Category Archives: Nineteenth Century British History

The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture 1740-1914 2003 364 p

I noticed a few weeks back as part of the discussion about childcare funding that the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has suggested that instead of big business being asked to pay a 1.5% levy, workers could be offered a HECS-style loan for childcare.  Not only do we put ourselves into HECS debt for the training to get a job, it seems, but we wade even further into ‘HECS-style’ debt for childcare to ensure that we can keep working to pay off that original HECS debt.   In a home-owner society like middle-Australia, it’s almost taken for granted that there will be a mortgage, but it’s becoming the new normal for rising generations to have an extra debt as well- that little ol’ HECS debt, bubbling away in the background.

I realized after reading Margot Finn’s book The Character of Credit, however, that the universality of indebtedness might not be a recent thing. Instead, as she demonstrates so ably,  debt was interwoven into the networks and relationships in British society from top to bottom.  They weren’t borrowing from banks: they were borrowing from each other, and the relationship was personal. In deciding if someone’s personal worth,  you’d check out his or her clothes, marital relations, spending patterns and perceived social status- and the people who were lending to you would be doing the same thing.

The book has three parts.  In the first, Finn begins by examining the treatment of debt in the 19th century novel and as you might imagine, Dickens and Trollope get a good airing, but many others as well- in fact, once you’re alert to it, you see these relationships of debt and obligation everywhere.  She explores a wide array of exchange activities: instrumental gift giving, customary retail sociability (where people of means would intentionally only pay their accounts once a year, often impoverishing the humble shoptrader in the process),  reliance on unwritten debt agreements and  purchasing by people (i.e. women) who did not have legal agency. She then moves onto autobiographical accounts and diaries, which largely support the view put forward by the novelists that the webs of overlapping indebtedness ran right throughout society from top to bottom.

In Part Two, she turns to institutional and governmental records to examine the changing history of imprisonment for debt.   Indebtedness was seen as misfortune, not a moral failing, and the debtors’ prison was not so much a punishment as a place of asylum for the debtor from the duress being placed on him by his creditors.  Many of the people there were of relatively high status: it wasn’t worth pursuing a debtor who had nothing.  Just as Dickens showed us with the Marshalsea in Little Dorritt, there was a flow of people and goods in and out of the prison which was, indeed, a sanctuary.  The prisoners there literally ran the prison, taking responsibility for conditions and behaviours- and get this! they even levied fines on people who left the toilet seat up in the water closet!!!

In Part Three she traces the change in attitude in the 1840s as debt came to be seen as fraud, not misfortune, and the implications for punishment.  The summary small-claims courts were established to support this changed conception, and were marked out from the other courts in that married women were allowed to appear and give evidence.  In this chapter she draws on legal cases and records from tradesmen’s protection associations.

The book covers 1740-1914, and so much of the material in this last chapter took me beyond my own period of interest (i.e. up to 1845). It was this ‘modern’ view of debt from 1842 onwards that my own judge, Judge Willis, was wanting to adopt, and it very much fitted in with his campaign of ‘sifting to the bottom’ of financial impropriety.  I’d read in several places where he expressed a wish for the English system, and now I understand why.

There’s a very detailed, informed and nuanced review of the book here which takes some issue with the arguments raised.  I lack the knowledge to give anything other than an impressionistic review. I admire the way that this beautifully written book combines a close reading of the novels she has chosen in the first section, with a confident use of legal documentation in the second and third sections.  There would be few writers, I suspect, who could combine the literary and the legal so well.

Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832,

2013, 278 p.

By coincidence, I have been reading this book during the week that the world was watching with bemused concern as the American economy seemed as if it were going to jump off a cliff through the single-minded intransigence of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party.  Will they/won’t they? What if..? Surely not?  It strikes me that much the same questions could have been framed by the political commentators after the 1830 election. For as Antonia Fraser reminds us, just as the financial world hasn’t known quite how the brinksmanship in Congress was going to work out, so too those watching the negotiations and brinkmanship over the 1832 Reform Bill didn’t know how it was going to work out either.

I have borne in mind the words of F. W. Maitland, which are at the heart of writing history: ‘We should always be aware that what now lies in the past, once lay in the future’: that is to say, we know the Reform Bill will pass, but the people who fought for it did not (p. xiii)

It was customary that an election be held after a monarch died. In the election held after William IV came to the throne, the Tories, who had been in power for nearly 60 years scraped in with a bare majority.  In a country already heaving with unrest with the Captain Swing riots in the wake of rapid industrialization,  Prime Minister Wellington declared in the House of Lords his trenchant opposition to any reform of the outdated voting arrangements for Parliament.  As a man whose political career  was founded on his military success after the French Revolution, he only had to look across the Channel to France where in the wake of the 1830 Revolution King Louis-Phillipe had abolished the hereditary upper house in 1831.  And so the stage was set:  the House of Lords bitterly resisted any reform that would challenge the personal control of parliamentary seats, but in the House of Commons, amongst the Whigs in both houses, and in the streets and fields outside, the momentum was on for reform.

