High Noon
Tuts expanded version of the Ford Lectures de- livered in Oxford in 1960 is one of the most interesting books on nineteenth-century English history to have appeared for many years. There has been an immense amount of research on the sociological, religious and economic aspects of Victorian England during the last two decades.
Some of it is unpublished, much of it is scat- tered through the articles of learned journals; even that portion which has appeared in book form has been, more often than not, too specialised and compartmented to contribute to- wards any general picture. Every now and then the historiography of a period needs some sort of synthesis and summing-up. Not since G. M. Young's Portrait of an Age has there appeared a comparable survey to Dr. Kitson Clark's.
The period with which he deals is the 'high noon' of Victorian prosperity, roughly from 1850 to 1875. Perhaps the most important change which he suggests is a change of perspective. We are, as he rightly says, too ready to draw
'an invisible line . . separating our relatively orderly, relatively humane, relatively well-policed society from the wilder, more savage, if more colourful, society of the past,' We forget how much of the eighteenth century survived into the 1850s—even into the 1860s. It has, of course, become a commonplace of political history that the Reform Act of 1832 wrought far less change in the political system than was at one time imagined. It is less clearly recognised that the Act of 1867 still left very large fragments of old-style politics embedded in the new structure; it was a rough, noisy old England which sup- ported Disraeli in 1877 and did not want to fight, but by jingo if it did .
Another matter which Dr. Kitson Clark brings into clearer proportion is the religious history of the period. In spite of the immense part played by religious controversy both in the poli- tical and in the ordinary life of the Victorians, the subject has been curiously neglected by his- torians as a general theme, although there have been many specialist studies of particular move- ments and sects. A fascinating book could be written on the interaction of religion and politics in the nineteenth century. Dr. Kitson Clark does well to remind us of the galling nature of the privileges of the Church of England, which could raise such passion and heat for the now extinct cause of disestablishment.
He is most revealing on the subject of Roman Catholicism. The social reasons for the bitter —and, as it now seems, almost inexplicable— hatred of Rome derived essentially from fear and dislike of the poverty-stricken Irish immi- grants who flooded, especially after the famine, into Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool. This reaction among the poorer classes in England and Scotland took the form of an intolerant tub- thumping popular Protestantism, unpleasantly reminiscent of anti-Semitic movements in cen- tral Europe, or of race riots in Notting Hill Gate. It has its political significance in explain- ing the opposition to Home Rule, not merely among the landed aristocracy who sympathised with the 'Ascendancy,' but among the lower middle and working classes, too.
Dr. Kitson Clark illuminates all the themes he selects, whether the subject is health statistics, the class structure, the public schools and the uniVersities, or the idea of a 'gentleman.' Of course, every historian will have his own ideas about what should go in such a book. I should have liked something about India and the colonies. If only by appealing to the imagination and by providing careers they did their bit to mould Victorian England. But no book can in- clude everything. We should be profoundly grate- ful for one of those rare studies of history which by disinterring forgotten facts, and throw- ing new light on familiar ones, makes it im- possible for us ever to look at the period again in quite the same way.
ROBERT BLAKE
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