There is, in the English mind, both in speculation and in practice, a highly salutary shrinking from all extremes…. Quieta non movere [not to disturb the quiet] was the favourite doctrine of those times; … therefore, on condition of not making too much noise about religion, or taking it too much in earnest, the Church was supported even by philosophers as a bulwark against fanaticism, a sedative to the religious spirit, to prevent this from disturbing the harmony of society or the tranquillity of the state. The clergy of the Establishment thought they had a good bargain on these terms, and kept its conditions very faithfully.16
The Established Church was officially the “United Church of England and Ireland.” Though it accepted the Thirty-nine Articles of the Calvinist creed, it kept many features of the Catholic ritual. It had archbishops and bishops, but these usually married, and they were appointed by the Crown. Local parsons were generally chosen by the local squires, and helped them in maintaining social order. The Anglican clergy acknowledged the king as their head and ruler, and depended upon the state to collect from all families in England the tithe that supported the Church. Burke described Britain as a Christian Commonwealth in which Church and state were “one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole”; and John Wilson Croker called Westminster Abbey “a part of the British Constitution.”17 The relationship resembled that between the Catholic Church and the government of France under Louis XIV, except that there was almost no persecution for heresy.*
The dissenting sects—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Unitarians—were allowed to preach their doctrines on one condition: that they declare themselves Christians.19 Some Dissenters sat in the House of Lords. Methodist preachers gathered great audiences by their frightening eloquence. The oppressed workers of the towns, losing earthly hopes, returned to their childhood faith, and with such ardor that when revolutionary ideas swept over the Channel from France, they resisted all efforts to make them revolt. In 1792 the leaders of Wesleyan Methodism required of each adherent an oath of loyalty and obedience to the king.20
Within the Established Church itself the influence of Methodism inspired an “Evangelical Movement”: many of the younger clergy and laity resolved to revitalize the Anglican creed by taking the Gospel to heart, and devoting themselves to simple living, piety, charity, and church reform. One of them, William Wilberforce, led the English campaign against slavery; another, Hannah More, spread a fresh Christian fervor by her lectures, books, and Sunday schools.
Two religious groups remained outside the circle of full toleration: Catholics and Jews. English Protestants had not forgotten Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up the Parliament (1605), nor the flirtations of Stuart kings —Charleses I and II, James II—with Catholic powers, mistresses, and ideas; they tended to look upon a Catholic as one who had given his allegiance to a foreign potentate (the popes were temporal sovereigns as rulers of the Papal States), and they wondered how a Catholic would behave in a conflict between a Roman pontiff and a British king.
There were some sixty thousand Catholics in the England of 1800. Most of them were of Irish origin, but some were indigenous descendants of pre-Reformation British Catholics. The laws against them had by this time been much relaxed. Various enactments between 1774 and 1793 had restored to them the right to own land, to hold their own services, and to transmit their faith through their own schools; and a specially worded oath enabled them to swear allegiance to the king and the government without repudiating the pope. However, they could not vote, and could not be elected to Parliament.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the movement for the full emancipation of English Catholics seemed on the verge of success. Prominent Protestants—Wesley, Canning, Wilberforce, Lord Grey—supported it. The French Revolution aroused in England a reaction against Voltaire and the Enlightenment, and some sympathy for a religion so opposed by the revolutionary government. After 1792 the French émigrés, including Catholic priests and monks, received a warm welcome, and financial aid, from the British state; the exiles were allowed to establish monasteries and seminaries. The notion that a Church so weakened and despoiled could be a danger to England now seemed absurd, and in a war against France that Church could be a valuable ally. In 1800 Pitt introduced a bill for the emancipation of Catholics in England. The Tories and the High Church Anglicans opposed it, and George III stood resolutely with them. Pitt withdrew his motion, and resigned. Catholic emancipation in England had to wait till 1829.
Still tardier (1858) was the removal of civil disabilities from the Jews in England. They numbered some 26,000 in 1800: most of them in London, some in the provincial cities, almost none in the countryside. The long war interrupted further immigration, and allowed the English Jews to adjust themselves to British ways, and to break down some racial barriers. The law still barred them from the franchise, and from major offices, by requiring an oath “on the faith of a Christian,” and taking of the sacrament according to the rites of the Established Church. Otherwise they were free, and might worship unhindered in their homes and synagogues. Several prominent Jews accepted conversion to Christianity—Sampson Gideon the banker, David Ricardo the economist, Isaac Disraeli the author. The last, besides fathering the incomparable Benjamin, published anonymously and casually, between 1791 and 1834, Curiosities of Literature, which can still please an educated and leisured mind.