It took two years, a fall of government, another election, and the threat of the King creating additional peers before  the Reform Bill was finally and grudgingly passed by  the House of Lords.  What followed was a decade of political swings and roundabouts, with governments changing, falling, and resurrecting in rapid succession.  From a colonial Australian perspective, you can see it in the succession of Secretaries of State for the Colonies who came and went in the 1830s and 1840s so often that Governors must have hesitated over addressing their despatches lest the recipient be ousted by the time it was received.

This book marks somewhat of a departure for Antonia Fraser, who is probably more famous for her books on individual French and English royals- Marie Antoinette, Henry’s wives, Mary Queen of Scots etc. (although she has also written on Cromwell, women in 17century England and the Gunpowder Plot). It’s the first of her books to be set in the 19th century as distinct from the 17th, but like all of her other books she looks at individuals within wider political movements.  This book centres on the action in and around Parliament in the two years that it took the Reform Bill to finally pass, and ‘the people’ (a much less threatening description than ‘the mob’) are a shadowy presence outside Parliament.  It’s a book about Lords a-plenty, both Whig and Tory, supported by Thomas Attwood, the middle-class banker from Birmingham who agitated the middling classes, and the so-called ‘Radical Tailor’ Francis Place who kept ‘the people’ as a restless weapon at the ready.

It’s always confusing reading British Parliamentary History because although the titles remain constant, the men who bear them change as fathers die and sons shuffle up the chain of titles to take their place.  So I was startled to read that Earl Grey was an old man when he stood up in Parliament in 1830 to push for Reform- and yet he was Secretary of State in the 1840s- how could this be? – until I remembered that there was a 2nd and a 3rd Earl Grey, and that Howick and 3rd Earl Grey were the same man. I must admit that I hadn’t realized that the House of Commons was such a holding-pen for sons waiting to succeed their fathers in the House of Lords, and that socially, the two houses were so intertwined. There’s many familiar names- Brougham, Lord Althorp (3rd Earl Spencer and Princess Diana’s forebear), Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Durham (of Canadian history fame), Queen Adelaide (the capital city of South Australia, the wine) and even court reporter Charles Dickens.  Fraser does well to give this huge cast of characters clear identities and a visual image, and if you do forget who’s who, the index is very helpful.

Because the interest of this book is based so much on the debates and tensions in Parliament, it’s a book dominated by politics and individuals.  In this way, it’s quite similar to the journalism that has surrounded the machinations in Congress over the passing of the debt ceiling in the last week.   It’s a book for political junkies of the 19th century, but it has lessons for us today as well. For those of us who want quick fixes through Parliament, it’s a sobering lesson.  When those who hold power are being asked to vote against their own interests (think the Abolition of Slavery, the Reform Bill, putting a price on carbon), things take time.   Change is often incremental, as well.  After all the debating, the pressure, the muffled threats of popular dissent, the Reform Bill of 1832 made only relatively small changes. The number of electors increased from 478,000 to 813,000 out of population of 24 million.  It took two further Reform Bills, then the final acknowledgment of female suffrage after WWI, before universal voting rights were achieved.

The subtitle of the book is “The Drama of the Great Reform Bill”.   For those of us who like reading about politics, it is drama indeed.

422 p. & notes, 2001

I spent all of Anzac Day and most of the following day reading about soldiers.  Not Australian ones, but British ones.  I was originally spurred to read this book by a question in my mind about the wives of officers in the British Army, but I then realized that British regiments have been just off-stage in the three British colonies that I’ve been studying (Upper Canada, British Guiana, New South Wales).  In fact, they’ve been ON the stage all along but I just haven’t been looking there.

Richard Holmes is one of my favourite biographers- as you can tell here and here. This book, however,  is written by the OTHER Richard Holmes- the military history one (who died in 2011) .  But his opening page certainly started well, and could well have been written by ‘my’ other literary-biography Richard Holmes:

He has not shaved this morning.  And from the look of things he shaved neither yesterday nor the day before.  Ginger stubble sprouts from a sun-tanned face, with red-rimed blue eyes and a mouth whose teeth stand anyhow, like a line of newly raised militia…. His name is Ezekial Hobden, Hobden to officers, NCOs and most private soldiers but Zeke to a favoured few….(p. 3)

Military history is most definitely not my favourite genre.  I dislike the deference, the lionizing of ‘great’ men,  the pernickity attention to details about battles and uniforms and regiments,  and the “well done those men!” tone of it all.  But as Holmes says in his preface

This is not a book about great, or even non-so-great generals, though both feature in it from time to time.  And it is not about battles either, even if we are rarely very far away from them.  Instead, its concern is for the  raw material of generalship and the pawns of battle, the regimental officers and soldiers, (and their wives, sweethearts and followers of a less defined and sometimes rather temporary status) that served in the British army in a century when it painted the world red. p. Xv.

