High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britainby Simon Heffer (Random House, £30)
Our own creeping anxieties have made us wary of the modernist habit of ridiculing the Victorians. Their ideas about race, gender and class are often repugnant, and Victorian earnestness can be daunting. But they had an enviably staunch belief in progress and social responsibility, and their determined industry and drive allowed them to accomplish grand projects. Simon Heffer begins this big, energetic history by claiming that a “climate of prejudice about the Victorians still lingers,” but this is only partly true. We are growing more respectful.
Heffer, an author and Daily Mail columnist, is not blind to the hypocrisies that sometimes lay behind the driving ambition of the Victorians. Nevertheless, his study is a wholehearted celebration of their refusal to accept the inevitability of suffering and injustice. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Britain was on the brink of serious unrest. The early 1840s saw widespread misery, as a downturn in trade brought hunger and despair. Conditions of employment, for those who had work, were grim—long hours for men and women, with wages that hardly allowed for more than the necessities of life. Disease was everywhere. Children earned pennies, rather than attending school. These have become the clichés of Victorian deprivation, remembered because they were described with such vivid indignation. Charles Dickens put his stamp on our sense of the age in passages like this lurid picture of Ignorance and Want, from A Christmas Carol (1843): “They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds…”
And so Dickens and his contemporaries set about the business of teaching and feeding these neglected children. Forty years later, Britain was a different place. Education was universal, better sanitation and nutrition had transformed the nation’s health, new universities, libraries, colleges, galleries and museums had sprung up in provincial towns and industrial cities. Old prejudices had been effectively challenged in political and professional life. The sense of a country helplessly mired in oppression had lifted, to be replaced by a conviction that advancement was a national destiny.
How did this happen? For Heffer, the answer lies in the exertions of determined individuals. His book is a procession of great men and women, and a catalogue of their social campaigns—Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, James Froude, Florence Nightingale, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Lord Shaftesbury. Even those whose motives were devious found themselves working for progress, almost by accident—as did Benjamin Disraeli, in furthering the cause of electoral reform. Heffer is not much interested in the significance of abstract ideas, technological innovation, scientific developments, international affairs or economic movements, except as they bear upon the projects of thinkers and reformers—Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network, Florence Nightingale’s nursing school. It’s an approach that reflects his sympathy with the values of the period. The Victorians saw character in action as the predominant agent for change, just as the struggles of the solitary soul, as defined by an evangelical, counted for more than the institutional authority of the church. The obligation to put things right could never be handed over to the slow tides of history.
Thomas Carlyle’s advocation of firm leadership makes him central to the book’s argument, though Heffer is too sane not to acknowledge the sourness of Carlyle’s views as he slid into age and dyspepsia. More surprising, perhaps, is the warmth of Heffer’s praise for Matthew Arnold, the man he calls, questionably, “the greatest mind of the 19th century.” When it came to thinking about women, or dissenters, or the culture of working people, Arnold revealed the imaginative limitations of his class. For Heffer, however, Arnold’s insistence on the perfectibility of humanity, an idealism that inspired years of relentless toil as a school inspector, makes him a hero.
Much that characterises the period grew from the evangelical revolution that transformed Britain in the 1820s and 1830s. Evangelicals believed that salvation depended on personal responsibility, rather than the intervention of church and priest, and that the truths of the gospels must be expressed through unremitting effort in the world. Not every Victorian was an evangelical, and many hated the movement’s tendency to self-righteousness. But few escaped the high-minded principles that the evangelicals spread across the land. The poor had little time to spare for piety, but the middle classes saw the exercise of virtue as a duty, even if their conscientiousness occasionally turned out to be self-interested. Religion used to be oddly under-played in academic accounts of the period, but as our own secularism has matured, this is no longer the case. Popular culture hasn’t caught up with this scholarly development, and religion is still seen as either oppressive or peripheral in televised Victorian novels, or 19th-century biopics. But it was a religious context that gave most Victorians a sense of purpose.
“Estote ergo vos perfecti!”—“Be ye perfect!” This, for Arnold and for Heffer, was the imperative of the age. The reference is biblical, for though Arnold abandoned the religious beliefs of his boyhood, his cultural criticism remains rooted in the ethos of Christianity. Perfection, however, is an exacting goal, and Arnold hardly supposed it to have been within the reach of his countrymen. What was within their reach was the more manageable aspiration towards seriousness, the great watchword of the evangelicals. The Victorians believed that life, and death, was a profoundly serious business. Even humorists, including Dickens, could be called into constructive service, creating “fellow-feeling with all forms of existence,” as Carlyle claimed in one of his gentler moments. The casual, the cynical, or the trivial, were not worth their attention. One reason for the scale of their legacy was their capacity for relentless focus, a fact worth remembering as we twitter our time away.
