Queen Victoria (5 page)

Dickens himself wrote
 
Hard Times
, dealing with the same subject. This appeared about the same time, and the two books should be read and compared, for, although
 
Hard Times
 
is not equal in any way to
 
North and South
, it is interesting. As Ruskin said of Dickens’ stories, “Allowing for the manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. . . . He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially
 
Hard Times
, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions.”

During all these years the ‘Chartists’ had been vainly struggling to force Parliament to proceed with reform of their grievances. In 1848 a monster Petition was to be presented to both Houses by their leaders, but London was garrisoned by troops under the Duke of Wellington on the fateful day, and the Chartist army broke up, never to be reunited. Quarrels among themselves proved, in the end, fatal to their cause.

A new party, the Christian Socialists, took their place; force gave way to union and co-operation. A new champion, Charles Kingsley, or ‘Parson Lot,’ stood forth as the Chartist leader.

The hard winter and general distress of the year 1848 nearly provoked another rising, and in his novel entitled
 
Yeast
 
Kingsley pictures the ‘condition of England’ question as it appeared to one who knew it from the seamy side. Especially did he blame the Church, which, he said, offered a religion for “Jacob, the smooth man,” and was not suited for “poor Esau.” This was indeed most true as regards the agricultural classes, where the want was felt of a real religion which should gain a hold upon a population which year by year was fast drifting loose from all ties of morality and Christianity.

The peasantry, once the mainstay of England and now trodden down and neglected, cannot rise alone and without help from those above them. “What right have we to keep them down? . . . What right have we to say that they shall know no higher recreation than the hogs, because, forsooth, if we raised them they might refuse to work -
for us
? Are
 
we
 
to fix how far their minds may be developed? Has not God fixed it for us, when He gave them the same passions, talents, tastes, as our own?”

The farm labourer, unlike his brothers in the North, had no spirit left to strike. His sole enjoyment - such as it was - consisted in recalling “‘the glorious times before the war . . . when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than were hands.’

“‘I say, vather,’ drawled out some one, ‘they say there’s a sight more money in England now than there was afore the war-time.’

“‘Ees, booy,’ said the old man, ‘but
 
it’s got into too few hands
.’“

The system of ‘sweating’ among the London tailors had grown to such an extent that Kingsley was determined, if possible, to put an end to it, and with this purpose in view he wrote
 
Cheap Clothes and Nasty
.

The Government itself, he declares, does nothing to prevent sweating; the workmen declare that “Government contract work is the worst of all, and the starved-out and sweated-out tailor’s last resource . . . there are more clergymen among the customers than any other class; and often we have to work at home upon the Sunday at their clothes in order to get a living.”

He followed this up with
 
Alton Locke
, dealing especially with the life and conditions of work of the journeymen tailors, and the Chartist riots. Both sides receive some hard knocks, for Kingsley was a born fighter, and his courage and fearlessness won him many friends, even among the most violent of the Chartists.

The character of Alton Locke was probably drawn from life, and was intended to be William Lovett, at one time a leader in the Chartist ranks. After a long fight with poverty, when he frequently went without a meal in order to save the money necessary for his education, he rose to a position of some influence. He was one of the first to propose that museums and public galleries should be opened on Sundays, for he declared that most of the intemperance and vice was owing to the want of wholesome and rational recreation. He insisted that it was necessary to create a moral, sober, and thinking working-class in order to enable them to carry through the reforms for which they were struggling. Disgust with the violent methods of many of his associates caused him at last to withdraw from their ranks.

Kingsley looked up to Carlyle as his master, to whom he owed more than to any other man. “Of the general effect,” he said, “which his works had upon me, I shall say nothing: it was the same as they have had, thank God, on thousands of my class and every other.”

When, finally, violent methods proved of no avail and the Chartist party dissolved, the democratic movement took a fresh lease of life. As Carlyle had already pointed out, the question of the people was a ‘knife and fork’ question - that is to say, so long as taxes were levied upon the necessities of life, the poorer classes, who could least of all afford to pay, would become poorer.

Sir Robert Peel was the first to remove this injustice, by substituting a tax upon income for the hundred and one taxes which had pressed so heavily upon the poor. Manufacturers were now able to buy their raw materials at a lower price, and need no longer pay such low wages to keep up their profits.

In 1845 Peel went a step farther, and in order to relieve the famine in Ireland, he removed the duty on corn. Thus, since corn could now be imported free, bread became cheaper.

The Corn Law Repealers had fought for years to bring this about. Their leader and poet, Ebenezer Elliott, declared that “what they wanted was bread in exchange for their cottons, woollens, and hardware, and no other thing can supply the want of that one thing, any more than water could supply the want of air in the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

It was not until there had been many riots and much bloodshed that the Irish Famine forced Peel at last to give way.

