David Cannadine
VICTORIOUS CENTURY
The United Kingdom, 1800–1906
General Editor: David Cannadine
I: DAVID MATTINGLY An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409
II: ROBIN FLEMING Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070
III: DAVID CARPENTER The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1314
IV: MIRI RUBIN The Hollow Crown: Britain 1272–1485
V: SUSAN BRIGDEN New Worlds, Lost Worlds: Britain 1485–1603
VI: MARK KISHLANSKY A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714
VII: LINDA COLLEY A Wealth of Nations?: Britain 1707–1815*
VIII: DAVID CANNADINE Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800–1906
IX: PETER CLARKE Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–2000
* forthcoming
Although I did not know it at the time, I was lucky enough to grow up in what were in many ways the final years of the ‘long’ nineteenth century – namely the 1950s. At the beginning of that decade, the United Kingdom was still a formidable international power, with a large navy and a world-encompassing empire; the traditional staple industries remained coalmining, steel manufacturing, engineering and textiles; London, Liverpool and Glasgow were among the pre-eminent ports in the world, just as Cunard, Canadian Pacific, the Royal Mail Lines and P&O were some of the greatest global shipping firms; houses were warmed and factories were powered by coal, goods trains and passenger expresses were pulled by steam engines, and as a result, Holmes-and-Watson fogs were still a common occurrence. Much of the Birmingham where I grew up would have been instantly recognizable to Joseph Chamberlain, who had been by turns a reforming mayor, an advanced Liberal, and an assertive imperialist, and who will be a significant figure in the later chapters of this volume. This was especially true of the magnificent ensemble of public buildings surrounding the square that bore Chamberlain’s name: the Birmingham and Midland Institute, the Reference Library (where I spent many happy hours), the Town Hall, the Council House and Art Gallery, and Mason College. Corporation Street was very much as Chamberlain had created it, the tramlines remained in many of the cobbled city-centre thoroughfares, and just a short distance away was Edgbaston, a quintessential Victorian suburb, where some of Chamberlain’s descendants still lived. My four grandparents had all been born during the 1880s, and they seemed to me very old, and very Victorian; they invariably dressed in black, as if still in mourning for the Gas-Lit Gloriana who had reigned during their youth. My father’s parents lived in a nineteenth-century terraced house in Birmingham with an outside lavatory, and my mother’s parents, who lived in what was then known as the ‘Black Country’, went every year to Blackpool for their summer holidays. Both their houses seemed full of nineteenth-century novels and atlases, along with coins and stamps with images of Queen Victoria, who thus became a real presence in my life from an early age.
My four grandparents died between 1961 and 1970, breaking my personal link to Britain’s nineteenth-century past. During that same decade, the United Kingdom itself began to de-Victorianize and embrace modernity, and this was vividly and literally brought home to me as much of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham was torn down, including many of its finest public buildings. Entire streets of the sort of houses in which my Cannadine grandparents had lived were demolished, to be replaced by offices, shops, hotels and flats. The grammar school that I attended was a creation of the 1880s, but it had left its original, inner-city home a few years before I became a pupil there, and it had been transformed into a concrete and plate-glass academy relocated on the edge of the city. But as much of Victorian Birmingham was disappearing before my very eyes, the serious study of the nineteenth-century past was simultaneously beginning in earnest; and having grown up during the last decade when much of it had still been real and visible, I was equally fortunate to live through the first decade of the twentieth century – the 1960s – in which a new generation of post-war scholars was bringing that rapidly vanishing world alive again. Pre-eminent among them was Asa Briggs: I can still recall the sense of excitement with which I read his history of Birmingham (appropriately in the Reference Library), covering the city’s heroic years from 1865 to 1938; soon after I devoured Victorian People and Victorian Cities; and like many sixth-formers, I relied on The Age of Improvement to help me pass History A Level. Ever after, Briggs would remain an iconic and inspirational figure, as well as being in some ways a quintessential Victorian himself – in his boundless energy, his incorrigible optimism and his exceptional public-spiritedness. But by the 1960s, he was joined by many other pioneering scholars, including Robert Blake, Norman Gash, George Kitson Clark, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Perkin, and two historians of Africa who were invariably known as ‘Robinson and Gallagher’, as if they were a firm of solicitors rather than a pair of academics.
