Surely I am at least somewhat biased in favor of this book, because the nineteenth period is my own special period of study, which means that (as opposed to many of the earliest volumes) I have a wider context in which to fit this book. But even aside from that, I think England in the Nineteenth Century is one of the best installments of the Pelican History of England, if not the best.
One of the goals of this series was to provide a "social history" of England, to focus not just on "dates and kings and battles" as A. R. Myers put it in volume 4, but how society itself was changing and evolving. This is an admirable goal, but I have found that many of the series's writers struggled with pulling this off in practice, leading to books where you would get snapshots of different aspects of society, but no coherent story. In my review of volume 4, I made this comment about volume 1 that I think sums it up well: "I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with." Volume 4 itself was another that struggled with this approach.
Some other authors moved away from this, preferring to work forward chronologically through a period, and I've found these the better volumes, because they were usually able to tell a story about the era in question—but even though each writer has their own prism of what they're interested in, it still would feel like you were moving forward through kings and politics, even if not "kings and battles," as if they had perhaps only succeeded because they had abandoned the whole raison d'être for the series. (I particularly liked volumes 5 and 6.)
The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914) |
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Originally published: 1950 Acquired: August 2008 Previously read: January 2013 Reread: July 2025 |
But Thomson manages to make a social history and to tell a story in a way that achieves the platonic ideal of this series, and I don't think it's just the fact that I'm a Victorianist myself that makes me say this. Thomson focuses on how during this time the English were coming into a greater understanding of their own society, and thus attempting to do something about. He is writing to reclaim the Victorian period to the way the modernists came to view it in the early twentieth century (see Woolf's Between the Acts, which would have come out less than a decade prior, for a good example of this): "The whole meaning of Victorian England is lost if it is thought of as a country of stuffy complacency and black top-hatted moral priggery.... [They were] a people engaged in a tremendously exciting adventure – the daring experiment of fitting industrial man into a democratic society. Their failures, faults, and ludicrous shortcomings are all too apparent: but the days when Mr Lytton Strachey could afford to laugh at the foibles of the 'Eminent Victorians' have passed,* and we must ask ourselves the question whether we can laugh at our great-grandfathers' attempts to solve problems to which we have so far failed to find an answer" (33-4). Yes, it was an age of empire and of unequally distributed wealth, "[b]ut even when least fully aware of whence their power came Victorian Englishmen usually used it well, for they used it in the cause of freedom" (10). Some of their attempts seem comic to us now, yet "[i]t is wiser but more difficult to try to understand mid-Victorianism than to ridicule it" (102).
Drawing on another historian, M. D. George, Thomson puts it this way when discussing the conditions of the working classes in London: "hardships begin to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted: and it is the increased attention paid to them that is perhaps the main feature of the period.... Sweated labour and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them" (18-19).
The beginning of the book is a bit jarring coming off of J. H. Plumb's volume 7, because Plumb ended his book on kind of a cliffhanger: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). But Thomson doesn't see 1815 this way at all! He says that in 1815, England "was on the brink of an era of prosperity and greatness unrivalled in her whole history," though he does also admit "she was entering upon a period of remarkable social distress and unrest" (32). One of the selling points of the series was that each writer had the freedom to advance their own interpretation, so this isn't necessarily bad, but it does read weird, like when an issues of a comic book ends on a cliffhanger, but the next issue has a new creative team, so they just ignore it and do what they're interested in. Thomson doesn't position 1815 as a dark time like Plumb did, but as a time where people began to see the darkness and therefore began to do something about it.
Thus the book manages to tell a story, but instead of being the story of kings or prime ministers or battles, it's the story of how England attempted to improve itself; if there was "[t]he spread of social distress and economic upheaval," what matters to Thomson is that this led to the creation of "what soon came to be called 'the condition of England question'." He talks about the many significant people, but what matters about them is how behind their actions was the "fermenting of a new spirit of discontent" (43). The book is filled with examples of how things were changing for the better, leading to results that might seem bad in isolation but were improvements on how things had been. For instance, Thomson discusses the reduction of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed; before 1832 you could be hanged for pickpocketing or stealing a sheep or "impersonating out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital" (17). The new alternative was transportation (i.e., exile to Australia), and while this may seem like a bit of a barbaric punishment to us in isolation, it really was a serious improvement; after 1838, murder (or attempted murder) was the only crime anyone was hanged for. Okay, yes, hanging is barbaric, but limiting hangings to murders is definitely an improvement!
