for continue so it will, as long as the flourishing state of our trade shall support it, and this support it can never want, till our legislators, shall cease to give sufficient attention to the protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power, ability, and honesty to execute the laws: a circumstance not to be apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest corruption.
Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott, call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through convention, as always, into mere inanition.
III
Now if you will take, as a convenient starting-point for your enquiry, the year 1832—the year that saw the passing of the Great Reform Bill and the death of Scott: if you will start (I say) with that year beyond which, when I first made acquaintance, with the English School here, our curiosity was forbidden to trespass—you will find that then, or about then, certain terrible diseases in our Commonwealth were brewing up to a head. As everyone now recognises, we must seek the operating cause of these in what we now agree to call the “Industrial Revolution”; that is in the process as yet unrestricted by law, encouraged by economic theory, moving at once too fast for the national conscience to overtake or even to realise it and with a step of doom as rigidly inexorable as the machinery, its agent and its symbol, converting England into a manufacturing country, planting the Manchester of those days and many Manchesters over England’s green and pleasant land, and leaving them untended to grow as they pleased polluting her streams, blackening her fields, and covering—here lies the indictment—with a pall of smoke, infinite human misery: all this controlled and elaborated by cotton-lords and mine-owners who prospered on that misery.
The plight of rural, agricultural, England is another story. Here in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire was a monstrous revolution gathering strength (as I say) beyond men’s power even to realise it. And if they realised it, there was Political Economy assuring them that it had to be. And it continued (as you will remember) long after poor Wragg strangled and left her illegitimate infant on the dismal Mapperly hills and the egregious Mr. Roebuck asked, if, the world over or in past history, there was anything like it. “Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.”
We all recognise it now, and the wicked folly of it—or at least I hope we do. My purpose to-day, Gentlemen, is not to excite vain emotions over a past which neither you nor I can remedy at all, but simply to show that—as, after all, we are a kindly nation—the spectacle of industrial England about and after 1832 became intolerable to our grandfathers: how it operated upon two extraordinarily different minds: and (if I can) how irresistible is the wind of literature, through what mouthpiece soever it breathes with conviction.
IV
But before examining how two of the most dissimilar minds conceivable—one a man’s, the other a woman’s—reacted upon it, I must indicate the enormity of the challenge.
France had passed through her Revolution and her Terror, with graphic details of which our public speakers and writers had taken pains to make our country familiar enough: and England had won out of the struggle, having taken the side she chose, all oblivious (as we are, maybe, to-day) that victory in arms is at best but the beginning of true victory, and that she herself was in the throes of a revolution not a whit the less murderous than that of France, and only less clamant because its victims, instead of aristocrats and politicians and eminent saviours of their country following one another by scores in tumbrils to die scenically in the Place de la République, the Place of the Guillotine, were serfs of the cotton-mill and the mine, wives, small children, starved unscenically, withered up in foetid cellars or done to death beside the machines of such a hell-upon-earth as Manchester had grown to be out of towns in which an artificer, however humble, had once been permitted to rejoice in that which alone, beyond his hearth and family, heartens a man—the well-executed work of hand and brain. The capitalists of that time simply overwhelmed these towns, expanding, converting them into barracks for workers. Who these workers were, let an advertisement in a Macclesfield paper of 1825 attest—
To the Overseers of the Poor and to families desirous of settling in Macclesfield. Wanted between 4,000 and 5,000 persons between the ages of 7 and 21 years.