The long experience of the Jews in banking, and their family connections across frontiers, enabled them to come to the aid of the British government in the Seven Years’ War and the long duel with France. The brothers Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid helped Pitt to break the ring of extortionate brokers who had monopolized the transactions in Treasury issues. In 1810 Nathan Rothschild (1777–1836) established in London a branch of the firm that his father, Meyer Amschel Rothschild, had founded in Frankfurt-am-Main. Nathan seems to have been the ablest of the financial geniuses who distinguished the family through several centuries and in many states. He became the favorite intermediary of the British government in its financial relations with foreign powers; it was he or his agents who transmitted from England to Austria and Prussia the subsidies that enabled them to fight Napoleon; and he played a leading role in the industrial and commercial expansion of England after 1815.21
IV. EDUCATION
England seemed resolved to show how a government could get along without sending its children to school. The aristocracy was not interested in education except for its own sons. It seemed better for the status quo that the peasant and the proletaire, and probably the bourgeois too, should be unable to read, especially now that Godwin, Owen, Cobbett, Paine, Coleridge, and Shelley were printing such nonsense about exploitive aristocracies, agricultural communes, factory slaves, and the necessity of atheism. “The resolute advocates of the old system,” wrote Godwin about 1793, “have, with no contemptible foresight, opposed the communication of knowledge as a most alarming innovation. In their well-known observation—that ‘a servant who has been taught to write and read ceases to be any longer the passive machine they require’—is contained the embryo from which it would be easy to explain the whole philosophy of European society.”22 Besides (argued the upper echelon), the lower classes would be unable to judge with wisdom and caution the notions presented to them in lectures, journals, or books; ideas would be explosives; given nationwide schooling, the “monstrous regiment” of dreamy simpletons would try to tear down the necessary privileges and powers of the only classes that can preserve social order and civilization. And manufacturers, worried by competitors, pressed by investors, and looking for cheap labor, saw no sense in teaching child laborers the Rights of Man and the splendors of utopia. “These principles,” said an anonymous conservative quoted by Godwin, “will inevitably ferment in the minds of the vulgar, … or the attempt to carry them into execution will be attended with every species of calamity…. Knowledge and taste, the improvements of the intellect, the discoverie
s of the sages, the beauties of poetry and art, are trampled under foot and extinguished by barbarians.”23
In 1806 Patrick Colquhoun, former police magistrate in London, estimated that two million children in England and Wales received no education; in 1810 Alexander Murray, philologist, calculated that three fourths of the agricultural laborers were illiterate; in 1819 official statistics reported 674,883 children attending schools in England and Wales—a fifteenth of the population.24 When, in 1796, Pitt proposed that the government set up schools for industrial education, his measure did not come to a vote; when, in 1806, Samuel Whitbread offered a bill for the governmental establishment of an elementary school in every parish (such as already existed in Scotland), it was passed by the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords on the ground that it did not place education on a religious basis.
Religious groups taxed themselves to provide some education for some of their children. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge maintained “charity schools,” but their total enrollment of children did not exceed 150,000.25 Hannah More’s schools were almost confined to religious instruction. The Poor Law administration opened “Industry Schools” to 21,600 of its 194,914 children to fit them for employment. One thing the children in the religious schools learned well—the Bible; it became their faith, their literature, and their government, a precious possession amid the misfortunes, injustices, and bewilderment of life.
In 1797 Dr. Andrew Bell, to meet a shortage of teachers, established a “monitorial system” of using older students as assistant instructors in elementary schools connected with the Anglican worship. A year later Joseph Lancaster introduced a similar system on principles accepted by all Christians. The churchmen refused to operate with this undenominational plan; Lancaster was denounced as a deist, an apostate, a tool of Satan, and Coleridge joined in the condemnation.26 In 1810 James Mill, Lord Brougham, Francis Place, and Samuel Rogers founded the Royal Lancastrian Association to spread unsectarian schools. Alarmed by the progress of the plan, the Anglican bishops organized a rival “Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church.” Not till 1870 was a national system of undenominational elementary schools established in England.
Higher education was provided, for those who could afford it, by domestic tutors, “public” schools, lecturers, and two universities. The public schools—Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster, and Charterhouse—were open, for a fee, to the sons of the nobility and the gentry, with occasional additions from affluent bourgeois. The course of studies was primarily classical—the languages and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. Some sciences were added on the side, but the parents wanted their sons trained for government and polite company, and they were convinced that a youth could better prepare for these by Greek and Roman history, literature, and oratory than by physics, chemistry, and English poetry; Milton, however, was admitted as a displaced Roman who wrote Latin almost as readily as English.
Discipline in the public schools was a mixture of flogging and fagging. Major offenders were flogged by the masters; fagging was the provision of menial services by boys of the lower “forms” or classes for those of the upper forms: to run errands for them, shine their shoes, prepare their tea, carry their cricket bats and balls, and bear their bullying silently; the theory was that one must learn to obey before he is fit to command. (A like theory prevailed in the Army and the Navy, which were also organized on flogging and fagging and silent obedience; in this sense the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo were won not only on “the playing fields of Eton and Harrow” but as well in the halls and rooms of the public schools.) Once a fag reached the upper forms, he was ready to defend the system. There was some democracy in these nurseries of aristocracy: all fags were equal, regardless of wealth or pedigree, and all graduates (if they avoided commerce) looked upon one another as equals—and upon all others as inferiors, however talented.
