Social Transformations of the Victorian Age Part 12

Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student, summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle's deeper studies of Fichte and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average reader on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of which, when the dandy who dashed off _Falkland_, as Byron dashed off _Beppo_, had matured into the student who travailed with _Rienzi_, Englishmen knew nothing.

The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation, resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished conceits, the recondite ill.u.s.trations drawn from every sphere of human thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself, suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully digested.

In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man of great fas.h.i.+on, a good specimen of that social school of which the younger Disraeli at his _Vivian Grey_ period was a bad specimen. A dandy of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson's lines in _Punch_ on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life as did Thackeray's caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his nature.[92] He saw his time in its entirety abroad as well as at home more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to many persons more intelligibly, by d.i.c.kens himself than by Lytton.

All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle's _History of the French Revolution_. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by Bulwer in _Zanoni_. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged _A Tale of Two Cities_, in which d.i.c.kens not only ill.u.s.trated after his own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in literary art to the _Esmond_ of his great rival. Lytton's genius impelled him to mysticism, as George Eliot's a.s.sociations inclined her to positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new and better France in _The Parisians_, as he had been the bard of the new England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the friends of Pisistratus Caxton.

Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England.

Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow, author of _The Bible in Spain_, than whom no one has influenced periodical writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his _Eothen_; to his literary disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in _Piccadilly_; to the late Grenville Murray, whose 'Roving Englishman' in _All the Year Round_ contains the happiest of travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the _Cornhill Magazine_ is a miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in _Vanity Fair_, and Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, _Sophy_.

Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their refining mission home to the ma.s.ses with an intimacy not approached by their mightier rivals.

Emerson's writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson, hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier afterwards. If Longfellow's simple ballads had never been written, the higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the Anglo-Saxon world.

The same gentle and gracious offices have been performed by less known and not always respected writers, Martin Tupper of the _Proverbial Philosophy_, and the late Hain Friswell of _The Gentle Life_.

CHAPTER XXVII

NEWSPAPER PRESS TRANSFORMATION SCENES

The newspaper press of all kinds, largely, the penny press, exclusively, a Victorian product. Its recent growth reviewed. A valuable rival to Parliament because its publicity a.s.sures parliamentary efficiency. Growth of the cheaper journalism summarized.

The _Daily News_, the _Daily Telegraph_, the halfpenny press, morning and evening as a special product of the age. The press and party.

'Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.' Such, in reference to the then editor of the _Times_, was the remark made a year or two after the Victorian age had begun by Lord Lyndhurst, himself an ex-journalist,[93] to Charles Greville, the Diarist. Like opinions by equal authorities as to the successors of Barnes have been delivered frequently since, but are less known because the memoir-writer has not yet stamped them with immortality. No attribute of skill or power belonging to Barnes was wanting to Delane. To his weight with the public a characteristic tribute was once paid by a shrewd judge of editors as of men generally, Lord Beaconsfield. 'I think,' were that statesman's exact words, on a social occasion to Lord Granville, 'I had better postpone giving you my views of Delane till he is dead.'

On her accession the Queen was congratulated by some 479 newspapers representing the collective press of the United Kingdom and its outlying islands. Her sixtieth commemoration gives a theme to 2396 journals published within the same area.[94] The English newspaper press which in effect began under one Queen, reached its final term of greatness under another Queen. 1837 is a landmark in newspaper history, because it was the first year in which the public press published the parliamentary division lists, and thus made another stride towards equality of influence with the legislature. Its effect was to increase the usefulness of Members of Parliament, as well as of the press itself. The Long Parliament made English freedom, but gagged the press.

In 1712 Harley had taxed newspapers at a penny a sheet, and one s.h.i.+lling for each advertis.e.m.e.nt. Under North and Pitt successively, these taxes were raised to prohibitive figures. In 1836 Spring Rice had fixed the stamp duty at a penny, so that the first step towards newspaper prosperity was made on the eve of the Victorian age. The Victorian press means the penny press. That was only possible after the fourteenth year of the reign, and the repeal of the paper duty in 1851.

Popular politics are changed as little by newspaper articles as are political votes by parliamentary speeches. The press rather organizes political opinion. Existing convictions are deepened. But the average reader chooses his newspaper not because he wants to be converted, but because his self love is flattered by seeing his formed ideas reflected in its columns. The modern newspaper is therefore a Victorian creation. In its best form it belongs to England alone. In no other country is there a second _Times_, as since 1788 the older _Universal Register_ has been called; no such epitome of foreign history from day to day; no such reflection, in letters to the editor, of English opinion.

