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

CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL GROWTH OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Private and individual efforts which have quickened the sense of citizenship in England and bridged the gulf between rich and poor. Historic and abiding influences of the Young England movement of 1846. How it facilitated the Factory Acts and prompted private owners to open their parks to the public. Temple Gardens and Lincoln’s Inn. Effect produced by the brothers Mayhew with their London Labour and London Poor during the fifties, and also by certain articles in the Times and Quarterly Review. Lord Shaftesbury, the Poor Man’s Peer. Origin of Public School and University settlements in great towns. Edward Denison and his friends before Arnold Toynbee. Individual example acting on public or corporate owners. Educate the public and actuate legislation when the time is ripe for it. Sir Erasmus Wilson’s gift of Cleopatra’s Needle preceded beautification of Thames Embankment.

The practical sense of citizenship by which, in the preceding chapter, the Jewish community in England has been seen to be animated is among native Englishmen themselves pre-eminently the development of the Victorian era. Its manifestation in the capital was preceded by its active display in the provinces. Few individuals of our epoch have more appreciably and definitely impressed the image of their genius on the social history of their age, than Benjamin Disraeli, first, and only, Earl of Beaconsfield. This is not the occasion on which to examine his position in, and services to, the public life of the period, as well as his place in the inner economy of the polite world. In the social movement of the industrial classes of the community, especially in their relations with their more highly placed neighbours, the work done by this remarkable man is not less conspicuous than it is seemingly enduring.¹⁷ The political school which, at the outset of his career his genius created, that of Young England in the ninth year of the present reign, did not last long as a political organization. It was never intended to do so. Of the little coterie whose inspiring literature is contained in the trilogy of romance that is constituted by Coningsby, Sibyl, and Tancred, the sole survivor is the Duke of Rutland. Even he, perhaps, is better known to many readers as Lord John Manners. He was first introduced to the general public by the style of ‘Lord Henry Sidney’ in his friend’s earliest novel. With pardonable pride in a letter incorporated by the editor of the Quarterly Review in an article on Sibyl,¹⁸ the Duke of Rutland points back to the undoubted service which the sentiment generated by the Young Englanders rendered to Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, and to Mr Oastler in their gradually successful efforts to pass the First Factory Act as well as generally to soften, perhaps even to sweeten the daily lot of the suffering, the defenceless, and the poor. At that time, the humane and religious fervour of Lord John Russell had not yet leavened, as it soon afterwards did, aristocratic Whiggism. Mr Gladstone’s spiritualizing touch was still to be laid upon the party that he was yet to join. The scientific economists of the school of Peel, comprising as they did Cobden and Bright, were the enemies of the movement. Even the pioneer of that movement, who afterwards nobly vindicated his claim to the title of the Poor Man’s Peer, was indignantly asked what he, Lord Shaftesbury, had been doing, when Lord Ashley was fighting for the Ten Hours Bill of 1844.¹⁹

His virtuous indignation obscured this critic’s view of the fact that the peer he praised was identical with the peer he denounced.

