Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

During many years, as each decennial census has appeared, timid sociologists may well have felt misgivings whether England could continue to support her ever multiplying millions. The fears of science have not been verified by the facts of experience; thus exactly a quarter of a century since the census return of 1871 seemed to leave no escape from the conclusion, that population had already all but overtaken the means of subsistence, or that unless our numbers were at once arrested, it must in a very short time do so. Since 1871 we have added 7 millions to our population, the equivalent, that is, of 1,200,000 families and the same number of working men. Instead of the pressure on subsistence being greater, or the average condition of our people being worse, the exact opposite has occurred. In comparison with the state of things two decades since, the masses among us are to-day better housed, better clothed, better shod, better fed, better educated. There is, as in an earlier chapter was shown, a steady decrease of pauperism; the number of those who with their dependents of all kinds live on the result of their investments, is growing constantly. Whether it be due to the reduction in the cost of conveyance, to the opening up of fresh fields of supply, or to the appreciation of gold, the fall in prices of the chief articles of consumption, corn, sugar, tea, cotton, timber, is a visible and a great benefit to the country.

The fact that the increase between 1881 and 1891 fell short by about a quarter of a million of that which signalized the preceding ten years has been demonstrated by statistical experts of scientific authority not to indicate pressure on means of subsistence, but to be explicable by the stationariness of the population in many rural districts as well perhaps as by the disinclination, reflected from French and American precedent, of Englishwomen indefinitely to fulfil the functions of maternity.

During the period now spoken of, with the exception of mining, the great staple industries of the United Kingdom have none of them increased, while agriculture has decreased. It may, therefore, well seem problematical how the 1,200,000 fresh heads of families have found a livelihood for themselves and their belongings.

The explanation can only be that several new, as they are often nameless industries have during this time come into existence. Birmingham, the home of small industrial enterprises and in a less degree Sheffield, would of themselves explain the mystery. And here specific mention of a personal experience seems necessary. When the present writer by local observation was first acquiring material for such writing as that of which this book consists, he visited among other places Sheffield, under the obliging personal conduct of its then, and happily its present, Member, Mr A. J. Mundella. Close to one of the largest factories in that capital of cutlery and furnaces is a small establishment owned by a single proprietor who from that source of income alone, has realized a considerable fortune. This gentleman contracts for the purchase of all the refuse, the waste paper, the gilt or tin foil and other unconsidered trifles included which accumulate in the rubbish heaps of other premises. On their reaching his place of business, they are placed in a furnace; all the impurities are burnt out of them. There remains a nondescript residuum of charred and apparently worthless substances. Some of these, however, contain particles of gold dust; these are placed into a crucible; eventually there is often left a deposit of the precious metal which the jewellers are ready to buy. The gold watch chain worn by the Sheffield industrialist now spoken of, was of several carats, and was manufactured entirely out of the yield of this refuse. The incident is worth mentioning as a concrete suggestion drawn from real life of the protean methods of industrial money-making that are constantly being discovered by the ingenious and unabashed industry which in Virgil’s phrase, conquers all things.⁵⁰

CHAPTER XVIII
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA

Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day, and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the Queen’s reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey’s Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P. Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction. Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.

Constitutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty’s accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage. The Reform Bill of ’32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English history popular constituencies had been organized by that Measure. But while all householders rated at £10 and upwards had a voice in the national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished. At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had a disfranchising effect.⁵¹ All sections of the middle class were enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.

With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs, better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive régime which had been swept away. The new constitution was not the only parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch. In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh constituencies there had recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen’s hands. The old structure had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape did not assume its present proportions in all their completeness till the reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between 1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new Chamber.

Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People’s Representatives and the Barons were constituted into separate Assemblies, the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth meeting place that has been assigned to the Commons of England. It was not till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had assembled in the Chapter House.

The Speaker’s Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this roof were passed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Præmunire, the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen’s became the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England, but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year, was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen’s period. Nor would it be easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized shrine.

What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons’ House of Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a century’s absence.

