not yet fully realized but may be judged from the circulation by millions of his posthumous Sermons, as well as by the pulpit imitations of him in all Communions, not excepting the high Anglican pulpits. Hence of course Nonconformist numbers depending largely on individual attractions, are subject to greater fluctuations than in the Establishment. Roman Catholics have increased in the large towns of England and in the Colonies. In 1837 their priests were less than 1,000. Fifty years later they were in round numbers 2,500. Their Churches have risen from 600 to 1,350. The activity of British Evangelicalism is farther shown by the doubling of the income of the British and Foreign Bible Society during the reign, by the cost of a New Testament being ten-pence in 1837, a penny in 1897. Similarly the income of the Propagation of the Gospel Society is very nearly twice, and of the Church Missionary Society almost thrice, as much to-day as it was in the Accession year.
Among Nonconformist bodies, numbers vary according to the eminence of individual leaders, rising by bounds with a Spurgeon, diminishing temporarily with some of his successors. Similarly, among Anglican Communicants numbers fluctuate according to the influence of the leaders of the great schools, a Liddon, or a Ryle, a Maurice, a Webb Peploe, or a Lefroy. R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, whose work on the Atonement is a recognised text book, even among many Anglicans, did as much as A. P. Stanley of Westminster, to soften down sectarian differences, and to command the respectof other Communions. Nor has Dale had any lack of worthy successors now living. Unless religion had been ineradicable in the national, because in the human, mind, results very different from this general increase in the number of all religious Communions, judged by whatever test, would have been witnessed.
Scarcely had the Church recovered from the shock of Newman’s secession, and the agitating effects during two decades of High Church and Low Church controversies[110]when Dr Mansel, then an Oxford tutor and professor,[111]in his ardent, but not wholly discreet zeal, expressed views on the relations of the Infinite to the finite which, as F. D. Maurice perceived, declaring the Deity to be unknowable by man, might be perverted into an apology for agnosticism. That religion did not really suffer is due in some degree to Benjamin Jowett. This good and honest scholar’s life was spent in educating young men into useful Christians, into serious citizens, and into sincere believers. He claimed liberty; he loved truth. He ridiculed with quiet satire the religious nescience and despair which Mansel’s terrific propaganda had been distorted into making the vogue. When Dr Temple was made Primate:—the first and greatest tribute was paid to the variety of Oxford ecclesiasticism that would be rightly described not asthe broad, or high, but as the hard Church. There could be no more striking instance of the transformation in religious ideas witnessed during our age than the fact that the volume to which Dr Temple and Mr Jowett both contributed,Essays and Reviews, was branded by Convocation as heretical during the sixties, and is discovered to be harmless during the nineties.
So qualified a judge on these matters as Mr Stopford Brooke deplores the declension of religious liberalism into something indistinguishable from unbelief. But as Professor Mansel’s orthodox zeal for the dignity of his faith helped his enemies rather than his friends, so the services rendered by his devout successors are not always unmixedly conducive to the old faith. The ‘higher criticism’ has been a dubious ally of Biblical Christianity.Lux Mundidistinguished between the historic and mythic elements in thePentateuch. The gifted editor of that work has more recently[112]applied the same method to the sayings of the Founder of Christianity, and has seemed to some to sanction the evaporation into proverbs of some Divine utterances.[113]
THE QUEEN’S SUBJECTS AT PLAY—ACTIVE OR SEDENTARY
The new Court as head of the old society. Social transformations which would most strike one revisiting the London West End in 1897. Going to Court. Multiplication of clubs in St James’s and Pall Mall, but disappearance of gambling clubs. Socially transforming effects of the Parliamentary Committee in 1844. Then and now. ‘Play and Pay’ betting modified by its recommendations. Necessary connection between horse breeding and horse racing. Cricket—then and now. The new football or the old prize ring. Indoor amusements. Transformation, by development, of Victorian chess. The men and events which have made it what it is. Ladies’ drawing room work. Middle class English ladies the great readers nowadays. Fashionable needlework of all kinds from 1837-97.