So far as the cheap newspaper is due to any one man, it may be connected with the name of the first proprietor of the _Athenaeum_, like its latest, a Charles Wentworth Dilke. In the twelfth year of the Victorian age the _Daily News_, to which the short editors.h.i.+p of Charles d.i.c.kens gave literary distinction rather than commercial success, its proprietors, Bright, Cobden, Walmsley, called in Mr Dilke, as the great newspaper organizer of his day. He at once reduced the price, though not yet to its final penny. In 1865 the proprietary was enlarged by the late Mr S.

Morley, Mr Labouchere and others, with the intention of turning it into a penny paper. That was done. Its success was made by its foreign correspondence during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. Meanwhile, the _Daily Telegraph_, started by Colonel Sleigh in 1856, had been acquired, enlarged, and improved by the strenuous ancestors of its present owners.

It at once electrified the town by its original writing of all kinds, notably its Paris correspondence. The letters to the _Times_ from the Crimea of William Howard Russell, first caused the Sebastopol enquiry;--then in 1855 produced the Roebuck motion[95] and with it the fall of the Government of Lord Aberdeen. In this way the whole conception of the province of the press was enlarged. Soon there sprung up a new and organized profession of the pen. If to-day the political writing of the great London dailies be below the mark of that of the two _Couriers_ and some later publicists in France, its special and descriptive correspondence by a Forbes, a Henty, a W. W. Knollys, a Pearce, a Becker, a Conan Doyle, a G. W. Steevens, in point of graphic vigour, of accurate and comprehensive swiftness of execution, is superior to anything which other periodicals of Europe can show.

The Jubilee Year of 1887 witnessed the completion of a revolution in the public press, that had in fact begun a twelvemonth earlier. Hitherto the great London broadsheets had either been affected really if not professedly to one of the great political parties; or had, as in the case of the _Times_, not less than of the chief weekly journals, made some show of impartially criticizing both parties alike. In 1886 the Liberal party was rent in twain by the Irish policy of its greatest member. The result with the press was to divest political writers of all show of independence. Those journals which accepted the great leader's view were converted into uncompromising champions of the scheme that their opponents said would dismember the monarchy. Those, on the other hand, which resisted the great statesman's plan found themselves by the force of events they could not control detached from their earlier traditions of independence and converted into the enemies of political Liberalism not only on one issue, but on all.

From that day newspaper criticism of men and measures has practically ceased. With a few able exceptions, signally that of the _Daily Chronicle_, the paramount task of the press in the sixth decade of the epoch is to support a combination of groups rallied not under a party flag, but an Imperial banner. About the same time another newspaper change may be said to have taken place. Hitherto, the anonymous system had been fairly preserved. The names of newspaper writers were not known beyond their office, or at least beyond Fleet Street. Now, however, English journalism was undergoing two distinct and mutually antagonistic processes. On the one hand it had by the agency of the great newspapers with their enlarged staffs and various departments been organized into a liberal profession, attracting specialists of all kinds to its columns. On the other hand its pleasures and its profits had gathered a host of camp followers who as amateurs vied with the older professionals. Next, persons of fas.h.i.+on or of quality took to the proprietors.h.i.+p or editors.h.i.+p of new journals, as, till then, they had taken to the owning and management of theatres for the benefit of personal friends. In _Lothair_, someone advises the hero to amuse himself with theatre proprietors.h.i.+p 'as being the high mode for all swells.' The paper next enjoyed the same vogue as the playhouse.

The former secrecy now became impracticable. As had long been the case with the monthly periodical, the weekly print first and the daily print afterwards showed a tendency towards a transformation from an organ of collective opinion into a platform for individual display. The new editor's chief business was not as formerly to point the gun for the marksmen of the pen to fire, but to recruit writers with well known names.

If their signatures were suppressed, the authors.h.i.+p, as it was intended it should do, speedily transpired. Fleet Street became a whispering gallery of press gossip. Its murmurs were heard throughout the land.

What the sixpenny magazine is to the monthly press that the halfpenny newspaper is to the daily. The first daily journal at this price, the _Echo_, after some startling vicissitudes came into the capable hands of John Pa.s.smore Edwards, a Celt of Cornwall with all the characteristics of his race. Morning as well as evening rivals at the same price sprung up like mushrooms after rain. _Evening News_ or _Star_ at night, the _Morning_, the _Leader_ are only a few of the fresh notes added to the music of the London street vendors. No urchin so ragged that he does not proclaim the printed wares of a millionaire _in esse_ or _in posse_.