If this were the context in which to illustrate the political permanence of the Young England agency, it would be enough to point to the perpetuation in the knights, dames, and chancellors of the Primrose League, of the sensibility to picturesque or semi-feudal effects which inspired Disraeli and his friends in their manipulation of Conservative sentiment. These qualities, at an interval of just half a century, were to reappear in Disraeli’s aptest²⁰ pupil, Lord Randolph Churchill. As a social and unpolitical testimony to the quickening power of the new England propaganda, when its promulgation was an affair of yesterday, it may be mentioned that at the Queen’s accession, as for many years thereafter, it was comparatively an unknown thing for the private parks surrounding gentlemen’s houses in the provinces to be used as people’s pleasure grounds. Show places on such a scale as Blenheim or Chatsworth existed then as they exist to-day. Even in the case of the former of these, in præ-Coningsby or ante-Victorian days, it is not likely to have occurred to a Duke of Marlborough, as it did occur to the seventh successor of John Churchill, being the eighth Duke, to engage a special train to convey several thousands of East End children from their native courts and alleys to the undulating woodlands of his Oxfordshire park. Within a few years of the appearance of Coningsby, Eaton was only one of the great parks which, so long as certain reasonable restrictions were observed, became not less free to town or country labourers with their wives and children than Kensington Gardens, or, as what till our age was called Battersea Fields.²¹ Royal patronage had not been withheld from the movement. The memories of the present generation stop short of a time when Windsor Park, together with the gardens and terraces of the Castle, was inaccessible to excursionists by the Great Western Railway to view the natural panorama bright with all the beauties of ‘blossom week,’ or to hear the band on the slopes play the favourite pieces of the Queen. The capital was not yet fully abreast with this piece of social progress. Long after the gardens and the general maintenance of the public parks endowed them with fresh attractions, the private pleasure grounds of corporate owners were closed. The new philanthropic reforms were introduced here by the noble structure of the Thames Embankment. The Temple Gardens had, indeed, long been open. The flower beds and their careful tending were still to come. The Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn were more exclusive. The new buildings, as they are called, flanking this enclosure, date from 1845. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ theatre had disappeared in 1848. Nearly half a century was still to elapse before the leafy paradise in the heart of this austere kingdom of Chancery law was to ring with childish voices from the courts and alleys which abut on Chancery Lane.

Within fifty years of the Queen’s accession, the personal example of that Lord Shaftesbury whose name has been mentioned already was to bear rich fruit. In the Times newspaper during the earlier sixties, there appeared a leading article on the subject of the homeless poor of London. It was equally noticeable for the humanity which inspired it, and for its vigorous and graphic expression. Not long before this, an interest, then entirely new, had been imparted to the grim subject by an essay in the Quarterly Review based on the then comparatively recent volumes about London labour and the London poor by the brothers Mayhew. A host of writers have treated this subject subsequently. Many of them, conspicuously the late Thomas Archer, with a thoroughness and freshness of knowledge scarcely inferior to that with which it had been approached by the Mayhews. But in their hands the topic was absolutely new. Without hyperbole, in literal truth, the West End was then not only ignorant of how the East End lived, but with very rare individual exceptions, entirely indifferent to the mingled squalor and tragedy of that existence. Horace Mayhew survived to a vigorous and remarkably handsome old age, dying only a few years ago. His work on the deeper depths of London poverty was the one effort of his life. All his energies were thrown into it. The work when finished, if it did not exhaust him, left him so depressed by the misery which he had been investigating that he had no mind to return to the lighter departments of periodical letters wherein his career commenced, and his earlier reputation was made. A long period of social indifference and legislative lethargy as to the condition of the very poor in the capital and in other great towns now ensued. In 1865, the first editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Frederick Greenwood, conceived the idea of commissioning his brother James, a well known writer on social subjects, to pass a night in the casual ward of a workhouse, rumours of abuses in the management of which were then attracting attention. About a year after this, a winter of exceptional severity afflicted the poorest portions of London, near the Docks and elsewhere, with the combined calamities of lack of labour, and as a consequence with famine, firelessness, and pestilence. Three friends, each of them then young men, all Conservatives by conviction and all under the influence of the philanthropic teaching of Disraeli’s novels, were in the habit of frequently meeting with a view of maturing some scheme for the relief of that destitution at the East End, with which existing agencies of help had proved themselves impotent to deal. One of these belonged to a well known Shropshire family, Baldwyn Leighton.²² Another, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, has since become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The third was a son of a former Bishop of Salisbury. Edward Denison was equally quick to master the dominant facts in a social situation, and to take the action that seemed the best thereupon. Within a few days, he decided that the first step towards remedying the evils recorded morning after morning in the newspapers must be personal acquaintance with their magnitude, and their origin, as well as with the habits and homes of the distressed masses. Denison, therefore, established himself in a small house in Whitechapel, the very heart of the necessitous district.