The new Court as head of the old society. Social transformations which would most strike one revisiting the London West End in 1897. Going to Court. Multiplication of clubs in St James’s and Pall Mall, but disappearance of gambling clubs. Socially transforming effects of the Parliamentary Committee in 1844. Then and now. ‘Play and Pay’ betting modified by its recommendations. Necessary connection between horse breeding and horse racing. Cricket—then and now. The new football or the old prize ring. Indoor amusements. Transformation, by development, of Victorian chess. The men and events which have made it what it is. Ladies’ drawing room work. Middle class English ladies the great readers nowadays. Fashionable needlework of all kinds from 1837-97.
The transformed society of the Victorian age may be regarded as a new combination of old elements. The interests, and the pursuits represented in it have always existed. The grouping and the mutual relations are the only novelty. Even during the Prince Consort’s time, the Court had begun to be the federal head of the many coloured corporation which, under the name of society, has superseded the ‘genteel’ or ‘polite’ world of earlier days. That all liberal professions or worthy pursuits should find their natural head among the representatives of the Crown was the central idea of the Queen’s husband. So far as the opportunities of ashort life allowed, he translated this notion into practice. It was reserved for his eldest son to witness, and himself largely to promote, the full realization of Prince Albert’s purpose. The result is that to-day not only diplomacy or soldiership, statemanship or wealth, sends its envoys to a transformed Court. There is no sort of human achievement or distinction that, directly it has won the approval of the people, lacks the recognition, personal or vicarious, of the people’s rulers.
Each of the callings noticed in the present survey, clerical or lay, sends its deputies to Marlborough House or Sandringham in the same way that diplomacy and arms are represented at a Royal drawing room or levée. For a reflection of the chief currents of thought, of the favourite pursuits of the most absorbing interests and influences of Victorian England, the historian will have to consult the list of visitors to the Heir Apparent’s house, or read the account of his doings. The Prince Consort was attacked by the Tories in 1846 because he listened to Peel’s speeches on Free Trade from the Peers’ Gallery in the Commons. In 1897 the Prince of Wales attends daily the State trial of South African celebrities at Westminster, and is praised for a fresh proof of his interest in Colonial affairs. No artist or author; no sailor, soldier, cricketer or actor, makes his mark upon his age without some tribute from a popular Court to prowess that is already a household word with the multitude.
Thus in its relations to those aspects of national life in which the people itself is most interested, the Court of to-day has been transformed into a federal head ofthe entire motley system. If the competition of individuals for personal recognition in the highest quarter sometimes embitters social life, that is not the Royal patron’s fault.
Among the changes which would make the fashionable quarter of the town most difficult of recognition to-day by one who knew it only in the early years of the reign, is the multiplication of joint stock palaces called clubs, which are really co-operative homes for poor gentlemen.[114]The absence of the gaming houses of which Crockford’s was only one among many; and the widely representative quality of the ladies and gentlemen whom our stranger might notice driving to Court on a presentation day during the season is as visible as the disappearance of the West End hells.[115]
In the seventh year after the Queen’s accession, the House of Commons’ Committee on Gambling began its sittings. It was presided over by Lord Palmerston. Among the witnesses it examined were men well known in every section of London or of national life. Trainers, jockeys, magistrates, policemen, all contributed to the remarkable picture of contemporary life and manners, contained between the covers of this document.
