Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Now, I dare say some of you, even while I read this, were dismissing it in your minds as early-Victorian humanitarianism, faded philanthropy, outworn sentiment. Yes, but even a sentiment, if it works simultaneously upon a generation of great and very dissimilar writers, is a fact in the story of our literature—a phenomenon, at least, which made itself an event—to be studied by you scientifically. One of the first rules of good criticism, and the sheet-anchor of the historical method, is to put yourself (as near as may be) in the other fellow’s place: and if you take but a very little pains to do so, you will soon discover that Mrs. Browning was not writing “for the fun of the thing,” exuding, or causing to be exuded, any cheap tears. We are accustomed to Manchester to-day: we take it for granted as a great community with a most honourable Press to represent its opinions. But we only take it for granted because it has become tolerable, and it only became tolerable, then dignified—it only became a city—because our Victorian writers shamed its manufacturers out of their villainies. In the twenties, thirties, and “hungry forties” of the last century Manchester was merely a portent, and a hideous portent, the growth of which at once fascinated our economists and frightened our rulers. Think of the fisherman in the Arabian Nights who, unstopping the bottle brought ashore in his net, beheld a column of smoke escape and soar and spread, and anon and aloft, overlooking it, the awful visage of a Genie. Even so our economists watched an enormous smoke ascend from Manchester and said, “Here is undreamed-of national prosperity”; while our ministers stared up into the evil face of a monster they had no precedent to control. You understand, of course, that I use “Manchester” as a symbolic name, covering a Lancashire population which grew in the first twenty years of the century from 672,000 to 1,052,000. But let a very different person from Mrs. Browning—let Benjamin Disraeli, then a young man, describe the portent.

From early morn to the late twilight our Coningsby for several days devoted himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a new world, pregnant with new trains of thought and feeling. In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science—

Mark you, not between capital and labour, but between capital and science, still by machinery arming capital to vaster strength—

In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science, working on a spot which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre for their exploits, he beheld a great source of the wealth of nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted

—“and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted.” There, in Disraeli’s words, you have it. Every prolonged war raises a new governing class of prosperous profiteers who turn their country’s necessity to glorious gain. So it was a hundred years ago at the conclusion of the long Napoleonic struggle: so it is to-day. So it goes on ever. A profiteering class of speculators and (as Cobbett would say) “loan-mongers” emerges at the top of any great war. Ex-soldiers tramp the roads for work, for bread. Decent folk, bred in the incurable belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing, taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made generous by education, forgetful of old woes. And so in time—give it a couple of generations—the descendants of the sponge and the parvenu will have shed the hair from the hoof, will leap to the summons of noblesse oblige, and in their turn make haste to die by Ypres or the Somme, transmitting somehow the mettle of England into a future denied to them.

VI

But you will say that, although this revolt in the better minds of England, a hundred years ago, may be a fact, I have as yet quoted but the evidence of a poetess and a novelist. Very well, then: I go to Blue Books and the reports of several commissions, reminding you that I lay most stress on the children because it happened through their almost inconceivable sufferings that, such as it was, victory came.

In 1831 Michael Sadler (a great man, in spite of Macaulay, and the ancestor of a great one—if I may insert this word of long admiration for the first senior man who spoke to me at my first undergraduate dinner in Hall, more than forty years ago)—in 1831 this Michael Sadler, member for Newark, introduced a Ten Hours Bill, and moved its second reading in a speech that roundly exposed, along with other woes of the poor, the sacrifice of child life in the mills. The Bill was allowed a second reading on condition that the whole subject should be referred to a Select Committee, over which Sadler presided.

Now let me quote a page from Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s recently published study of Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who, though so many have laughed at him, devoted his life that they should laugh if they chose, but willy-nilly on the right side of their mouths, and not with a grin unacceptable to any Divinity presumed as having created Man in His image—

The Report of Sadler’s Committee is a classical document; it is one of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of factory life at the time. Its pages bring before the reader in the vivid form of dialogue the kind of life that was led by the victims of the new system. Men and women who were old at twenty, from all the industrial districts, from Manchester, from Glasgow, from Huddersfield, from Dundee, from Bradford, from Leeds, passed before their rulers with their tale of weariness, misery, and diseased and twisted limbs. A worsted spinner of Huddersfield, Joseph Hebergram, aged seventeen, described his day’s work at the age of seven. His hours were from five in the morning to eight at night, with one solitary break of thirty minutes at noon. All other meals had to be taken in snatches, without any interruption of work. “Did you not become very drowsy and sleepy towards the end of the day and feel much fatigued?” “Yes; that began about three o’clock; and grew worse and worse, and it came to be very bad towards six and seven.” “What means were taken to keep you at your work so long?” “There were three overlookers; there was one a head overlooker, and there was one man kept to grease the machines, and there was one kept on purpose to strap.” His brother, who worked in the same mill, died at sixteen from spinal affection, due to his work, and he himself began to grow deformed after six months of it. “How far do you live from the mill?” “A good mile.” “Was it very painful for you to move?” “Yes, in the morning I could scarcely walk, and my brother and sister used, out of kindness, to take me under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.” Another witness, an overseer in a flax spinning mill at Dundee, said that there were nine workers in the room under his charge who had begun work before they were nine years old, and that six of them were splay-footed and the other three deformed in other ways. A tailor at Stanningley, Samuel Coulson, who had three daughters in the mill, described the life of his household when the mill was busy. In the ordinary time the hours were from six in the morning to half-past eight at night; in the brisk time, for six weeks in the year, these girls, the youngest of them “going eight,” worked from three in the morning to ten or half-past ten at night. “What was the length of time they could be in bed during those long hours?” “It was near eleven o’clock before we could get them into bed after getting a little victuals, and then at morning my mistress used to stop up all night, for fear that we could not get them ready for the time; sometimes we have gone to bed and one of us generally awoke.” “Were the children excessively fatigued by this labour?” “Many times; we have cried often when we have given them the little victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they have fallen asleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time.”