Camplin Being Victorian

How it felt then, Why it matters now
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917458-54-2
Verlag: Unicorn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Writers and poets, academics and art critics, mathematicians and experimental scientists, churchmen and politicians, women of strong opinions gather for a summer weekend in the 1870s. Is it real, or is it a fantasy? One thing's sure: their debates - about life's aims, rural and urban living, love and money, civilization and belief, the social framework, the past, the present and the future take us to the heart of the Victorian dream and its reality: the idea that their society exemplified 'Progress'. What did 'Progress' mean? Were things (and which things) getting better? What did 'better' mean? And for whom? The history of the world before the Victorians, from Aberdeen to Africa, showed a particular form of equality for almost everyone: an equality of poverty and no prospects, with kindness often in short supply. Victorians wanted to change that world, thought they were changing it, did change it. They did it in a human way: a melange of muddle, vision, certainty, doubt, too slow for many, too fast for some. Yet their changes were decisive both for creating the modern world, but also for revealing the dilemmas attached to mass living in urban, technological societies, as well as the moral flaws in imposing one civilization's or one person's beliefs on another. Most remarkably of all, the upheaval in making major transitions in every area of life, which produced revolutions and violence across Europe, in the Americas and in Asia, was carried out - at least in Britain itself - almost entirely peacefully. The past will always be a foreign country for those unwilling to engage with its people. Whether viewing the lives of rulers or the ruled, 'Being Victorian' corrects innumerable preconceptions.

Jamie Camplin took a double first in history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the mid-1960s after winning a place when he was sixteen. After a period working in industry and considering a political career, he changed direction and was successively Editorial Director and Managing Director (1979-2013) at Thames & Hudson. He is the author of The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England, the historical novel 1914: The King Must Die and, most recently, Books Do Furnish a Painting (with Maria Ranauro).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Camplin, Jamie

Leseproben

‘A WEEKEND BY THE SEA’

PROLOGUE

Late one July weekend in the 1870s, when – it was said – the London Season was ‘fast dying of the dust’, Laurence Oliphant invited what the Morning Post called ‘a select circle of friends’ to his seaside villa, a house of porticoes and pillars and statues very much in the Classical style. It was typical of the extent to which the Victorians appropriated the Classical world for their own purposes (in a way that might not convince our more sceptical eyes) that it should be seen – at least through the eyes of a fashionable female novelist of the time – as the sort of house in which the gormandizing Lucullus might have feasted, or the oversexed Clodius wreathed the brows of the super-accomplished Greek courtesan Aspasia with rose petals.1

Oliphant was 33, some way past the days of his twenties, when his considerable talents suggested that he was likely to do something of note. An unkind observer might have hinted that he was heading for the time, though not just yet, when the consensus would be that he might have done anything if he had chosen to do so. He tells Isy Froude, whom we will meet during the weekend, that we are haunted with the power of imagining that there might be something worth living for, ‘and are pursued with the knowledge that there never is’. He so wants one great cause, but politics is just a petty, weary game, while religion post-Darwin is dead and replaced by Humanity (a poor deity). What should he labour for? He hates wasted moments: ‘I could do something…. I feel I have powers.’

Everyone had arrived by dinner on Saturday evening. One of the guests, who looks very like William Hardinge – an aesthete, a wryly romantic writer and, less charitably, nicknamed the ‘Balliol bugger’ in Oxford, where he had a troublesome relationship with the art historian Walter Pater – found Laurence in the library contemplating a pile of menu cards in front of him.

These cards were not concerned with matters of cuisine; the cook had that matter fully worked out. Instead, a different kind of fare was at issue: a menu for conversation. There would be tongues for tasting, and there would be tongues for talking. The two men discussed the matter. What would be appropriate for soup – ‘the first vernal breath of discussion that is to open the buds of the shy and strange souls’ gathered at the table? ‘Love’ proposes Hardinge. Too ‘strong’ at the beginning, too ‘real’ counters his host. ‘Religion’ was surely more suitable. But Hardinge suggests that, too, would be ‘rather strong meat for some’.

The ice broken, they then make rapid progress. The ‘Aim of Life’ is decided upon for the soup, then ‘Town and Country’ – where best to achieve an objective – with ‘Society’ a natural sequel. For entrées there would be ‘Art and Literature’, ‘Love and Money’, ‘Riches and Civilisation’. ‘The Present’ would be ‘solid and satisfying’, as indeed it was, leaving mere dalliance of an insubstantial kind for the entremets, focused on ‘The Future’.