Since then, the example thus set has been followed frequently. Denison of course was sometimes visited in his East End lodging by his West End friends. These returned, bringing with them a more vivid sense of the industrial suffering just outside the doors of the polite world than literary descriptions, however graphic, could convey to the perfunctory reader of the morning paper. Other incidents were to prove unexpectedly instrumental in deepening the interest of well-to-do Londoners in their destitute neighbours. Within a year or two of Denison’s mission, the Fenian outrage at Clerkenwell Prison not only robbed many poor families of their breadwinners, but left them literally homeless. Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister, sent down his private secretary to distribute alms among the victims of the explosion. Mr Montague Corry, since Lord Rowton,²³ saw sad and strange sights during this charitable errand. His recital of these experiences was followed by liberal subscriptions to the sufferers from Pall Mall and Mayfair. From that day to this, not only has the stream of charity flowed less sluggishly; there has been also awakened a new personal and intelligent interest in the condition of the most squalid of poverty’s perennial children. That feeling has not evaporated in charitable doles. Substantial funds have been organized by private or corporate munificence for improving the dwellings of the poor and for practically testifying the neighbourly solicitude of more fortunate citizens.

The demoralizing effects of public executions were exposed by Thackeray. His essay, ‘Going to see a man hung’ gave shape, and eventually success to the movement for the hanging of criminals within, and not outside, the prison walls. So, at an earlier day, Dickens, who of all our greatest writers was the first to interest the public in the waifs and strays in the London streets, had initiated in Oliver Twist a social demand for workhouse reform. The best causes are liable to abuse and caricature. There have been moments when, since the Mayhews wrote, sympathy with the lot of the London poor has seemed in danger of becoming overdone, or being degraded into a fad, a craze, a fashionable hobby, and thus of ceasing to be an actuating conviction. The modish popularity of ‘slumming’ as it used a few years ago to be called had of course its absurd aspects, but was, nevertheless, not an unhealthy sign. It could be compared to the froth upon the surface which concealed, and did not necessarily weaken, the stimulating and strengthening qualities below. Whether this philanthropic curiosity was displayed in town or country, the social truth of which it constituted evidence was that the commercial spirit and its harsher influences, not unfortunately uncommon among the upper classes in the early days of the new poor law, were becoming obsolete, and that the class fusion born of class sympathy to which De Tocqueville has attributed our later freedom from organic revolutions was in steady process of evolution. Edward Denison came first of all, and could only see with the eye of faith the fruits which his example was to bear in the beneficent experiment of Arnold Toynbee and in the People’s Palace. So it has continued, till to-day the University and public school settlements in the East End of London and in other great cities are institutions not less deeply rooted than the parochial system itself. The kindly work is not confined to a single sex. St Margaret’s House, Bethnal Green, the ladies’ branch of the Oxford agency, presided over by Mrs Burrows, is as firmly established as the homes founded by Trinity or Christ Church in the same neighbourhood. Throughout the English speaking world, the same beneficent inspiration seems to have been almost simultaneously operative. One hears of analogous enterprises in the great cities of Australia and in the United States. The American movement even claims seniority over the English. Andover House, Boston, was in full working order before the cognate agencies in our own capital were complete. The devotion of Trade Unionists to their Union has been employed as a figure to illustrate the mutual loyalty to a great and good idea of those brought up in the same College or University or public school. This reciprocal enthusiasm has now been active and productive long enough to entitle it to the praise of solidity and permanence. The public and legal provisions for quickening the sense of citizenship in town and country will presently be examined in detail. That which seems important to bear in mind is that the legislature did not interpose its machinery until the private agencies, social or moral, already recapitulated, had done their work. Even the improvement in the open spaces of the capital which is so marked a feature in metropolitan progress during the last few decades, has been helped or encouraged largely by private initiative. The late Mr Matthew Arnold recognized as a graceful and original act of public service, the transport of Cleopatra’s Needle from Alexandria to London at the cost of Sir Erasmus Wilson. Before the obelisk was established on the Thames Embankment the municipal authorities had prepared a home for it and converted into daintily kept pleasure grounds the little enclosures by the side of the riverain promenade.