The state of the law as regards gambling was then, as now, obscure. Magistrates shrank from giving constables a chance of confirming their suspicions as to houses of shy-looking exterior; but generally in the streets off St James’s nearly every third house was a place of play. Between Pall Mall and the east side of Leicester Square, some 36 gambling houses were proved to exist. At Crockford’s itself the tables were honestly managed. It was the perversion of Crockford’s example which did the harm. Thus, some half dozen years before the Great Exhibition, Crockford’s ceased to exist; its humbler but more mischievous imitators were also weeded out. An improved epoch began. Before the twentieth anniversary of the Accession, the building at the top of St James’s Street described by Disraeli in the first chapter ofSibylhad become under the style of ‘The Wellington’ the best restaurant of the kind then, or for many years, known to London. Thereafter, indeed, it reverted to a club, the ‘Argus’ first, and then the ‘Devonshire;’ but a gambling club no more. The periodical flutter caused by rumoured scandals, is itself evidence of the improved standard of social morals. One other result of this Enquiry[116]is probably felt among sporting persons to-day.
Lord Palmerston’s Committee pronounced against play and pay betting, that is, the system under whichthe bet is valid whether the horse runs or not. In betting at the post for ready money the bet is off to-day if the horse does not start. Not only is the Turf more popular than it ever was before. It binds sections of the polite world more closely together than they are held by any political or ecclesiastical cement. It is thus a social interest of the first importance which a prudent statesman makes a point of conciliating not less than he would the clergy, the lawyers, or even the licensed victuallers. The constantly increasing encouragement given to the Turf by men who have no personal end to serve, and whose refinement must be revolted by the aspect of many of its accessories, justifies the conclusion that the racecourse is indispensable to the breed of horses.
From the Plantagenet and Tudor period the best horses in England were raced; they were made better that they might be raced more successfully. Hence the wise introduction, for beauty as the crown of strength, of Arab blood, especially under Charles II. and onwards. The early excellence of stallions followed. The sires of racers begot also English hunters, so that the best horses in the hunting field to-day derive their pedigrees on one side from the founders of the best racing blood. The general utility animal, seen in carriages and cabs, is bred in the same way but has just fallen below the hunter level. Thus, without thoroughbred sires, the excellence of our horses generally must decline. The expense of breeding the best quadrupeds of the stud book is so heavy that withoutthe stimulus of racing, the stock could scarcely be maintained.
The long distance plates on the Turf dating back to the time of Anne have been replaced by the Queen’s premium stallions, periodically on view at Islington, and at the disposal, for a small fee, of horse owners throughout the country. These fine animals are almost all the winners of races. The necessary expense of racing suggests the usefulness, as in an earlier chapter was seen, of the sporting plutocrat to the Turf, and hence to the national quadruped generally. Unless the sport gave to its followers some sort of social diploma, the wealthy breeders whom the mart has furnished to the racecourse, from the earliest of the Rothschilds down to the latest of the Hirsches or the Maples, would scarcely have given time and money to their own pleasure as well as to the country’s good.
To pass to the horse in another aspect, the conjectural estimate of packs of hounds at the beginning of the hunting season in 1837 was 28. At a corresponding date in 1897 the ascertained figures were 61. This does but faintly indicate the change undergone by the national sport. Not even John Leech’s pictorial satire inPunchcould deter the Cit from the hunting field, or discourage him from educating himself into a more than passable rider across country. Capel Court has or had a cry of beagles of its own. At longer distances from London than the Surrey pastures 15 per cent. of the wearers of pink and buckskin wear on ordinary days the glossy uniformof the brokers and jobbers of the House. A little earlier in the year, these sportsmen were tramping after partridges by the early September twilight that they might be at their business in the City before the West End sits down to breakfast. This is a specimen of what goes on throughout the kingdom. On the outskirts of all great cities, co-operative shootings are as common as co-operative stores.
Other pastimes are too much in daily evidence to need many words or to allow the apprehension that the male acceptance of the feminine lawn tennis implies any degeneration in the Victorian race of youth. The addition of Scotch golf to English games, and the vast improvement as to pace, style, and time shown by crews at Henley or on the Metropolitan waters in 1897 over 1837 may dispel any fears of a deterioration of youthful stamina or of muscular zeal. Whether as regards its own surface or the meadows which it waters, the Thames in the South, like the Tyne or Mersey in the North, is still a river that feeds the sea of English manhood.
