The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (14 page)

The British soldier was given a small island for his birthplace and the whole world as his grave. Including Indian sepoys, there were about 356,000 soldiers in the army—at the time of Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, Rome’s legions had numbered 300,000 men—including 55 line battalions scattered about India, Ireland, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Ceylon, Malta, Egypt, Gibraltar, Canada, Singapore, the West Indies, South Africa, Barbados, and Mauritius. Their epitaph may be found today on sinking gravestones: “For Queen and Empire.” It is inadequate. They died for more than that. So vast an Empire, so vigorous a society, could have been neither built nor held without staunch ideological support, a complex web of powerful beliefs, powerfully held. Alfred North Whitehead defined a civilization in spiritual terms, and Christopher Dawson, in
The Dynamics of World History,
said: “Behind every great civilization there is a vision.” What was the vision of imperial Britain?

Jingoism was part of it, or rather one of its outward manifestations, and it wasn’t confined to the music halls. On the slightest excuse, Londoners in the city’s rookeries hung out bunting and gay streamers, crisscrossing mews and alleys where washing was usually hung to dry. Behind the calls to honor, duty, and glory lay the Victorians’ firm belief in obedience—absolute obedience to God, the Queen, and one’s superiors, in the family as much as in the army. It was a time of pervasive authoritarianism. The Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon wrote of the Victorian wife that her husband “has many objects in life which she does not quite understand; but she believes in them all, and anything which she can do to promote them, she delights to perform.”
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Unquestioning submission to orders was taught to schoolboys as soon as they reached the age of awareness; they recited “The Death of Nelson,” “Drake’s Drum,” “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Every story for Victorian children had a point, a moral; usually one of dutifulness. Winston Churchill was four years old when the most popular glorifier of discipline, G. A. Henty, published the first of his eighty novels for children. With loyalty went courage, as witness Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Alice, the Ugly Duckling, and Tom Thumb.

War was Henleyized, and such ancient institutions as the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Church of England were venerated. This allegiance to tradition accounts for the immense popularity of Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
and the flood of best-selling historical novels: Scott’s
Ivanhoe,
Bulwer-Lytton’s
Last Days of Pompeii,
Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped,
Charles Reade’s
Cloister and the Hearth,
Stanley Weyman’s
Under the Red Robe,
Charles Kingsley’s
Westward Ho!
and Harrison Ainsworth’s
Old St. Paul’s.
Reverence for the past was especially strong in the church. The devout took the Bible literally, assumed the existence of an afterlife, and believed that the only significance of life on earth was as a preparation for eternity. That blind faith could have flourished in an age of intellectual ferment may be puzzling, but the Victorians could rationalize anything; for them, doubts raised by evolution, for example, were resolved by Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
. By the time a youth of good family had reached manhood, he had heard more than a thousand sermons. He could not matriculate at Oxford, or graduate from Cambridge, until he had signed the church’s Thirty-Nine Articles. Days of Humiliation, such as the one commemorating the Mutiny martyrs, signified national atonement. The Sabbath was sacred. To be sure, half the population stayed away from weekly services—when the Archbishop of Canterbury grieved that the church was losing the working people, Disraeli replied, “Your Grace, it has never had them”—but this was a matter of propriety, not piety.
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The poor were only too well aware that they were unwelcome. Nevertheless, they knew their Bible, knew their hymns; the ancestors of workmen who read nothing today were familiar with
Pilgrim’s Progress
and
Paradise Lost
and could quote from them.

The middle classes, who were always in their pews, if not singing in choirs, cultivated evangelical seriousness, Arnoldian earnestness, and the eagerness of Bagehot. They loved maxims. “Attend church, abstain from drink, read a serious newspaper, put your money in the bank,” they told one another. And:

Carlyle implored them to devote themselves to work, which was sending coals to Newcastle. They had already made a cult of toil. It dominated their lives, and not just in London. A French visitor to the Midlands in the 1870s wrote: “On entering an office, the first thing you see written up is: ‘You are requested to speak of business only.’ ”
Bradshaw’s Handbook to the Manufacturing Districts
described “the utmost order and regularity” in the enormous textile mills of Ancoats and Chorlton, and said that visitors were discouraged because they “occupy the time of an attendant, and disturb the attention of operatives throughout the mill. The loss accruing from this cause is frequently more than can be readily estimated.” Until the year of Churchill’s birth, working-class children started in the mills on their ninth birthday; then the age was raised to ten. When Parliament passed a “short-time” bill limiting workers to a sixty-hour week, employers were outraged. Safety measures, as the term is understood today, were unknown. This led to what Professor Geoffrey Best calls “Death’s continuing Dance around the scene of labour.” Toilers in phosphorus factories suffered from “fossy jaw.” A thousand miners were killed each year, and more than three thousand railway workers killed or maimed. The proliferation of moving parts was lethal, but mill owners airily dismissed the problem: “Workers
will
be careless.” Protests were few and unheard. Writing in
The Uncommercial Traveller,
Dickens quoted a Shoreditch woman: “Better be ulcerated and paralyzed for eighteenpence a day… than see the children starve.” Yet, astonishingly, she made no complaint. Like her Queen, she believed that all work, even drudgery, was sacred. The Victorians were never more Victorian than when they stood in church, or around a Salvation Army band, belting out “Art Thou Weary?”
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Though safer than mill hands, the middle classes drove themselves just as hard in pursuit of “respectability,” which was not, as Shaw acidly noted, the same thing as morality. Gilbert’s Pirate King sang that piracy was more honest than respectability, and in
H.M.S. Pinafore
the reproachful Captain Corcoran tells Buttercup that it would have been “more respectable” if she had gone ashore before nightfall. Respectability, in short, was largely a matter of appearances. It was fragile; the slightest lapse could shatter it. Those who retained it were, in G. M. Young’s words, forever fearful that “an unguarded look, a word, a gesture, a picture, or a novel, might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart, and the same word or gesture might betray a lingering affinity with the class below.” Ridiculing the Victorians is easy, and nearly everyone who has written of them since their departure has done it. They were hypocritical, snobbish, maudlin, fanatical about “moral rectitude” and the superiority of the British “race,” devoted to Augustan “order, regularity, and refinement of life.”
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The books on their shelves told you that they played their games according to Hoyle, toured England as directed by
Bradshaw’s Weekly Guide to the Railways,
were instructed in housekeeping by Mrs. Beeton and guided abroad by Baedeker and Cook. Always deferential (Bagehot’s favorite word), they dreamed that their daughters might marry someone in
Who’s Who
or, even better, in Burke’s
Peerage
and
Baronetage.
At the table they watched their tongues. Legs were “limbs,” and anyone wanting to use such words as “disemboweled” or “pelvis” employed another language or remained silent.

