Lor' bless You, sir
Quentin Bell
The World 100 Years Ago Michael WYnn Jones (Macmillan £4.95) T, he Victorians Sir Charles Petrie (White Lion £4.50)
Public Purity, Private Shame: Victorian Sexual Hypocrisy Exposed Ronald Pearsall (Weidenfeld and Nicolson
£4.5o)
SPread over pages ninety and ninety-one of The World 100 Years Ago is a handsome Photograph of the plenipotentiaries at the aerlio Congress of 1878. In the middle, standing beneath a large historical canvas Painted perhaps by Feuerbach, Bismarck turns towards Disraeli and Lord Salisbury and says—well, we don't know what he says since the only memorable words uttered at that once momentous, now utterly forgotten, gathering were 'peace with honour', and it was not Bismarck who said them. Bat whatever the Iron Chancellor may be salting, it must surely be magisterial; everyt.hIng about the photograph is impressive; In fact, everything is rather too impressive. There is something i false about it. The gentlemen in most nineteenth century Photographs look as though they had slept In their clothes. And in a volume which ,,,ntoves from Helena, Montana, to Gulgong, eVil South Wales, with battles, revolutions, ear-hunts and atrocities to enliven the Journey; it is likely that a great number of tilC gentlemen will have done just that. But soinething of the wrinkled, crinkled, creaseda,rld generally 'lived-in' air of Victorian ek_lothes—as observed by the camera—will 1„ue.found even when the scene is Simla or windsor. Here, in Berlin, on the other hand ne has the impression that the clothes of tne great have been taken straight from the tailor's block to the wearer's back, with ilever a moment's wear or tear on the way. sa_UsPect that this was exactly the case. This, b °elieve, was not an historic scene caught
a highly privileged photographer, but e Picture of a conference of waxworks.
It remains a suspicion, since we are told nothing, or very little, about the photofraPhs themselves. Many are old friends nrent the Gernsheim collection, others are yew to this reviewer at least, and some are I try striking. They have not been very well ,reated for although the illustrations seem kni determine the shape of the book, and t r Wynn Jones has to use all his ingenuity inatch his text to his illustrations, the ndtographs are not carefully described. and utit this is a readable and valuable book one which demonstrates one of the tkest.interesting things about the history of in'te nineteenth century, the fact that we have such abundance not only the official
image or the socially acceptable myth but the grubby' reality of photographs and statistics. No epoch was more splendidly romantic in its inventions and none more cruelly factual in its documentation. It speaks therefore with two voices and, as a result, we naturally accuse it of hypocrisy. Even Sir Charles Petrie, whose amiable, garrulous essays tend on the whole to lay stress upon the more public and presentable history of Victoria's reign, cannot avoid a discussion of the mines and the sweat shops. As for Mr Ronald Pearsall, he falls with horrid joy upon the obscene underbelly of the age, While Sir Charles deals largely with the drinking habits, the municipal politics and the vicissitudes of the monarchy, seldom adverting to anything more scabrous than the Tranby Croft scandal, Mr Pearsall is what the Victorians would have called 'frankly disgusting'. He leaves one with the impression of a lecherous, kinky, introverted and disgustingly double-faced society and provides, for what purpose it would be hard to say, a guide to all the indecent passages in the Bible. Both authors enliven their pages with some good jokes. I was particularly charmed by Mr Pearsall's account of the evangelist who, perceiving a solitary young woman stationed on the pavement, approached her with a tract only to receive a bewildered look and the statement: `Lor bless you, sir, I ain't a social evil. I'm waiting for a bus.'
On the whole, Sir Charles is the more reliable of the two historians but there is one point at which both he and Mr Pearsall are a little misleading. The conflict between science and orthodoxy is one of the major intellectual preoccupations of the age, and yet for Sir Charles it hardly seems to exist. He describes the disputes between the rival brands of Christianity, and describes them very well. These were indeed, superficially at least, the most important issue for many people. As Fitzjames Stephen put it, when considering the Roman Catholic Tablet and the Evangelical Record: `We have vulgar papers, we have unprincipled papers, and we have imbecile papers; but the full bitterness which the human heart is capable of feeling, the full ferocity which it is capable of expressing, is to be met with nowhere but in religious papers.'
This was one of the grand characteristics of the age, and the historian does well to consider it at length--but there was also an underlying movement, a steady seeping of faith which, so far as this island is concerned, has led to the triumph of scepticism and of tolerance. We are tolerant of one another's beliefs because we now believe in so little. We are tolerant, also, because our infidelity has not taken the form of anticlericalism or social radicalism; socialism in this country was established at an early date in the Anglo-Catholic church and the Dissenting chapel.
It is here, so it seems to me, that Mr Pearsall goes astray. Not only does he tell us that 'the decline of religion as a governing force. . was associated with the "creep
ing socialism" exemplified by the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867 and 1884 . . . ', which I doubt, but also that, 'as more and more people ceased to believe in God and vengeance from on high, an inhibition was removed.'
It may be that, among the followers of Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, there were a few radical republicans who dismissed the Christian morality along with the Christian God, but their number must have been minute. The interesting thing about Victorian atheism is rather the extent to which it clung to the ethical system, and indeed to many of the most unreasonable taboos of the pious long after the cosmological structure of Christianity had been discarded. The attitude of that agnostic who declared, now believe in nothing, to put it shortly, but I do not believe the less in morality etc etc. I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible,' was surely typical of, at all events, upper-class scepticism. It was left to the next generation, that is to say to the Edwardians, to consider whether there might not be something intellectually doubtful and morally barbaric about 'morality etc etc'. The image of the Gentleman (not to speak of the Lady) is not one that emerges intact and untarnished from Mr Pearsall's investigations; admittedly it has its finer side, and perhaps Victorian myth compares favourably with some of our own ideal constructions, but when all is said and done it was something unreal, a waxwork figure.
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