As regards cricket, it is impossible to compare ancient or modern players, batsmen or bowlers; so entirely have the conditions of the game been transformed. The high scoring of the later Victorian days which would have amazed earlier players seems due, first, to the vastly improved pitches, making as they do, almost any bowling fairly easy; secondly, to the great increase of good players, consequent of course upon the evergrowing popularity of the game. The first of these facts, the improved pitches, explains why thedifficult shooter that before 1875 was so fatal to batsmen at Lord’s has now become a very rare ball. Although the power of the bat seems to-day greater than that of the ball, the ground had no sooner become easy and overhand bowling allowed, than the utmost was done to equalize the attack and defence. Hence the bowling is much straighter than of old; long leg and long stop no longer have a place among the fieldmen, and the absence of long leg hitting and fielding makes the game less interesting for spectators; still the grounds improve, the scoring consequently increases. The feature which has transformed the bowling seems to be that now the best bowlers are fast with a break even on a hard wicket: whereas formerly they only broke on a sticky wicket. The still astounding power of the best bowlers is shown by the havoc they make when they get a sticky wicket to bowl on. In fine weather there is no serious obstacle to the stupendous scoring; the batting is of a more monotonous type than it used to be, and the play therefore less interesting to onlookers.
Here, as elsewhere, individual influence has been a transforming power. Between 1871 and 1883 when W. G. Grace was at his best, no fast bowler could do anything with him. Slow bowling, therefore, was adopted to keep down his run getting. As this batsman has taken his place among the veterans the old swift style has come into vogue once more. In the opinion of the greatest experts of modern cricket, as W. G. Grace is the most formidable bat, so Richardson of Surrey first, after him, Spofforth,the Australian, in his middle career, have been the most difficult bowlers.
The popularity of football, whose vogue is a recent Victorian growth is shown by the collection of 50,000 spectators at the Crystal Palace, to witness a final tie for the Association Cup. Admissions of 20,000 and 30,000 are daily events in all great towns; the money thus paid by the public has created the professional football player. Hence many questions on which authorities differ. The subject has divided the different football unions: the northern Rugby clubs having seceded to found a union of their own. The feuds among football legislators are thus as varied and violent as the forms of muscular ferocity which the game itself allows. That these can be minimized by a strenuous and keen referee is probable; that when this functionary is slack, professional football resembles the revival of the prize ring in disguise is admitted.[117]Football may seem to the mere observer almost to have become a misnomer, when carrying the ball is part of the game; when hands, shoulders, chest, fists, are nearly as active as legs and feet.
Among indoor games chess is that which has been transformed the most during our age. Here something may be attributed to the example of the Prince Consort, who was not, however, an invincible player, but more to his youngest son, the lamented Prince Leopold, who did a good deal to popularize the game. In point of universal popularity chess will never quite rival whist or billiards. It lacks the element of chance in the first, and the display of physical skill in the second which must ever chiefly fascinate men. The chess player, too, when well matched, uses more brain power than the whist player. Each has to keep the judgment perpetually alert. But the conventions in chess are left behind when the opening has been matured into the mid game, while the conventions of whist relieve the whist player continuously during the progress of the rubber.
Throughout the whole of this age chess has grown in favour among us. In most of our large towns for every chess club existing in 1847, there are ten or fifteen in 1897. On the Queen’s accession English chess players still felt the stimulus given to the game in London from 1780-95 by André François Danican, commonly known as ‘Philidor.’ Hence may be dated the earliest English chess clubs, and the scientific study of the game. Three years before the Victorian age began, a series of matches was played by the English Alexander MacDonell and the French Labourdonnais. In 1844, the English Howard Staunton defeated the French St Amant in a match which decided the championship of the world. This, followed in 1847by the publication of Staunton’sChessplayer’s Handbook, brought hundreds more to the board.