CHAPTER VII
THE NEW ERA IN ENGLISH PARISHES

Reflection of the Estates of the Realm in the old divisions of rural life in England. Modifications in the system introduced by recent changes in local government. The English village as it now is. The public house as a place of resort largely displaced by the parish meeting room. The quickened sense of civic life shown in the speech and bearing of the villagers. The exact functions of the Parish Council, or Meeting. Relations between Parish and District Councils. Retrospect of English Poor Law system. Greater popularity of the District Councils. Other duties than of Poor Law Guardians discharged by District Councils. Clergy and Squires. How affected. District Board’s composition. Its relations with magistrates, and popular feeling.

Before 1894, English parishes in rural districts possessed, as they still do, three centres of local life. The State was represented by the squire, or chief landowner, often, as may still be the case, an absentee. The Rectory, or Vicarage, with the neighbouring church was the geographical depository of spiritual power. The village inn, or public house, was the place of popular meeting, and with its adjoining skittle-alley was the source of popular amusement. Here the gossip of the neighbourhood was discussed, or the local newspaper read. London journals did not, and do not, often enter remote neighbourhoods in the provinces. The doings of the Imperial Parliament, or the Concert of the European Powers were, as they remain, of little interest to the rural tillers of the soil in comparison with the wages paid by the farmers in the district, the supervision, or the lack of it, exercised by lords of the land over the cottages of the poor. Nothing more struck the stranger who wished to acquire information as to the daily lot of the rural population, and as to opportunities for their improvement, than the prevailing ignorance or indifference about the facts of their daily life. It was not exactly Christian acquiescence in chronic want and squalor as a Divine dispensation. It was rather an unreasoning suspicion as to the motives of the enquirer, and as to the consequences to themselves of the answers given, which, if it did not seal the villagers’ lips, restricted their replies to inarticulate grunts or evasive generalities.

Within the fifth decade of the present reign, all this has either changed entirely or has been appreciably modified. The public house, or inn, stands indeed where it stood. The tap is no longer the parish club room. Even the skittle-alley has lost many of its attractions. The authority of the Manor House has been divested of the superstitious sanctions with which it was once clothed. The squire and the parson are regarded as well-meaning persons with a good deal of human nature, after all, about them. As for the geographical centre of village existence, it is no longer the roof tree of the publican, but the village meeting hall. This, in the majority of cases, would never have existed but for the initiative of the clergyman. He it is who with no parliamentary sessions to attend during half the year, with no town house always ready to receive him, passes most of his time among his own people; and thus combines in his own person, very often, the two separate principles of Church and State. This village assembly room is furnished with the chief county and market town newspapers. It is without carpets or draperies, and does not consequently retain tobacco smoke. If, therefore, the villager likes a dry pipe while he reads, or chats, it may at stated hours be allowed him. Gradually, therefore, he has grown to regard the place as his betters regard the House of Commons, as the best club of which he knows. The publican may suffer, but all other members of the little community have gained.