A third party of reformers were working for the same end. This was the ‘Young England’ party, whose leader was Disraeli, a rising young politician. By birth a Jew, he had joined the English Church and the ranks of the Tory party. His early works are chiefly sketches of social and political life and are not concerned with the ‘question of the People.’ He took as his motto the words Shakespeare puts into Ancient Pistol’s mouth,

Why, then the world’s mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open,

thus showing at an early age that he had a firm belief in his own powers. From the beginning of his career he never hesitated in championing the cause of the People, and declared that “he was not afraid or ashamed to say that he wished more sympathy had been shown on both sides towards the Chartists.”

The people had begun to look upon the upper classes as their oppressors, who were living in comfort upon the profits wrung from their poorer brethren.

Thomas Cooper in his Autobiography describes the reckless and irreligious spirit which continued poverty was creating among the half-starved weavers:

“‘Let us be patient a little longer, lads, surely God Almighty will help us.’ ‘Talk no more about thy Goddle Mighty,’ was the sneering reply; ‘there isn’t one. If there
 
was
 
one, He wouldn’t let us suffer as we do.’“

The Chartists were opposed to the Anti-Corn Law party, for they thought that the cry of ‘cheap bread’ meant simply ‘low wages,’ and was a trap set to catch them unawares.

The Young England party believed in themselves as the leaders of a movement which should save England through its youth. They were, however, known in Parliament in their early days as “young gentlemen who wore white waistcoats and wrote spoony poetry.”

‘Young England’ wished for a return of the feudal relations between the nobility and their vassals; the nobles and the Church, as in olden days, were to stretch out a helping hand to the poor, to feed the hungry, and succour the distressed. National customs were to be revived, commerce and art were to be fostered by wealthy patrons. The Crown was once more to be in touch with the people. “If Royalty did but condescend to lower itself to a familiarity with the people, it is curious that they will raise, exalt, and adore it, sometimes even invest it with divine and mysterious attributes. If, on the contrary, it shuts itself up in an august seclusion, it will be mocked and caricatured . . . if the great only knew what stress the poor lay by the few forms that remain, to join them they would make many sacrifices for their maintenance and preservation.”[6]

[Footnote 6: George Smythe, Viscount Strangford,
 
Historic Fancies
.]

It was to lay the views of his party and himself before the public that Disraeli published the three novels,
 
Coningsby
,
 
Sybil
, and
 
Tancred
.
 
Coningsby
 
deals with the political parties of that time, and is full of thinly-disguised portraits of people then living;
 
Sybil
, from which a quotation is given elsewhere, is a study of life among the working-classes;
 
Tancred
 
discusses what part the Church should take in the government of the people.

Though the life of the ‘Young England’ party was short, it succeeded by means of agitation in and out of Parliament in calling public attention to the harshness of the New Poor Law and the need for social reform.

Carlyle was again the writer who influenced the young Disraeli, for the latter saw that to accomplish anything of real value he must form his own party and break loose from the worn-out beliefs and prejudices of both political parties. Though in later days he will be remembered as a statesman rather than as a novelist, it is necessary to study those three books in order to understand what England and the English were in Victoria’s early years.

Each of these Reform parties had rendered signal service in their own fashion: Church, Government, and People were no longer disunited, distinctions of class had been broken down, and with their disappearance Chartism came to an end. The failure of the “physical force” Chartists in 1848 had served to enforce the lesson taught by Carlyle and Kingsley, that the way to gain reform was not through deeds of violence and bloodshed. Each man must learn to fit himself for his part in the great movement toward Reform. Intelligence, not force, must be their weapon.

After years of bitter strife between the Two Nations, England a last enjoyed peace within her own borders - that peace which a patriot poet, Ernest Jones, during a time of bitter trial had so earnestly prayed for:

God of battles, give us peace!
Rich with honour’s proud increase;
Peace that frees the fettered brave;
Peace that scorns to make a slave;
Peace that spurns a tyrant’s hand;
Peace that lifts each fallen land;
Peace of peoples, not of kings;
Peace that conquering freedom brings;
Peace that bids oppression cease;
God of battles, give us peace!

“From the folding of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. . . . They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. . . . ‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.’“[8]

[Footnote 8: Charles Dickens,
 
A Christmas Carol
.]

In surveying the long reign of Queen Victoria nothing strikes one more than the gradual growth of interest in children, and the many changes in the nation’s ideas of their upbringing and education. At the beginning of her reign the little children of the poor were for the most part slaves, and were often punished more cruelly by their taskmasters than the slaves one reads of in
 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.

When Disraeli, afterward Lord Beaconsfield and Prime Minister, wrote
 
Sybil
, he drew, in that book, a terrible picture of the life of children in the manufacturing districts and in the country villages. The following extract speaks for itself:

“There are many in this town who are ignorant of their very names; very few who can spell them. It is rare that you meet with a young person who knows his own age; rarer to find the boy who has seen a book, or the girl who has seen a flower. Ask them the name of their sovereign and they will laugh; who rules them on earth or who can save them in heaven are alike mysteries to them.”

In such a town as Disraeli describes there were no schools of any kind, and the masters treated their apprentices “as the Mamelouks treated the Egyptians.” The author declares that “there is more serfdom now in England than at any time since the Conquest. . . . The people were better clothed, better fed, and better lodged just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The average term of life among the working classes is seventeen.”