Believers in literature as part of popular education will think it a good sign that book reviews, and articles of a kindred sort are features in characteristically Victorian newspapers. Signally in the arrangements for supply of foreign news, a revolution extending throughout the whole press of the country has been effected by the enterprise of these journals. The telegrams on which for its tidings from abroad the public used exclusively to depend, have been often superseded by the dispatches of special representatives of their journal stationed abroad.

Every journal has now become its own Reuter. Men like Alfred C.

Harmsworth, being millionaires as well as resourceful journalists, thought no more of having their own agents in every capital at the end of a telegraphic wire than of arranging a little Arctic expedition on their own account. They have thus forced the hand of newspaper proprietors all round. The leisurely descriptive writing has gone out. The condensed three-line paragraph has come in. The _Daily Mail_ has shown a busy generation which reads its papers as it takes its lunch standing at a buffet, that the essence of the day's news of the world can be read in a few odd minutes as easily as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were once packed into a nutsh.e.l.l.[96]

For this new journalism new men have been needed. In most cases very young men; generally fresh from Balliol or Trinity where they have perhaps won Fellows.h.i.+ps as well as First Cla.s.ses, but in appearance often not much older than a public school sixth form boy. Youth is an error which unfortunately time too soon corrects.

In ability, in conscientious use of increased power; in education, in social position, in all the best guarantees of responsibility, the British press has improved immeasurably within the present age. Even now it shows signs of perceiving that a certain amount of political impartiality towards the great leaders of State and Church renders its praise, its censure, and its criticism the more effective because the less mechanical.

The condition of things which has made so many great newspapers patriotic partizans instead of independent guides must in its nature be temporary.

When it has gone by, and a more normal state of affairs is re-established, there will be perhaps no compensating disadvantages to the increasing influence with which the Victorian age has endowed and is yet endowing what is really a fourth estate.[97]

CHAPTER XXVIII

TRANSFORMATIONS IN INVALID LIFE

Legislation for the helpless in health or in sickness the exclusive feature of the Victorian age. Early interest of the English Court through the Prince Consort in the housing of the poor. This coincided with, and helped forward, the organized public movements for popular sanitation. General summary of these, as shown by results. The new nurse contrasted with the old. Hospitals to-day twice blessed.

Specific progress of sanitary reform. Demonstrable connection between these improvements and figures of the death rate. Preventive and curative medicine also ent.i.tled to credit. General course of medical progress. Special researches of English physicians. Their ascertained usefulness and their latest aspects. Improvement in English doctors, with particular instances.

Before the Victorian age, there had been no legislation for the purpose of helping the helpless, housing the homeless, providing for the health of those whose birth-right was the squalor, the starvation, the disease, that come from systematic neglect. Here, as in other things, the representative of the Crown, transformed from a political power into an agency of social good, led the way. The Prince Consort, moved by the condition and by the address of the ballast heavers in the East End of London took the initiative; the legislature gradually followed. Thus was the principle established and acted on that one of the prime duties of the State is to those for whom from any other quarter there is no help.

The last instance of that wholesome truth was the Dilke Commission for the better housing of the poor aptly presided over by the Prince Consort's eldest son in 1885. Exactly forty-five years earlier than this, Colonel Slaney's[98] motion in the House of Commons produced an enquiry into the health of towns. Local Improvement Acts had been multiplied to the number of 500. There was still no proper drainage. The Duke of Buccleuch's Commission of 1848 led to the Public Health Act of the same year. As the cholera invasions of 1853 and of 1865-6 showed, the Local Boards established by the Act of 1848 were too permissive in their operations to be fully effective. Edwin Chadwick, and Southwood Smith had from the first co-operated with the Queen's husband. Their activity did not cease when the earliest steps to reform had been taken: 1858 witnessed fresh improvements.[99]

It was not till 1875 that the confused ma.s.s of sanitary laws was consolidated. Then the Local Government Board which, with the powers of the superseded Poor Law Board, had been established in 1871 was in full and in most beneficent work. Still the Commission that last investigated the matter, due as it was largely to Lord Shaftesbury, showed many evils still to remain. Overcrowding was worse in the West London rookeries than it had been in the East. In 1885 the Dilke Commission Act gave fresh power to local authorities to destroy unhealthy dwellings.