From such schools the graduate—usually at the age of eighteen—went on to become an “undergraduate” at Oxford or Cambridge. These universities had declined from their late-medieval and Renaissance excellence; Gibbon was not alone in regretting his Oxford days as mostly wasted in irrelevant studies (though he profited hugely from the Latin and Greek), and student competition in gambling, drinking, wenching, and warfare with the town. Admission required acceptance of the Established Church. Instruction was by dons, each of whom took charge of one or more pupils, and transmitted his lore to them by lectures or tutoring. There too the classics dominated the curriculum, but mathematics, law, philosophy, and modern history had won a place, and lectures were available—though sparsely attended—in astronomy, botany, physics, and chemistry.
Oxford was Tory, Cambridge was Whig. In the latter, subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles had been removed as a condition for entrance, but only members of the Church of England could take a degree. The campaign against slavery had been waged there since 1785. Science found at Cambridge better teachers and more students than at Oxford, but both universities lagged behind the German and the French. Oxford taught philosophy from the works of Aristotle; Cambridge added Locke, Hartley, and Hume. Cambridge was producing scholars of international renown; Oxford aimed rather to fit men for eloquence and strategy in Parliament, and then, after trials and experience, and with proper connections, for a role in the government of Britain.
V. MORALITY
1. Man and Woman
What kind of moral life evolved from this class government, this changing economy, this union of state and Church, this education so limited in content and spread, this national heritage once strengthened by isolation, now challenged by communication, revolution, and war?
Men and women are not naturally moral, for their social instincts, which favor cooperation, are not as strong as their individualistic impulses, which serve the self; so these must be weakened, and those strengthened, by law expressing the will and power of the group, and by a moral code transmitted through the family, the church, the school, public opinion, custom, and taboos. Inevitably, then, there was considerable crime in the England of 1789–1815, a deal of dishonesty, and a flow of premarital sex. If we may believe Hogarth and Boswell, brothels and streetwalkers abounded in London and the factory towns. The aristocracy had found prostitutes less expensive than mistresses. Lord Egremont, open-handed host to Turner and other artists, “was said to have had a series of mistresses, by whom he sired many children…. The gossip, however, only added to the warmth his friends felt for him.”27 We may judge the morals of the upper classes by the amiability with which they adjusted themselves to those of the Prince of Wales. “The Prince grew up amidst the most licentious aristocracy that England had known since the Middle Ages.”28 The peasantry may be presumed to have respected the old moral code, for the family organization of agriculture required a strong parental authority, and allowed almost inescapable surveillance of the young by the old. The growing proletariat, however, released from such controls, imitated its exploiters as well as its income would allow. “Low wages in unregulated sweatshop industries made temptation strong”29 for women factory workers to sell themselves for an added pittance to their minimal wage.
Until 1929 the legal age of marriage was fourteen for the male, twelve for the female. Normally marriage was mercenary. A man or a woman was maritably desirable according to his or her actual or prospective income; mothers schemed night and day (as in Jane Austen’s novels) to marry their daughters to money. Love marriages were still exceptional, though literature was exalting them. Common-law marriage was legally recognized; formal marriage required a clergyman. Families were large, for children were economic assets, only a little less so in factories than on farms. Contraception was primitive. The rate of population growth was rising, but was slowed by infantile and senile mortality, and the inadequacy of nourishment, medical care, and public sanitation. Adultery was widespread. Divorce could be obtained by the husband or (after 1801) by the wife, but only by
an act of Parliament, which cost so much that only 317 divorces were granted before the law was liberalized in 1859. Until 1859 a woman’s movable property became her husband’s at marriage, and he automatically acquired whatever such property came to her after marriage. She retained her property in land, but the income therefrom belonged to her husband. If she predeceased him all her property passed to him.30
We hear of wealthy women, but they were few. By the custom of entail a father who had no living son could—and in many cases did—bequeath his estate to a male relative, leaving his daughters dependent on friendship or courtesy. It was a man’s world.
2. Mary Wollstonecraft
Custom had inured most British women to these inequities, but the winds now blowing from Revolutionary France aroused some sufferers to protest. Mary Wollstonecraft felt them, and raised her voice in one of the ablest appeals ever made for women’s liberation.
Her father was a Londoner who decided to try farming; he failed, lost his fortune and his wife, took to drink, and left his three daughters to earn their own living. They opened a school, won praise from Samuel Johnson, and went bankrupt. Mary became a governess, but was dismissed after a year because “the children loved their governess better than their mother.”31 Meanwhile she wrote several books, including, in 1792, at the age of thirty-three, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
She dedicated it to “M. Talleyrand-Perigord, Late Bishop of Autun,” with a hint that since the Constituent Assembly had proclaimed the Rights of Man, it was morally obligated to issue a Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Perhaps to ease her way she took a high moral tone, professing loyalty to country, virtue, and God. She said little of woman suffrage, for “as the whole system of representation is now in this country only a convenient handle for despotism, they [women] need not complain; for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hardworking mechanics, who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children’s mouths with bread.” Nevertheless, “I really think that women ought to have representatives [in Parliament], instead of being governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.”32 As an example of sexually based legislation she pointed to the laws of primogeniture and entail. And custom was even crueler than law, for it branded and punished a woman through life for one moment’s departure from chastity, “though men preserve their respectability during the indulgence of vice.”33