So it was perhaps over-determined that as an undergraduate reading history at the University of Cambridge from 1969 to 1972, I should concentrate on nineteenth-century Britain, not only in terms of its domestic past, which in those days was deemed to consist exclusively of political and constitutional, and social and economic history, but also in its interactions with the greater world of the British Empire and Commonwealth and with what were deemed by some scholars to be its informal realms in Latin America. Thereafter, I resolved to investigate the relations between aristocratic landowners and the management of their estates bordering on large towns or the seaside, and Edgbaston, which had been developed as ‘the Belgravia of Birmingham’ by the Calthorpe family, seemed the obvious place to begin. Entirely by chance, I began my researches at just the time when Professor H. J. Dyos of the University of Leicester was defining and proclaiming the new sub-discipline of urban history – in part in response to the widespread demolition and destruction of large areas of Victorian cities that I had witnessed at first hand in Birmingham. Since then, scholarly approaches to the past have widened in many ways and diversified in many directions, with the rise of women’s history, cultural history and the ‘new’ imperial history, while the IT revolution has made available many new sources, which means it is now possible to research topics that were impractical and unthinkable a quarter of a century ago. As a result, the study of the past has become a much more varied, complex, multi-layered enterprise, and that has certainly been true of the British nineteenth century, about which more scholars are writing more kinds of history than ever before.
But this welcome and prodigious expansion in academic labour also has its downside, as it is now impossible for anyone to keep up with the unrelenting outpouring of academic literature in the way that was still practicable when I was starting out in the early 1970s. So much learning, so much erudition and so much information has undoubtedly extended and enriched our knowledge in ways that were unforeseeable and unimaginable several decades ago. But this has also had a dampening and deadening effect, which may explain why, in recent decades, the focus of scholarly interest and excitement has moved backwards, to a rejuvenated eighteenth century, where Namerite torpor and Thompsonian simplicities have alike been banished, and forward to the twentieth century where the opening of official records and other archival collections means it has become a fertile and compelling field, in which new discoveries are constantly being made. By contrast, the British nineteenth century has for some time been in what Miles Taylor calls ‘a state of suspended animation’, and he believes it needs to be ‘brought back to life’. This book is one such attempt at historical resurrection and scholarly resuscitation. As with the other volumes in the Penguin History of Britain, it is primarily a political history, with the politics imaginatively understood in the broadest possible way, encompassing many activities that, at first glance, may not seem conventionally ‘political’ at all. It also attempts to tell that history – or, more accurately, those many parallel and interlinked histories – in essentially narrative form, in the process aiming to restore to the subject something of the brio of those earlier, pioneering times. Moreover, the long years that have elapsed since I signed the contract for this book have witnessed the rise of global history as another significant sub-specialism, and this has helped to de-parochialize the nineteenth-century British (or English) past, while at the same time relocating the all too often self-enclosed history of the British Empire in a broader international context.
In writing this book, my first thanks are to those many historians who, since 1945, have written so much about the British nineteenth century, and whose works I have plundered and pillaged in the pages that follow. I have acknowledged some more specific debts in the bibliographical essay at the end of this book, but anyone who has tried their hand at any such work of panoramic synthesis knows how much they owe to the giants of an earlier time on whose shoulders they stand, and to past and present colleagues and co-workers in the same field. More particularly, I am grateful to Derek Beales, the late Christopher Platt, Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin who taught me nineteenth-century British, imperial and Commonwealth history when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and to the late Peter Mathias and the late Jim Dyos who respectively supervised and examined my Oxford doctoral dissertation. Since then, I have professed and practised modern British history at Cambridge, Columbia, London and Princeton Universities, and I have learned more from my doctoral students and personal assistants than I fear I have ever taught any of them. Much of this book was drafted while I was a Visiting Professor at Stern Business School, New York University, and I am grateful to Professor George Smith for having made that arrangement possible, and to him and his colleagues for having welcomed me so warmly. Earlier versions have been read by my good friends Jonathan Parry, Bill Lubenow, Stephanie Barcweski, Michael Silvestri and Martha Vandrei, and I am much in their debt for their comments and corrections. Eve Waller brought her careful and critical eye to bear on the earlier chapters of this book, and greatly to their benefit. And as fellow historian, departmental colleague, adored spouse and best friend, Linda Colley has done more than anyone to make this book possible and to make it happen.
I am also once again beholden to my long-standing friend and long-suffering editor at the Penguin Press, Simon Winder, who has shown extraordinary forbearance in waiting so patiently for this book, and who has seen it into print with consummate professionalism and unfailing cheerfulness. He has been ably assisted by Maria Bedford, to whom I also render thanks, along with Ingrid Matts and Pen Vogler for their work in publicizing and promoting the book. I am also indebted to Cecilia Mackay for her inspired research on the illustrations, to Richard Mason for his meticulous and painstaking copy-editing, and to Dave Cradduck for compiling the index. I dedicate this book to the memories of that great historian who did so much to bring the British nineteenth century alive, for me and for so many other people, and to a great publisher who commissioned this book and the series to which it belongs. How I wish that they were both still here to receive in person my homage and my thanks.
