The Townshends and Their World: Gentry, Law, and Land in Norfolk, C. 1450-1551 Book

This is a collection of biographical essays. Though a pelican book, a book written for, or appropriate for, a general reader, I found it a difficult book to read. Many simple facts are presumed known and the impact of certain historical events are not always given with the contextual significance spelled out. The book also presumes knowledge of a number of terms specific to parliamentary workings, and takes license to drop a few untranslated quotations in French (though the latter was more understandable for the time it was written). In spite all of this, the biographical approach made for a vivid reading experience, and the conclusions that Briggs makes are thought provoking. Briggs brings a sympathetic eye to the most cliched victorian traits which are typically referred to with condescension or shame.

In the introduction he justifies his choice of well-known figures to structure his book on "Victorian People," highlighting the quality of Victorian self-reflection (in spite of the cliches of hypocrisy):

The people I have chosen are not unknown "men in the street" or forgotten personalities; they are men who made a distinctive contribution to the character of their times. Some of them were the best critics of their own age or chroniclers of its history; others were makers of social and cultural values or persuasive advocates of them; a third group were reformers who wished to speed up the processes of change. p.18

Introducing the later chapter on Samuel Smiles and the popularity of his "self help" book and its wide appeal, Briggs concludes that a significant reason for its success was due to the upward-looking nature of the common english family in the Victorian age. The spirit of the common, urban man was often disposed to venerate the virtues of the bourgeois and aristocratic rulers, being influenced by the seeming ease of transition and equality of discourse between both factors; equally educated, equally intelligent, and equally powerful. Perhaps only a generation seperating them, depsite the stereotypes that one occasionally indulged of the other. The belief in progress not only at a national or intellectual level, but for the upward mobility, and self-improvement through imitation of one's "betters":

There was a forth reason why England did not become a business society, perhaps the most interesting reason of all. The businessmen themselves showed only a limited interest in the values by which they had risen. Many of them were deferential rather than rebellious, snobbish rather than independent, and usually tempered by what Gladstone described as "a sneaking kindness for a Lord". The moment quietly arrived in private histories when a new family became an old one and when its members basked in the branches of family trees and forgot that there had been ladders to climb on the way. Self-help was a more convenient philosophy for first than for second generations. If it was not easy for a successful businessman to become a "gentleman" in his own lifetime, he could have reasonable hopes that his children, educated in the new public schools and marrying sons or daughters of the gentry, would eventually become "ladies" and "gentlemen." p.19-20

On the chapter on the political struggles during the Crimean war, it is interesting to notice how absurdly highbrow-seeming today the common catcalls of parliament seem:

Russell, whose erratic course had precipitated a crisis in 1854, was even more erratic in 1855. He spoke in Vienna as a peacemaker and in London as a warmonger, and, when it became clear that he preferred his Vienna performance to that on his own soil, he was totally discredited:

I went like a fairy plenipotentiary
To the town of Vienna, to settle the war,
But they'll not believe me then, they vow I've deceived them,
And call me the friend of the great Russian Tsar.

The Tories took the lead in moving a vote of censure on his conduct and, when Palmerston told them in defence of his old rival that "they were making much ado about nothing," Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton replied pertinently that "Much Ado came after The Comedy of Errors." p.79


In a chapter on the bourgeois radical Roebuck, "David to the 4th Earl of Aberdeen's Goliath" during the scandals of resources for British soldiers in the Crimean, Briggs draws attention to an interesting moment in which outdated and inefficient administration procedures appeared as the culprit, in opposition to any scapegoat in the form of any one individual's failure of judgement:

It soon became clear that Aberdeen and his ministers, including Newcastle, had been unjustly blamed for offences of which they were innocent; the causes of administrative confusion lay buried in the whole structure of government, not in the incompetence of particular people. "I felt corruption round about me," wrote Roebuck, "but I could not lay my hand upon it." p.84

Briggs presses on with this point, depicting a minor epiphany within government that would have important influence in the following generation of institution-building: the focus of parliament on the reform of systems. This cued a clash of heads between artistocratic power, from which stock the positions of bureaucracy were de facto filled, and the increasingly confident management strategies of borgeous power, who wanted a chance to apply their ideas to the aparatus of the state:

There were many members of Parliament who sympathized with the demand for administrative reform as businessmen rather than as politicians. Samuel Laing, for instance, constrasted private concerns, where merit was the mainspring, with government offices, where merit passed unnoticed. The reason why the system was wrong was the mediocrity of the people who were managing it. [... Henry] Drummond, who had supported the setting-up of Roebuck's select committee, was [...] outspokenly independent in his views. He asked whether it was true that the middle classes were better or more "pure" administrators than the aristocracy. They had not even succeeded in draining the great cities in which they lived.

See what a precious mess they have made at Manchester. Filled as that town was with Radicals and philosophers, they could not drain it. And yet there was hardly a town in the kingdom which could be more easily drained; for it stands upon two hills and any man of ordinary common sense would have at once said, "Cut a ditch from the top to the bottom and so drain it."