The machinery which thus exists as the sixth decade of our epoch draws to its close, is therefore tolerably complete. Guarantees for its promptly being put into motion are still wanted. Not only the credit, but the very conception of this wholesome function of the State belongs entirely to our era, and arises out of the enlarged idea of Royal service which fills the modern mind.

Strictly consistent with family tradition is the effort of the Prince of Wales to help those who are only one degree more helpless than the dwellers in city and suburban alleys and courts in time of need. To free the London hospitals of debt will crown the edifice of sick relief that in Crimean days the Queen and her husband began.

From the departure of Miss Florence Nightingale[100] and her trained staff for the Crimea in 1854 must be dated the birth of nursing as a polite profession. But for that mission of mercy one would hear nothing of the contemporary parade of nurses in the height of the London season in the grounds of Marlborough House. The fas.h.i.+onable vogue of the vocation may sometimes attract modish recruits who have not counted the cost.

Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs.

Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most quick to observe. Not a few of the sick whom the ministering angel of the new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances at herself as she pa.s.ses the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of d.i.c.kens. They arose from the rumoured hastening of the sick man's death by the scriptural practice of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse (new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency.

Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in training for the medical profession have nothing about them left of the lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious--'Evil be to him who evil thinks.'

Hospital management is the subject not for a few pages in a single book, but for a library in itself. One or two not controversial facts may be given. Throughout the Victorian age a marked feature in medical charities has been the supplementing of the historic hospitals with many new dispensaries and establishments for special diseases. If the latest hospital endowments are smaller than those originating in an earlier century, the explanation is less a decline in eleemosynary purpose or power than the development of the value of the property a.s.signed to the older foundations.[101] Thus the revenue of St Bartholomew's in the middle of the sixteenth century seems to have been only 371 a year. Towards the close of the nineteenth century it is 32,000 a year. During our own era hospital benefactions approaching a quarter of a million are far from unknown. These do not include such special and comparatively recent hospitals as that for consumption, with the 40 new dispensaries connected with it.

To epitomize the facts; the total of London hospitals or infirmaries with wards for the sick amounts to 49. The movement still goes forward. So vast is the scale on which these buildings, less houses than towns in themselves, were first planned that in many of them there is yet room for fresh beds. This is only a specimen of what has been, and is being, done throughout the kingdom. There thus seems a fresh argument in favour of continuing to London itself an inst.i.tution like St Thomas's, Southwark, the removal of which to the country was not long since suggested.

Like all gracious works, these places are twice blessed. They relieve those who are in need. They humanize those whom prosperity and comfort might make callous. Before our age began, no one thought of sending game or fruit to the sufferers or convalescents within these places of refuge.

Now it is the exception for the millionaire not to make the spoils of his fas.h.i.+onable battue pay t.i.the to those for whom such food is often the best of physic. The costly flowers that decorate the drawing rooms or dining rooms during the season are not discarded as rubbish when the festivity is over. They are scrupulously tended so as not to lose their freshness.

Presently their hues and fragrance will relieve the bleak expanse of white-washed wall in those places where our sick are nursed away from their own homes.[102]

The contrasts of our age include a marked connection between the organization of the healing art and the advance of medical science on the one hand and the reduction of the death rate on the other. In 1855 the mortality of the United Kingdom was 23 per 1,000. In 1875 it was 21 per 1,000. In 1895 it had fallen to 18 per 1,000. The figures,[103] and the conclusions to which they point, are tributes, not only to medical skill in healing disease, but to sanitary reform in preventing it.

Before the Victorian age began the whole population of these Islands awaited the periodical onsets of pestilence with the resigned fatalism of the Turk, or with the pa.s.sive submission of latter day London to the incubus of snow. The notorious consequences of unhealthy living prompted no preventive measures. Divine wrath was believed to express itself in deadly epidemics. When that anger was a.s.suaged health would return. Till then human remedies could do little. Meanwhile, the truth that Providence helps those who help themselves was being scientifically shown. Hence in 1838, a State enquiry into the whole matter was inst.i.tuted. In 1848 the legislation began which, by promoting cleanliness, at once disarmed disease. John Simon proved the propagation of pestilence to proceed by impure particles. In 1858-65, on his initiative, the Government strengthened the defences of public health. The entrance of foreign plagues was stopped at our ports. Three sons of a clever West of England doctor named Budd[104] had been trained from their childhood in practical medicine by their father. These doctors showed the connection between impure water and typhoid fever, as before them Snow had shown between cholera and water. When the improvements suggested by these researches were adopted health generally benefited. Consumption statistics became less alarming every year. Fevers of all kinds were successfully combated.