Heffer, like the Victorians, cannot claim perfection. The decision to exclude foreign affairs and empire is understandable, given the already immense size of the book, but it gives the misleading impression of an inward-looking society. The radical changes in the position of women are acknowledged, yet despite recurrent references to the Queen, and to the labours of women like Octavia Hill and Angela Burdett Coutts, women are often marginalised in Heffer’s account. Similarly, the huge cultural riches of the period are recognised, but in the capacity of a supporting role that diminishes the range of their influence. Occasionally—rarely, in fact—Heffer will get a point of information wrong. When Archibald Tait, who was to become the first Scottish Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five daughters between the ages of two and ten in the space of little more than a month, it was scarlet fever, not smallpox, that devastated the family. But the point Heffer is making about the ubiquity of sickness and sudden death, even among the prosperous, is unaffected. The story of Tait, who endured a life of crushing sorrow and loss (his only surviving son later died, as did his wife), but doggedly continued his work of modernising the Church, represents the kind of courage that Heffer singles out for the reader’s appreciation.
As a journalist, Heffer relishes a stand-up fight. The tone of this book is different. Though he sees the Victorians in the light of his own conservatism, the work is not framed as a political intervention. Nor is it a salute to the origins of the Tory party. Heffer is sympathetic to Victorian liberalism, and Gladstone’s moral discipline is more to his taste than Disraeli’s unscrupulous scheming. As politicians, Gladstone and Disraeli could scarcely have been more different, yet the interaction of their successive ministries underpinned the development of the reforms that forged a compassionate society out of early Victorian wretchedness. Heffer’s admiration for a generation blessed with an unshakable confidence in the future tempers his habitually acerbic tone. Modesty is not a quality usually associated with his writing, but here a sense of the grandeur of what was accomplished in the face of formidable difficulty means that he adopts the role of chronicler and advocate, rather than polemicist. This is a serious book about the lasting value of seriousness. Engaging, and finally moving, it is a remarkable achievement.
Our own creeping anxieties have made us wary of the modernist habit of ridiculing the Victorians. Their ideas about race, gender and class are often repugnant, and Victorian earnestness can be daunting. But they had an enviably staunch belief in progress and social responsibility, and their determined industry and drive allowed them to accomplish grand projects. Simon Heffer begins this big, energetic history by claiming that a “climate of prejudice about the Victorians still lingers,” but this is only partly true. We are growing more respectful.
Heffer, an author and Daily Mail columnist, is not blind to the hypocrisies that sometimes lay behind the driving ambition of the Victorians. Nevertheless, his study is a wholehearted celebration of their refusal to accept the inevitability of suffering and injustice. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Britain was on the brink of serious unrest. The early 1840s saw widespread misery, as a downturn in trade brought hunger and despair. Conditions of employment, for those who had work, were grim—long hours for men and women, with wages that hardly allowed for more than the necessities of life. Disease was everywhere. Children earned pennies, rather than attending school. These have become the clichés of Victorian deprivation, remembered because they were described with such vivid indignation. Charles Dickens put his stamp on our sense of the age in passages like this lurid picture of Ignorance and Want, from A Christmas Carol (1843): “They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds…”
And so Dickens and his contemporaries set about the business of teaching and feeding these neglected children. Forty years later, Britain was a different place. Education was universal, better sanitation and nutrition had transformed the nation’s health, new universities, libraries, colleges, galleries and museums had sprung up in provincial towns and industrial cities. Old prejudices had been effectively challenged in political and professional life. The sense of a country helplessly mired in oppression had lifted, to be replaced by a conviction that advancement was a national destiny.
How did this happen? For Heffer, the answer lies in the exertions of determined individuals. His book is a procession of great men and women, and a catalogue of their social campaigns—Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, James Froude, Florence Nightingale, William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Lord Shaftesbury. Even those whose motives were devious found themselves working for progress, almost by accident—as did Benjamin Disraeli, in furthering the cause of electoral reform. Heffer is not much interested in the significance of abstract ideas, technological innovation, scientific developments, international affairs or economic movements, except as they bear upon the projects of thinkers and reformers—Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer network, Florence Nightingale’s nursing school. It’s an approach that reflects his sympathy with the values of the period. The Victorians saw character in action as the predominant agent for change, just as the struggles of the solitary soul, as defined by an evangelical, counted for more than the institutional authority of the church. The obligation to put things right could never be handed over to the slow tides of history.