Drummond added that the cry for administrative reform was a delusive cry and that the dream of replacing all those who had ever been concerned in the government of a country by ship-brokers, stockbrokers, and railway directors could only lead to disaster. p.87

Briggs looks at the political snobbery of the victorians through the writings of Bagehot, essayist, and Trollope, novelist. Instead of framing it as a reaction to fears, he presents it as a principled belief in quality, excellence, and democracy. Briggs allows for the interpretation that these beliefs were inspired by a simple distain and dislike of uneducated manners and culture, and gives quotations which display the full forcefulness of self-aggrandizement, but gives equal time to the ways in which the men presented themselves, and defended their views with articulate reasoning:

Both Bagehot and Trollope recognized that the peculiar characteristics of the English constitution in the middle years of the century depended upon a social as well as a political balance. [...]Deference and dignity were safeguards of parliamentary government in a society in which "primitive barbarism lay as a recognized basis to acquired civilization." [...] Deference and dignity were more than safeguards of social peace and political tranquillity; they were necessary conditions. [Bagehot:]

A deferential community, even though its lowest classes are not intelligent, is far more suited to a cabinet government than any other kind of democratic country, because it is more suited to political excellence. The highest classes can rule in it; and the highest classes must, as such, have more political ability than the lower classes... A country of respectful poor, though far less happy than where there are no poor to be respectful, is nevertheless far more fitted to the best government. You can use the best classes of the respectful country; you can only use the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other.

The qualification "though far less happy" provides the key to the social philosophy of Bagehot; whereas the Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham had taken "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" as the unchallengeable aim of government, Bagehot considered happiness neither as a precondition nor as a prior objective of "the best government." The "best government" was that based on discussion; it was most effectively managed not by the many but by "a select few," men who had enjoyed "a life of leisure, a long culture, a varied experience, an existence by which the judgement is incessantly exercised and by which it may be incessantly improved." p.99-101

Both Bagehot, the essayist, and Trollope, the novelist, stressed the simple contrast between the many and the few, the elite and the mob. At one end of the scale were the "coarse, dull, contracted multitude," who existed chiefly to serve and minister to the middle ranks of society and the upper classes. Trollope's poor have a language of their own - a very stilted language - but little independent life; in so far as they have aspirations of their own, they make themselves ridiculous, as does Mr Bunce in Phineas Finn: Bagehot believed that "the character of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art" and attacked Dickens's poor people because they were "poor talkers and poor livers, and in all ways poor people to read about... Mean manners and mean vices are unfit for prolonged delineation; the everyday pressure of narrow necessities is too petty a pain and too anxious a reality to be dwelt upon." p.102

The chapter on Samuel Smiles was perhaps the most interesting to me. A man of no naive view of class relations, and no snob like Bagehot or Trollope, his book exhorted individuals to focus on improving themselves, but also for the chasms between selfishly minded classes to open up and to embrace meritocratic values. His philosophy, borne from experience with all manner of peoples, was both a personal guide and a societal doctrine, and one that is perhaps due for serious re-consideration:

[Samuel Smiles] was an active participant in Radical politics in the hungry forties, advocating an extension of the suffrage, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and improved education of the working classes. These political experiences left their mark on the rest of his life and provide the background of his later social philosophy. Unlike Alger or most of the other "success" writers, he turned to self-help and thrift only when he saw the inadequacy of collective striving in an atmosphere of ignorance and poverty. Although he said little of politics in the later years of his life and had no sympathy with socialism or even with organic consitutional reform, he had known politics from the inside and had found political formulas inadequate. He had seen the artisans of Leeds - and even the Leeds manufacturers - "groping after some grand principle which they thought would lead them to fresh life, and liberty and happiness," but they were groping in the dark, and the flickers of light, like Owenite socialism, were merely will-o-the-wisps. p. 128

[to Smiles,] the working class was identified with "all toilers of hand and brain." Humble they might be, bu t they were the real makers of the future; from the start they had the advantage over the aristocracy that they tended to produce great inventors rather than great soldiers, a far more useful result despite the appeal of military service. It was with great approval that Smiles quoted the words of his friend Arthur Helps, the civil servant, who taught him the advantages of using shorthand: "Deduct all that men of the humbler classes have done for England in the way of inventions only, and see where she would have been but for them." [...]