One of his big emphases throughout is the way the modern "social service state" developed; Thomson had previously written a book called Equality (1949) where he discussed this in detail, and I am interested enough to probably track it down someday. The belief that the government could be the remedy for social ills through systematic intervention was a new one in the period. Here, he says that the period created "well-rooted and flexible institutions of government and of social life.... [T]hese institutions of national life could be preserved, adjusted, modified, and used for new ends" (230). For example, he talks about how Robert Owen ("[c]ompletely a crank, something of a prig, but very much a saint"!) promoted education because it was the solution to the new idea that "our characters are made for us by environment and heredity alike, and therefore we are not responsible for what we are.... Men can all recognize truth when it is placed before them, and by moulding men's minds to the truth, society and even human nature can be revolutionized. Here was a simple and powerful basis for any program of comprehensive reform" (46).
A related emphasis is the Victorians' attempt to create a scientific understanding of society and thus a scientific basis for reform—this is my area of interest when it comes to the Victorians, so of course I'm into it. Thomson discusses Herbert Spencer, of course, but also figures less well known to a modern reader, like H. T. Buckle, who "attempt[ed] to handle human society by the methods of the physical sciences" and Walter Bagehot, who wanted more conscious discussion of a society that had evolved without conscious direction, and applied principles of natural selection (105). I found his discussion of how Darwin's Origin created an intellectual break particularly fascinating; I want to quote at length his quotation of Edward Pease, one of the founders of the Fabian Society, writing in 1916:
It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents. The Origin of Species, published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution.... The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis.... Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology. (qtd. on 151)
But as he says, a man like Charles Dickens is born out of the same intellectual conditions that give us people like Spencer, even if he might seem very different at first glance: "His significance is not that he propounded any programme of social reforms or political improvements, but simply that he painted, for all to appreciate and enjoy, a vivid picture of working class folk whose poverty could be seen not as a penalty from heaven or the punishment of sin, but as the product of bad social conditions and the consequence of man's inhumanity" (114).
Thomson discusses imperialism, thankfully, fitting in too into his overarching story. I liked his take on Rudyard Kipling: "He made popular the ideal of a common imperial patriotism, transcending every diversity of birth and circumstance, ennobled by an ideal of selfless service. He has much too often been quoted as an exponent of aggressive imperialism. He is rather the voice of unrepentant but chastened imperialism, seeking perhaps to unconsciously equip British power with moral purpose and a human content" (204). I don't think you have to buy this interpretation of Kipling in specific or Victorian imperialism in general, but it shows where they were coming from—or at least where they believed they were coming from. On the other hand, I was a bit skeptical of his claim there was little malice in the British attitude to Germany before the Great War (218), given the strong anti-German sentiment in some of the era's future-war fiction I have read.
This is a smaller part of the book, but he also discusses the way the monarchy changed in this era to become what we (I would argue) still recognize it as today, as a physical symbol of Britain's greatness (172), calling it "a new type of royal authority, resting not on constitutional prerogatives or political activity, but on the psychological needs of nationalism and imperialism" (174).
I think probably the whole story of the book is probably summed up by this bit: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils.... Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115).
It's a strong story of social transformation, and I think the best of these volumes by far. Perhaps a bit too sympathetic to the Victorians at times, but I guess I wouldn't be studying them if I wasn't sympathetic to them myself. It is certainly noteworthy that this is the first Pelican History where the book's publication date is closer to the era in question (it came out 36 years after the book's closing date) than it is to the time I read it (it came out 75 years ago). I am further from him than he was from many of the people he discusses! I think there is something to be said for the "power of distance," but proximity yields its own insights. I look forward to finishing off this project by (re)reading Thomson's second volume, which covers the era he himself lived through.
* Strachey's Eminent Victorians came out in 1918.
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