DNC
Princeton
St George’s Day 2017
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2017
Copyright © David Cannadine, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-31038-0
In memory of
Asa Briggs
and
Peter Carson
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not do so freely, not under conditions of their own choosing, but rather under circumstances which directly confront them, and which are historically given and transmitted.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
1. William Daniell, An Elevated View of the New Docks and Warehouses now Constructing on the Isle of Dogs near Limehouse, 1802 (copyright © Government Art Collection)
2. Nelson’s funeral procession arrives at St Paul’s Cathedral, 9 January 1806 (Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy)
3. Anon, ‘Britannia weighing the Fate of Europe, or John Bull too heavy for Buonaparte’, 1803 (copyright © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)
4. George Cruickshank, ‘The Free-born Englishman, envy of nations’, 1819 (Mary Evans/Alamy)
5. Wellington and Blucher at La Belle Alliance, 1819 (copyright © British Library Board; all rights reserved/Bridgeman Images)
6. Penry Williams, The Merthyr Riot, 1816 (Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Merthyr Tydfil)
7. The arrest of the Cato Street conspirators, 23 February 1820 (Pictorial Press/Alamy)
8. George Cruikshank, ‘Sweeping Measures, or making a Clean House’, 1831 (copyright © Trustees of the British Museum)
9. Cartoon of a public meeting in favour of the Reform Bill, 1832 (Working Class Movement Library)
10. Augustus Earle, A British Traveler in New Zealand, c. 1827 (Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra)
11. The British army entering the Bolan Pass during the first Anglo-Afghan War, March 1839. From J. Atkinson, Sketches in Afghanistan (World History Archive/Alamy)
12. L.L.D.B., Beggars and Peasants Assembled for Irish Meal, July 1847 (copyright © National Library of Ireland)
13. William Kilburn, View of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, 10 April 1848 (Royal Collection Trust, copyright © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017/Bridgeman Images)
14. British school, The Menai Straits with Britannia Bridge and Suspension Bridge, c. 1860 (copyright © Government Art Collection)
15. Augustus Butler, The Crystal Palace Viewed from Kensington Gardens, 1851 (Getty Images)
16. William Wyld, St George’s Hall, Liverpool, 1852 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017/Bridgeman Images)
17. Policemen in Manchester, c. 1850 (Courtesy of Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives)
18. Orlando Norie, Indian Mutineers About to be Blown Apart by British Cannon During the Great Rebellion of 1857, c. 1858 (National Army Museum, London/Bridgeman Images)
19. John Tenniel, ‘A Leap in the Dark’, from Punch, or the London Charivari, 3 August 1867 (Mary Evans/Alamy)
20. Charles West Cope (attr.), Domestic Interior with a Mother and Child Seated at a Piano, c. 1860 (Geffrye Museum, London/Bridgeman Images)
21. Frank Holl, No Tidings from the Sea, 1870 (Royal Collection Trust, copyright © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2017/Bridgeman Images)
22. Henry Gritten, Melbourne from the Botanic Gardens, 1867 (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
23. Alexander Caddy, The Delhi Durbar, 1877 (Private Collection/Bridgeman Images)
24. The Ottawa Parliament Buildings, with troops delivering a feu de joie for Queen Victoria’s birthday, 1868 (Library & Archives of Canada)
25. John Everett Millais, William Ewart Gladstone, 1879 (copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London)
26. John Everett Millais, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1881 (copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London)
27. Charles Staniland, The Emigrant Ship, late 1880s (Bradford Art Galleries and Museums/Bridgeman Images)
28. Sarah Acland, Lord Salisbury, 1894 (copyright © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)
29. Cover of an 1887 piano transcription of Iolanthe, after the original comic opera by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert, 1882 (Wikimedia Commons)
30. A cycling couple, c. 1900 (by courtesy of Leicestershire County Council)
31. Sketch of the body of Catherine Eddowes, by Foster, the City surveyor, 1888 (by courtesy of the Royal London Hospital Archives & Museum)
32. English School, A General View of Birmingham, 1893 (Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images)
33. Bonfire to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking, 1901 (003 Collection/Alamy)
34. ‘All Red Now Joey’, poster, 1902 (copyright © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)
35. Thomas Hill, Mourning for Queen Victoria, Parliament House, Melbourne, January 1901 (State Library of Victoria, Melbourne)
36. ‘Gertrude D. Bostock and Kate Fraser, Science Graduates of the University Of Glasgow’, c. 1900 (copyright © University of Glasgow; licensor www.scran.ac.uk)
37. Jawaharlal Nehru at Harrow, c. 1904 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