Above all, he advocated a greater sympathy among classes. "Want of sympathy pervades all classes - the poor, the working, the middle, and the upper classes. There are many social gaps between them, which cannot yet be crossed." An increase in sympathy could not come about by charity - by giving money, blankets, coals, and such like to the poor"; it could not come about only by increased working-class independence and by mutual understanding of common interests. "Thus only can the breath of society be sweetened and purified." p.140-141

On a chapter on the public school, Briggs focusses on what was me a surprising consideration. Though they excluded far more than they embraced in pure numbers, in their time they represented a levelling influence that many conservatives were uneasy about:

The second way in which the public school was of central importance was in its mixing of representatives of old families with the sons of the new middle classes. The social amalgam cemented old and new ruling groups, which had previously remained apart. The working classes were for the most part excluded from the schools as they still are in the twentieth century, but the great social divide of the 1840s between landlords and businessmen was bridged. The public school, consequently, provided for the gradual fusion of classes and their drawing upon a common store of values. "There was nowhere in the country so complete an absence or servility to mere rank, position, or riches," wrote Charles Dickens; while Matthew Arnold, the son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, told Arminius with pride, in one of the letters in Friendship's Garland, that:

it is only in England that this beneficial salutary intermixture of classes takes place. Look at the bottle-merchant's son, and the Plantagenet being brought up side by side. None of your absurd separations and seventy-two quarterings here. Very likely young Bottles will end by being a lord himself.

[...however] the obvious limitations of such an idea were clearly apparent before the end of the century, when middle and upper classes were cementing a new conservative alliance against labour, but in the middle years of the century its limitations mattered little when cmpared with its immediate efficacy. p.153-4

The intellectually high-achieving generations that this form of schooling produced were high-minded, and recognized one another. Those most high-achieving, that later became politicians, such as the brilliant but dour Robert Lowe, fused their political beliefs with the platonic ideal of the "aristocracy of intellect":

John Bright guided the forces of change in English politics, and the Reform Bill of 1867 was his greatest triumph. Robert Lowe gave strength to the forces of resistance, and to him the Reform Bill was a national disaster. Lowe's resistance did not spring from naked self-interest or blind prejudice. Although he was member of Parliament for a pocket borough, Calne, not even his worst enemies claimed that his opposition to reform was based merely on a desire to protect that which was his own or that which was his patron's. There was less self-interest in Lowe's approach to politics than there was in that of Bright. He attacked reform not as a Whig apologist defending an order, but as an intellectual pleading for government by the educated against the government by the masses. The only aristocracy he recognized was the aristocracy of intellect; mere lineage was unimportant. "All knowledge," he once said, "except heraldry, has some use." In 1866 and 1867 it was reason, not passion or personal property, which persuaded him that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" could not be secured by an extension of the suffrage to the working clases.

Lowe established an ascendancy in the House of Commons during the debates of those years befcause he asked one bold question which was in the back of many members' minds: "Is England to continue as a monarchy in which the aristocratic and democratic elements of the nation have ever harmoniously blended? or is it, in spite of all experience, to adopt a lower form of civilization?" p.241

In attacking Disraeli, Lowe was angrier than he had been in attacking Gladstone. He claimed that the Conservatives were knaves and traitors as well as fools. "We have inaugurated a new era in English politics this session," he told the members of Parliament in 1867, "and depend upon it, the new fashion will henceforth be the rule and not the exception. This session we have had not what we before possessed - a party of attack, and a party of resistance. We have, instead, two parties of competition, who, like Cleon and the sausage-seller in Aristophanes, are both bidding for the support of Demos." p.247

The final proof of this form of progression of equality - perhaps small in absolute numbers of individuals, but then perhaps hugely significant historically speaking - was the dandy jew, Disraeli, whose charm and intellect won strong support and credentials for leadership in spite of constant suspicion and radical reinvention of the conservative ethos: that this was possible only 2 generations after the [i]Catholic[/i] Emancipation Act shows what a levelling force the public schools were:

His age was to educate "his party", and the first lesson he taught was that the party could not hold together on the principle of stubborn resistance against the spirit of the age. Change was the order of the day. [...] Conservatism could survive only if it considered something more than conservation. The historic past was alive, but it was also dead. After the second Reform Bill of 1867 had been attacked by both the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Tory Quarterly Review, the two great organs of traditional English politics, Disraeli compared them to two old-fashioned rival posting-houses. They had each described his policy as dangerous, revolutionary and precipitate. So, said he, "you may behold the ostler ast the Blue Lion and the chambermaid at the King's Arms, though bitter rivals in the bygone epoch of coaches and post-horses, making up their quarrels and condoling together in the street over their common enemy the railroad." p.273

One of the brilliant satirical magazines of the period, the Tomahawk, coupled the names of Bright and Disraeli in an imaginery letter from Bright to Disraeli written after the bill had passed the Commons: "We have had a very hard struggle to carry our Bill," Bright is made to say, "and as it left the Commons, spite of one or two blemishes, it promised to effect our object by transferring power from the hands of those who may be clever enough to see through us, to the hands of those who are sure to take us at our own valuation." Other writers saw Disraeli merely as the putative father of the bill, Bright as the real one. "This offspring is a stolen child," exclaimed Bernal Osborne, one of the political wits of 1867. "The right hon. gentleman has stolen it, and then, as the School for Scandal has it, he has treated it as the gipsies do stolen children - he has disfigured it to make it pass for his own. But the real author of this Bill is... the Member for Birmingham." p.274