Who was to be present at this ‘feast of reason’? It was soon to become clear that the company included many figures of distinction. Here was Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley, with a formidable-looking face, copious black whiskers and bushy eyebrows, but by no means Darwin’s poodle when it came to popularizing his ideas, rather using them as a vehicle to support the importance of science and scientific education for all. Like many of those among the company, his public profile and changes of mood could easily mislead; as he had written to Kate Amberley – mother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell – some years earlier, his protoplasm was ‘by no means the unstable and semifluid character you imagine’, but alas he was unable to take up her invitation because his excitable family would object to his absence on his birthday. That at least gave him the chance to offer evidence that he did, after all, have ‘the ordinary natural affections’.2

Here, too, John Ruskin, who writes so divinely that God should surely not feel threatened by scientific discovery, ‘a prophet for his age’ because he teaches realism, rather than the vagueness that comes from ‘the mists of feeling’, according to the young George Eliot – rather misleadingly – in 1856; and Walter Pater, who found Ruskin’s Modern Painters inspirational when he read it as a schoolboy, but had been rather crushed when another undergraduate at Oxford (allegedly W.H. Mallock) passed his correspondence with William Hardinge to the formidable Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett. Jowett sent Hardinge down for ‘keeping and reciting immoral poetry’, sonnets for a male lover.3 Pater, depicted in the house as a ‘pale creature, with large moustache, looking out of the window at the sunset’, was nevertheless to become an important influence on the modern evolution of art criticism and literature, even if he did have to remove the Conclusion to his 1873 major work, The Renaissance, after an outcry against its amoral hedonism. The ever witty G.K. Chesterton summed up: ‘In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that is, without the funny parts.’4

Pater, whether on academic matters or life itself, was all for a subjective, relativist approach, unlike another key Victorian figure present that evening, Matthew Arnold, with his hard, moralistic and – as he thought – objective mode of instruction. There was something very Victorian about the way he combined the roles of very considerable poet and man of letters with the direct experience of earning his living as a School Inspector, enabling him to experience new ways of life for an employment that involved using the railways, reading while waiting for trains, reading in diverse hotel rooms, as well as putting him in touch on the ground with one of the great issues of the age: how to educate the rapidly growing population and who was to fund that – church, philanthropist, state? In the end, he asked too much, a point made less kindly by his contemporary, Sir Joshua Girling Fitch (himself a brilliant educationist), when he described him as a ‘man who held a moral smelling-bottle at his nose, and exacted an impossible standard of life from a busy and strenuous people who had a living to get’.5

1 Benjamin Jowett. Behind the gentle and unworldly demeanour of Spy’s 1876 caricature lay a man with a subtle yet steely determination, used to create a small army of pupils destined for public service at home and across the globe. In a letter to a friend two years earlier, Jowett had called for the working classes to be ‘taught to demand a free education – free and compulsory’.

Arnold, son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby, was another Balliol man, though it was many years after his time that a further member of the house party, Benjamin Jowett, became Master of the College and acquired the tag, ‘All there is to know I know it.’ Jowett was certainly a considerable theologian, university reformer and Platonist, though not surprisingly, his suggestion that platonic love eschewed sex was not Pater’s conclusion.6 Not much liked by some of those present, Jowett was nevertheless an outstanding Victorian: not just a brilliant Greek scholar, but wonderfully skilful in trying to navigate the church through difficult challenges raised by the many discoveries of modern science by arguing for ‘the spirit of inquiry into historical facts’, thereby ‘bringing to light…inconsistencies’ in the ancient testimony that underpinned accepted theology, and above all by helping to foster a new class of public servants and other kinds of leader with the integrity and skills to contribute wisely to the needs of a society facing any number of changes. Moreover, as a young man, after being made a Fellow of Balliol as an undergraduate, he made a series of expeditions to France and especially to Germany in order to be fully informed about Continental scholars and their involvement in shaping the future through a better understanding of the past. The modern assumption that leaders of British thought were parochial is one of the many myths about Victorian Britain.

It would be unfair to describe such luminaries as mere observers – on the contrary, we shall see how they helped to mould the future – but there was certainly something distinctively different about the representatives of the scientists at the gathering. John Tyndall, who did so much to bring experimental physics to a receptive wider audience, succeeded Michael Faraday, pioneer of our understanding of electricity, at the Royal Institution, which had been founded in 1799 to introduce new technology and science to the general public. Tyndall had recently, in 1874, stridently told the Belfast gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, that science’s position was now impregnable and that it would take from theology ‘the entire...