Thomas Carlyle’s advocation of firm leadership makes him central to the book’s argument, though Heffer is too sane not to acknowledge the sourness of Carlyle’s views as he slid into age and dyspepsia. More surprising, perhaps, is the warmth of Heffer’s praise for Matthew Arnold, the man he calls, questionably, “the greatest mind of the 19th century.” When it came to thinking about women, or dissenters, or the culture of working people, Arnold revealed the imaginative limitations of his class. For Heffer, however, Arnold’s insistence on the perfectibility of humanity, an idealism that inspired years of relentless toil as a school inspector, makes him a hero.
Much that characterises the period grew from the evangelical revolution that transformed Britain in the 1820s and 1830s. Evangelicals believed that salvation depended on personal responsibility, rather than the intervention of church and priest, and that the truths of the gospels must be expressed through unremitting effort in the world. Not every Victorian was an evangelical, and many hated the movement’s tendency to self-righteousness. But few escaped the high-minded principles that the evangelicals spread across the land. The poor had little time to spare for piety, but the middle classes saw the exercise of virtue as a duty, even if their conscientiousness occasionally turned out to be self-interested. Religion used to be oddly under-played in academic accounts of the period, but as our own secularism has matured, this is no longer the case. Popular culture hasn’t caught up with this scholarly development, and religion is still seen as either oppressive or peripheral in televised Victorian novels, or 19th-century biopics. But it was a religious context that gave most Victorians a sense of purpose.
“Estote ergo vos perfecti!”—“Be ye perfect!” This, for Arnold and for Heffer, was the imperative of the age. The reference is biblical, for though Arnold abandoned the religious beliefs of his boyhood, his cultural criticism remains rooted in the ethos of Christianity. Perfection, however, is an exacting goal, and Arnold hardly supposed it to have been within the reach of his countrymen. What was within their reach was the more manageable aspiration towards seriousness, the great watchword of the evangelicals. The Victorians believed that life, and death, was a profoundly serious business. Even humorists, including Dickens, could be called into constructive service, creating “fellow-feeling with all forms of existence,” as Carlyle claimed in one of his gentler moments. The casual, the cynical, or the trivial, were not worth their attention. One reason for the scale of their legacy was their capacity for relentless focus, a fact worth remembering as we twitter our time away.
Heffer, like the Victorians, cannot claim perfection. The decision to exclude foreign affairs and empire is understandable, given the already immense size of the book, but it gives the misleading impression of an inward-looking society. The radical changes in the position of women are acknowledged, yet despite recurrent references to the Queen, and to the labours of women like Octavia Hill and Angela Burdett Coutts, women are often marginalised in Heffer’s account. Similarly, the huge cultural riches of the period are recognised, but in the capacity of a supporting role that diminishes the range of their influence. Occasionally—rarely, in fact—Heffer will get a point of information wrong. When Archibald Tait, who was to become the first Scottish Archbishop of Canterbury, lost five daughters between the ages of two and ten in the space of little more than a month, it was scarlet fever, not smallpox, that devastated the family. But the point Heffer is making about the ubiquity of sickness and sudden death, even among the prosperous, is unaffected. The story of Tait, who endured a life of crushing sorrow and loss (his only surviving son later died, as did his wife), but doggedly continued his work of modernising the Church, represents the kind of courage that Heffer singles out for the reader’s appreciation.
As a journalist, Heffer relishes a stand-up fight. The tone of this book is different. Though he sees the Victorians in the light of his own conservatism, the work is not framed as a political intervention. Nor is it a salute to the origins of the Tory party. Heffer is sympathetic to Victorian liberalism, and Gladstone’s moral discipline is more to his taste than Disraeli’s unscrupulous scheming. As politicians, Gladstone and Disraeli could scarcely have been more different, yet the interaction of their successive ministries underpinned the development of the reforms that forged a compassionate society out of early Victorian wretchedness. Heffer’s admiration for a generation blessed with an unshakable confidence in the future tempers his habitually acerbic tone. Modesty is not a quality usually associated with his writing, but here a sense of the grandeur of what was accomplished in the face of formidable difficulty means that he adopts the role of chronicler and advocate, rather than polemicist. This is a serious book about the lasting value of seriousness. Engaging, and finally moving, it is a remarkable achievement.