At the present moment, the manner and the countenances of the rural company, apart from the subjects of their more than usually animated conversation, indicate a season of exceptional importance. The truth is, that an election for the village parliament is imminent. Whether the name be parish council or parish meeting, the reality is the same. That reality since Sir Henry Fowler’s amendment in 1894 practically implies Home Rule for every parish in rural England. The franchise is in effect universal. Without regard to income or place of domicile every parishioner whose name occurs in the local government or parliamentary register has a vote, and is in addition entitled to attend the parish parliament. So systematic is the preservation of the separate individuality of every village, that where the number of inhabitants is below²⁴ 300, and the gathering is called a meeting, not a council; no association of that particular village with others is allowed to supersede the separate meeting. The executive body is thus always the parish meeting. The grouping order necessary for the amalgamation of parishes for council purposes is never given without the closest scrutiny by the County Council first, or confirmed by the Imperial authority in London afterwards. In no case is the parish meeting dispensed with. Amongst the groups we have seen discussing their affairs, one might have noticed women as well as men; for though by the decision of the Court of Appeal in the case of Drax v. Ffook, women can vote as occupiers and not as owners, they are, whether spinsters or wives, eligible to be parish councillors. Should the parish be without a village hall, the schoolroom is the usual place of assembly. The one spot peremptorily forbidden by the law is the public house; unless no other rendezvous be procurable for love or money. It is still too early to pronounce definitely as to the permanent effect of these institutions. The general tendency has perhaps been towards the falsification alike of the extreme hopes and fears which they first raised. Their jurisdiction includes all the functions of the old vestries and their officers, together with other novel and more drastic prerogatives. The discussions are often limited to dull details of mechanical routine, but are sometimes, as to-day, sufficiently animated. In the typical parish (a generalization from actual experience), the question of opening or closing footpaths across fields chances closely to divide parochial opinion. A little time ago, the vexed problem was the limits of a village green which had been so much diminished by encroachments as to cease almost to exist. Another issue that a little while hence will furnish material for debates not less vivacious is that of allotments for cottagers. Here as in the other cases, there is a strong faction on either side. A heavy parochial whip has been sent out by the two sets of leaders. If the matter is decided in the affirmative, and the allotment or village green extension, as the case may be, is carried, a measure of expropriation may follow, should the County Council, as superior body, sanction the scheme, and should the Local Government Board, after hearing the case of the dissidents, confirm the parochial proposals. As a check to parochial extravagance, the money to be advanced by the central authority is not to exceed one-half the value of the local rates. Inheriting the power of the vestries which they displaced, the bodies now mentioned have in their hands the appointment of overseers of the poor. ‘One man, one vote’²⁵ is the universal principle. The employers of labour, that is the farmers, are consequently liable to be placed in the minority by their servants. Hence proceeded the assertion that the signal withdrawal of the farmers from the Liberal party, as being morally responsible for the measure, largely brought about the crushing defeat of the Gladstonians at the general election of 1895. If the farmers were animated by any such resentment towards the party which they identified with the real authorship of the Act, the feeling has already to a great extent passed away. What remains of it will no doubt evaporate as eventually sentimental grievances of this kind seldom fail in England to do. Impartial evidence, gathered at first hand, does indeed show that the increased mutual knowledge generated between farmers and their hands in the parish meeting room has resulted in an actual improvement of the relations between the two classes. All the national processes which legislative change sets in motion have worked slowly in England. It was not till the third or fourth appeal to the constituencies under Household Franchise was made that the permanent results of the peaceful revolution in 1868 could be computed with even approximate accuracy. The final consequences of the extension of the franchise to counties by the Liberals in 1884 have not yet declared themselves. It would, therefore, be premature as yet to make any definite deductions, social or political, as to the working of a system which has been operative only since 1894.

One thing more about them may, however, be said. As in the case of the farmers where, with a fair measure of conciliation and tact, the occupiers of the soil find their official intercourse with its tillers unexpectedly harmonious, so as regards the relations between the villagers and the clergyman, in the position of the latter as the spiritual, and often inevitably to a great degree the temporal, head of the community. Briefly stated, the effect of the Parish Meeting, or Parish Council, is to restore to the villagers certain of the rights which, in the old Manor Courts, they had possessed. Where the clergyman combines with the practical sense of an educated man a freedom from a suspicious antipathy to the civic activities of his flock, there is not only no jealousy of the parson’s intervention in the deliberations of the parish hall; but the experience which he is likely to bring to the work is welcomed by the councillors as a valuable aid to their discussions. If, when standing for a seat on the council, the rector issues an address savouring of dictatorial self-assertion; if from his pulpit he prescribes a plan for the conduct of these elections; the reverend gentleman may find himself at the bottom of the poll. When, however, he deals with his parishioners on the assumption of their equality in all non-religious matters with himself, he disarms or prevents jealousy. He has a fair chance of being chosen by acclamation to the president’s chair at the little Board.²⁶ Parish Councils have for the first time in the rural history of England developed a sense of responsibility among those to whom a decade ago the idea of rural citizenship, with obligations as well as rights, was unintelligible. They have, therefore, impressed the minds of those concerned in them with some sense of power. Thus far, no tendency has been displayed to use that power in a revolutionary fashion. A body which, like the average parish parliament, numbers from five to eleven, is not likely to prove a tempestuously democratic, or violently revolutionary assemblage. Finally, though, on the requisition of three members to the chairman the council may be convened at any time, its actual convention is never brought about more than thrice, and seldom more than once in a twelvemonth. Not the least good which this institution carries with it in most neighbourhoods is its creation of wider, less mean, more liberal interests in daily life, and with these interests, subjects of conversation for the village community more generous than private affairs of individual households; – what Hodge, the ditcher, does so late at night in the neighbourhood of the squire’s game preserves; how much money the carpenter’s wife paid for her new bonnet; or how her daughters afford so gaudy a display of Sunday finery. That the new machinery has thus far worked with less friction than might have been expected may be inferred from the statistics courteously forwarded to the present writer from the Local Government Board under date August 7th 1896. As has been said already, the Imperial authority at Whitehall acts as arbitrator in all cases of difference between the popular Parish Councils and the more exclusive County Councils as to the acquisition of land for allotments. At the time now mentioned, it was the calculation of the President of the Local Government Board that four cases had occurred of appeals by Parish Councils against the refusal of the County Council to make the allotment order; and that in fourteen cases in which orders have been made by County Councils, eight protests against them have reached the Local Government Board from persons immediately interested.