Palmerston had pointed the way for those who obeyed the rules; he extolled the nation’s social system as one “in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which providence has assigned to it; while at the same time each individual is constantly trying to raise himself, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct and by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.” This sent them to public reading rooms, Mechanics Institutes, mutual improvement groups, and public lectures and displays. Not only did they intend to better themselves; they insisted that the lower classes follow their example, until Dickens protested: “The English are, so far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse. They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them!”
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Yet even Dickens believed that true love and marriage led to a horse and carriage—that respectability was rewarded by a rise in social standing. The nouveaux riches Victorians, with their sudden access to prosperity and power, were certainly naive, and often vulgar. They worshiped false gods (the theme of
Dombey and Son
) and they failed to meet the standards they set for themselves. But certainly that is loftier than the abandonment of all standards. The stars of social navigation which they tried to follow were stars—genuine ideals, even if unattainable. Their “civilizing mission” in far lands was not only well-meant; at its best it was also noble. The English way of life, which they believed was exportable, was at least as estimable as the way of life the Americans tried to export a century later, with less success. When the Romans conquered a province, the glories of Roman citizenship were slow to follow. The moment the Union Jack raced up a colonial flagstaff, speech was free and habeas corpus the right of all. Among distant people a parliament became a status symbol, like having a national airline today, but more admirable. And if the Victorians’ system was flawed, they knew it. Believing in individual and collective reform, the best of their intellectuals, like the Americans who followed them, practiced vigorous, often savage, self-criticism. In the fine arts, London was a suburb of Paris and Berlin, but in literature it led the way. Carlyle, Dickens, John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Herbert Spencer, and the contributors to
Yellow Book
were all Victorian rebels.

The chief difference between rebels then and rebels now is that they saw the world as rational, harmonious, teleological. Cartesians to a man, they believed that life was rational and mechanical and that progress was as inevitable as evolution and moved in the same direction. Their world, in Hans Koning’s happy phrase, was “an unthreatened world.” The earth seemed to be on the verge of being totally understood. Its flora, fauna, tides, and mountain ranges had been catalogued, measured, and minutely described. Some parts were still unexplored, but steamships would soon fix that. So the Victorian intellectuals felt a sense of confidence and optimism. They never doubted that the globe would always be dominated by Caucasian men. If the white masters differed among themselves, their governments would resort to arms. That prospect didn’t alarm them. “Unwarlike,” indeed, was a pejorative. It signified vitiation. The prime weakness of the darker races was their lack of martial spirit. Kipling urged England’s youth: “Bite the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.” Not that there was much to fear; the Industrial Revolution had not yet caught up with weaponry. The Gatling and the Maxim were clever gadgets but, it was thought, without potential. Bloodshed in Britain’s little colonial wars was relatively light. The eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
actually told its readers that “losses in battle are… almost insignificant when compared with the fearful carnage wrought by sword and spear.”
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I
f any Victorian institution was cherished above all others, it was the home. “Home Sweet Home”—which sold 100,000 copies in its first year—was the most popular song of the century, even among workingmen who sang it in pubs because their own homes were unbearable. When an Englishman crossed his threshold he was in his castle, with almost absolute power over everyone within. That wasn’t true of his wife, but if diaries and letters are to be trusted, she enjoyed their hearth even more than he did. It was a good thing they liked it. They hadn’t much choice. Divorce usually meant ruin. It was almost impossible to obtain; a woman had to prove, not only that her husband was an adulterer, but that he was also guilty of desertion, cruelty, incest, rape, sodomy, or bestiality. Simple infidelity on his wife’s part was all a man need show. However, the moment he picked up his decree, he was an outcast. Victoria dismissed one divorced member of her court even though he was the injured party. Often families turned a divorced relative’s picture to the wall and spoke of him, if at all, as though he were dead.