The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasure that now make the House of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers’ Gallery; nor in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the necessity for Barry’s new building had arisen these improvements in the internal fittings of any House of Commons were anticipated. When in 1847 the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord Redesdale the blunt remark: ‘It will make the place like a casino.’ To-day the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured glass, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.

Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour. Looking through the swing door of the Representative Chamber, the parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the compartment just above the reporters’ benches, and that is known to-day by the name of the Ladies’ Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year of the present century.

In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a balustrade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted surreptitiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834 fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the Confessor’s palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present St Stephen’s where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two Assemblies were exchanged.

In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was made for ladies. By the report of the select committee of 1836 this fresh accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following year, the House ordered⁵² that a place should be provided where, with less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp balustrade, ladies could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated to them seems to have been behind the Speaker’s chair, if not actually beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative situation as possible. The Ladies’ Gallery of to-day as it exists just above the Reporters’ box is divided into three parts. The western third is reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady’s name. Here she receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her own sex. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for the Ladies’ Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the balustrade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus, when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below. Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry’s plan had become an architectural fact that the wives and daughters of the people’s elect were delivered from these two predicaments.

To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5 o’clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at Gunter’s in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as yet no great appearance of success.

Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the parliamentary precinct, the sex that is no longer ‘suppressed,’ pervades the place at all hours. The Members’ dining room, where male strangers can be invited, is not yet open to guests of our new ecclesiazusæ. All other parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the basement a room has been discovered in which the fair guests of Members can be entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior of the Peers’ Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an assembly of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all the other modish adjuncts of 5 o’clock tea. This they have done since 1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special habitué of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a whole regiment of tea room nymphs.

The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her sex controls votes and vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same sex records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary influence already established beyond doubt, the mothers and daughters of England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?

The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have passed since Mr Disraeli’s oft reiterated remark that the future of English politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amusement of visitors to the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the Assembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen’s reign the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of their Form. Thus, ‘If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!’ is the opening often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the country gentlemen that they were, have been replaced by men whose antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.

Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to be true. A glance sufficed to show that these ‘men of metal and of acres’ were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this class lingered at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire. If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely beneath the compact sturdy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his class ceased to be known in their places.

These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them. These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his excellence of parliamentary manner, and his maintenance of historic standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of Mr Gladstone. With a pang they anticipated the day when his withdrawal would rob the Assembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first assembly of gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen’s accession, in the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881, after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of the spolia opima.

With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful quotation in the House of Commons from classical authors. Not indeed for want of classical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W. Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.⁵³ The simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have passed into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable gentlemen illustrate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by an epigram, they go for their tropes and ideas, not to the library, but to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be said to have passed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the shortest space of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.

The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the circumstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, the sudden growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre Royal St Stephen’s. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the title of the play, or the nature of the discussion.

The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the ‘down-right’ Shippon, as Pope calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, ‘He is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.’ The theatrical and parliamentary analogy might be illustrated much further. One or two more instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact analogue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising is the signal for a burst of anticipatory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell. He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he pointed his invective.

Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity as the Queen’s Speech, or the Debate on the Address.

Other rôles are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli characteristically styled ‘the children of the Church.’ Of this section, during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief. Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted look, had a place. The burly presence of Sir John Mowbray, the less robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University, belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction. The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical defenders.

During the Queen’s earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name, was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so preponderantly came from the upper class of society as to give the Assembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.

From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100 to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions to the House made by the Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland 8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The Measure, therefore, which created popular constituencies and with them a popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen’s numerically unaltered. As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said, revolutionized the Assembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchisement of 8 English constituencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658. An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emancipation of the agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchisement balances the English enfranchisement. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.

While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstone no diminution of ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform Act. But, it is said, as our constitution has become more democratic, our popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by competitive debaters of smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, cockcrowing amongst them, that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty that some have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be brought in. The early practitioners of obstruction seized upon this issue to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.