Ascending from the lowest deliberative unit in the new scheme of local self government one passes from the Parish Council to the District Council. If it can be questioned whether the average villager as yet fully appreciates the gift of power made to him by the legislature in 1894, no such doubt can exist as to those bodies that are a little higher in the deliberative scale, the District Councils. The local parliament in the parish hall may sometimes be unattended by a single cottager. The District Council, if it be not as yet popular, is at least never neglected. Seats on it were from the first objects of local ambition. This is only what might have been expected in an age, a marked feature of which is the quickened interest of all sections of the community in whatever affects the health or comfort of the labouring classes. The District Council, as its name implies, has a more than parochial dignity. Its jurisdiction is practically commensurate with the sphere of the old Rural Sanitary Authority. The relief of pauperism however, forms a first and special care of this body, the members of which are also the Guardians of the Poor. Its place of assembly is the chief small town of the neighbourhood; not indeed the County town, but generally a convenient town where there happens to be a railway station. The District Council has already contracted certain associations of local fashion. The ladies of the country side have entered warmly into its business, and often constitute a majority of its most active members. There is, of course, the complaint of impulsiveness brought against the District Councillors. Thus the domestic idea is regarded by them with more respect than it secured from their predecessors, the Boards of Guardians. Guardians were elected by the plural vote of the larger ratepayers. They had, moreover, to satisfy a property qualification in their own persons. District Councils in theory know nothing of, and in practice are affected little by, such conditions. The ex-officio magistrate, without which no Board of Guardians was complete, is systematically absent from the new District bodies. The personnel of the new Councils, which occupy a place midway between the Parish and the County assemblies, presents a notable contrast to that of the superseded Boards of Guardians. County magistrates are not, in virtue of that office, ordinary members of these bodies, which are almost solely elective. The dignity of the body, however, is well maintained. The chairman of the District Council becomes, in consequence of that position, a County magistrate with powers as plenary as if he were the nominee of the Lord Lieutenant. Sometimes, of course, the chairmen of the District bodies are already magistrates. That is, however, the exception. There now exist in the United Kingdom about a thousand elective magistrates, being chairmen of District Councils. By far the greater part of these are new to their legal responsibilities. A few are working men. One District Council in Northamptonshire is presided over by the master of a small railway station on the Midland line. Another has for its chairman an agricultural labourer; a third is controlled by an ex-policeman; a fourth by one who supports himself on the cultivation of sixteen acres of land. The effect of popular election is not limited to the discharge of those duties connected with pauperism and sanitation that are the primary concern of the District bodies. Assessment committees, and school attendance committees are both drawn from the District Councils. The latter of these, it is generally admitted, have done their work better since they ceased to be composed exclusively of employers of labour, and since they have become representative of industry as well.²⁷