Lashing out
Brigid Brophy
Night's Black Angels The Forms and Faces of Victorian Cruelty Ronald Pearsall (Hodder and Stoughton £4.75)
"Yes," says Hesione Hushabye when Boss Mangan calls her cruel. "cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didnt really hurt." Mr Pearsall is at the disadvantage of not having been invented by Bernard Shaw. Except when he quotes Shaw (on the "horrible passional ecstasy" of crowds at public floggings, "from which even the most self-restrained and secretive person who can prevail on himself to be present will not be Wholly free"), his book is devoid of Mrs Hushabye's insight into the ambivalence of People's feelings about cruelty. The cruelties it catalogues did really hurt, but not recently. They were suffered in the reign of Queen Victoria which, Mr Pearsall says, "is far enough away for us to look at it objectively, and observe acts of cruelty by man and society for what they were, not necessary actions to Uphold law and order, retain social stability, or enforce exploded dogma." To recognise an act of cruelty as such is certainly an intellectual advance on mistaking it for an act of kindness. But an accumulation of such recognitions is not a further advance. Mr Pearsall's "objective" look at the Victorians doesn't raise its vision above the descriptive. He classifies his horrors on the least analytical principle he could have picked, namely by victim. His chapters tour shades of the prison-house, the madhouse, the workhouse, the sweat shop, the slaughterhouse and the school room. To his credit, he includes the drawing room, where he has imaginatively recognised the studied social snub as a cruelty. Quite a lot of upper-class Victorian energy went into grinding the faces of the newly rich. . In tone the book is popularising, though that Is an insulting label to put on the violence it sometimes does to words and sense. Mr Pearsall writes of "disinterested doctors" certifying People insane "for an easy two guineas." that he means that part of the evil was at the doctors were, precisely, not disinterested When he asserts that in 1875 "each individual drank 1.30 gallons of spirits," he has , P°Pularised a statistic into a damned lie. There
Is a now bibliography, though only blanket ack
the ledgement of the novels and newspapers of
. period, but few detailed references to
cru isr"s. (Why do popularisers or their pubhers so often, so condescendingly, assume __at PoP readers won't want to folloW up cancheck up on — information?) Nothing that I find in the book discloses the source of its '''e. which I take to be a quotation. But with paeryerse illiteracy the publishers have, on the Ihicliet, printed the sub-title, which is presuma YA"t a quotation, between quotation marks. short introduction, which opens with the
orthodox but not indisputable assertion that man is the only animal capable of cruelty, attributes cruelty to multiple causes: sometimes sadism, sometimes over-reaction to fear. The second might have been salvageable by a long argument. Here, however, it's simply asserted and then, in the next paragraph, apparently contradicted: by the statement that cruelty is most often visited on the weakest those, that is, from whom the perpetrator has the least to fear.
The multiple causes formula is this decade's fashionable way for authors to dodge the responsibility of having a thesis. It may insure you against being proved wrong, but it leaves your book without form or even much of a thread. Plonking his facts flatly down, Mr Pearsall gives himself no chance to illuminate the psychology of cruelty and little to characterise the specific Victorianness of Victorian cruelty. He does remark, under 'Religious Cruelty,' that, unlike most ,Christians before them, Victorians didn't kill and torture heretics. But since he confines himself to Britain (apart from a white-slave trip to the brothels of Brussels) he doesn't take off into even the mild speculation that Victorian religious cruelty may have been exported and converted into the conversion of the heathen.
His other major historical comparison is with the present, where he's much less bold about , recognising a cruelty under its cloak of a -necessary action." His chapter on vivisection begins by saying that it is and always has been "an emotive issue" (the fashionable formula for excusing its wielder from feeling any emotion himself), and it ends (without having mentioned that, since the Victorians, the victims have multiplied from hundreds to millions of animals a year) by saying that the issue is "still with us." To this he appends -Though it rarely boils over today" a remark that is punctuated as though it were a whole ,sentence and that betrays ignorance alike of syntax and of today. As I write, three people are awaiting trial for a non-violent move against vivisection; and Davis-Poynter are about to publish a documented indictment, by Richard D. Ryder, of experimental practice. On this subject, indeed, Mr Pearsall seems ignorant of twentieth-century writing even when its material is Victorian. His bibliography leaves out John Vyvyan's sombre and serious history of Victorian vivisection, In Pity and inAnger.
Although he has a chapter on the "amateurs of suffering" who, by hearsay or as eye witnesses, collected atrocities (and in whom he admits ,a sexual motive only when the collector's item was explicitly sexual), Mr Pearsall seems not to wonder what sort of second-hand amateurs of suffering will collect his book. Mrs Hushabye's requirement is best met by sado pornography, since fantasy doesn't really hurt, and next best by the Clients and staff of the whipping brothels, the only people to emerge from' Mr Pearsall's book in the moral clear, since though their cuts really hurt they didn't violate consent. The social advantage of sado-pornography (and likewise the reason why some people treat it with superstitious dread) is that it obliges the reader to acknow ledge that the impulse towards cruelty is his own. Societies that manage to persuade themselves that their average citizen is an
ordinary decent chap without an unkind thought in his head will probably always be liable to be deceived by whichever pretext of -necessary action" is historically in vogue.
A collection of atrocities that really happened lacks the justification, along with the pleasures, of pornography. The best it can claim is the lesser usefulness of spreading information. Even so, the "necessary action" of informing oneself might serve as a pretext for avoiding self-knowledge. The publishers decorate the jacket with a pert little piece of Victorian (non-consenting) fladge.
Brigid Brophy has most recently written The Ndventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl
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