Another agency in the same direction was the presence in Europe of a young American, Paul Morphy. His play was, upon the whole, the finest the world has ever seen. He crossed the Atlantic in 1857; at the close of 1858 he had beaten every European noteworthy enough to try conclusions with him. The effect of these triumphs, won by a youth of twenty-one in the most difficult of all games, was electrical. No considerable town in the country was without its chess clubs. Nor is the influence more recently exercised by J. H. Blackburne less remarkable in its way. His skill in playing games without the board, exhibited in all parts of the United Kingdom, has raised up many imitators, but scarcely an equal.
With these great players there have come also fresh scientific discoveries in the conduct of the game itself; the first of these as to time was the Scotch Gambit, partially anticipated indeed by Italian writers in the last century, but owing its new name and later vogue to its adoption by the Scotch players in the correspondence match between Edinburgh and London, 1824 to 1826 and subsequently improved upon in 1837. About that latter year, too, W. D. Evans, of the Royal Navy, invented the Gambit which now bears his name. Stimulated by these British achievements, the Austrian players hit upon the Vienna or Queen’s Knights game which was first made famous during the tournament of 1873. In this country, most of these advances have been sensibly helped by the movement that theIllustrated London Newsbegan in 1842, which the whole press has since followed, of publishing chess problems.
An exhibition of feminine needlework justly forms a feature in the Commemoration shows of the period. In 1837 the decorative functions of the needle were oftener shown by English women of the middle classes than by acknowledged fashion leaders. In 1867 it is the middle class ladies who do most of the reading and the ultra-fashionable ones who do most of the fancy work. What transformations has this latter passed through? In 1857, as it had been in 1837, the mode was to work patterns for cushions and screens with Berlin wool on canvas. The squareness of the cross stitch was fatal to artistic effect; the covering thus decorated went out of fashion soon after Rowland’s Macassar hair oil ceased lavishly to be used, and heads no longer gleamed with unguent. The frame work was succeeded by that known to the Afghans as ‘boning,’ and to Britons as crochet, while chairs and sofas still needed some protection from locks not yet wholly unanointed. Even the crochet coverlets, tied with little pink ribbons, began to disappear when people left their hair to nature. But the artistic instinct was slowly helping forward this sort of work.
More popular than crochet had ever been, leather frames for pictures, cut out of leaves copied from Nature, or the pinning down of fern leaves on a soft cloth or silk began to be; for these Indian ink, used with a fine brush made an effective background. Ruskin’sgospel of following Nature had not been preached in vain. Accomplished women like the late Lady Marion Alford began to revive, with improvements of her own, the art of embroidering flowers, plants, birds and butterflies in wool or silk; while the stately arum lilies were used for screens, and gorgeous poppies for curtains. Next came a renascence of lace work. Many amateurs produced beautiful samples of pillow and point; but the work was trying to the eyes, and competed unfairly with the poor professionals of Honiton or Nottingham.
The early days of Ritualism popularized the copying of the borders of the old painted missals and prettily occupied many drawing rooms. Oil painting on pottery, wood, and glass came in during the early South Kensingtonian period. All young ladies now were water colour artists, or busied themselves with colouring panels and dados on their friend’s walls. Brass work was a later and not very long lived development. It was costly; it was noisy; the long suffering male gradually rose up against it. Iron work, the torturing into fantastic shapes of ductile strips of metal, was a little more enduring; but it required too much accuracy and too many instruments ever to be very popular. The beautiful glass painting in churches of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford was admired rather than reproduced.
Irish cabins supplied a modish industry to English drawing rooms in drawn linen work. The principle of this seems to be hem stitching, or unbinding work into the spaces left by the drawn threads. Poker work done within the outline traced by this simpleinstrument on a wooden board, is practised successfully by ladies of genius who could touch nothing without adorning it, but is scarcely to be commended to bunglers or in school rooms.[118]
THE REIGN OF LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS:—HOME AND COLONIAL