Holmes makes no secret of his admiration for the British Army- he even declares his love (and he uses that word) for  “its sheer, dogged, awkward, bloody-minded endurance.”  The army he describes in this book existed with relatively little change between 1760 and the eve of World War I.  It had two functions: the continental one, with an emphasis on formalism in drill and dress and the scientific aspects of warcraft, and a colonial function where practicality outranked precedent, and dress and discipline were looser.  It is this colonial British Army that I have been encountering in my studies without quite acknowledging it.  Holmes examines both threads of the British Army, both at home and in deployments in the American War of Independence, the Peninsular campaign, in India and particularly the Indian Mutiny and finally in the Crimea.

His emphasis is on the experience of the officers and soldiers of the British Army, rather than the battles as such.  He speaks of recruiting,  food, clothing, camaraderie, punishment, equipment, wounds and drunkenness.  It is a particularly human account, with only one section on weaponry and its use in battle that had me squirming a bit and wondering why I was reading it.  He relies heavily on memoirs from soldiers of all ranks and campaigns, and there’s humour in there, alongside the waste, the waste, the waste.  We meet several of his soldiers again and again in different chapters- perhaps he could have had an appendix at the end to remind his readers of who they were when you met them again. But perhaps they’re better left as living, talking men in their memoirs, rather than a cut-and-dried obituary.  In fact, he says something like this in his closing pages:

There are moments when a memorial has come as an unexpected shock, for the man it commemorates has featured prominently in the memoirs that have formed so much a part of my working life for the past two years and, ridiculously, I know, it is hard to think of him as being dead. (p. 420)

This is a strangely emotional book for a military history with  humour and love written into it.  I enjoyed it a great deal.

416 p. 1994
Some time ago I read and reviewed Victorian People and Ideas, a book that I described as a ‘light touch intellectual history’ that explored the mental furniture of  characters in the canon of Victorian Literature.   As you might guess from the title of this book, it has a similar intent but it’s Mills and Boon in comparison, and not so much about mental furniture as the actual furniture that Elizabeth, Anne, Tess et al might have sat on.

No concerns here about periodization- Austen,  the Brontes, Trollope, Hardy- they’re all bundled in together with nary a thought about the wider political and physical world outside.
The book is a cradle-to-grave, upstairs-to-downstairs explanation of the domestic and social world of the characters one might find in Victorian literature. It explains clothes, food, business practices, social manners and expectations etc in a rather whimsical fashion.  It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you don’t really need to have read particularly widely to enjoy it.  It is divided into two parts- the first is organized thematically, while the second part is a glossary of particular terms and phrases that you’re likely to encounter in reading Victorian novels.

The author is American, and the book felt a bit like a travel guide from the self-assured comfort zone of Americana into the weirdness of British life and customs.  It’s written in a breezy style and you can easily pick it up and put it down again, but I found that very little actually stuck with me- with two exceptions.  One was his explanation of entail and inheritance, which is of course so important to Victorian novels, and the other was his description of promissory notes.  I see that the author is a lawyer, and I think that he put his skills to good work here.

I know that the book is not intended in any way to be an academic tome, but I did find myself frustrated that there were no footnotes or references at all. You were just left to trust him and not question too deeply. Still, the book is intended as a bit of a hoot, and in that way it probably fulfils the promise of its catchy title perfectly.

 1974 (first edition)  309 p.

This book is subtitled: ‘A companion for the modern reader of Victorian literature’.  This qualification is an apt one as the book is intended,  as Altick makes clear in the preface, to be a background accompaniment to literature rather  than a history in its own right.

This book is rather like of of those “Music Minus One” records of a concerto, in which the orchestral accompaniment is present but the solo instrument lacking.  The different voices of Victorian social and intellectual history here provide the background, that is to say, the thematic material which in a fully realized concerto is developed by the solo instrument.  The unheard soloist- the real center of interest- is, of course, Victorian literature itself… The chapters that follow are designed, then, to supply the accompaniment by which Victorian literature can be made more intelligible and pertinent to a reader in the last quarter of the twentieth century.  The accurate understanding of any era’s literature depends to a greater or less extent on a grasp of its historical context, but the danger of misreading and of anachronistic criticism increases when one deals with literature so intimately connected with contemporary life as was that of the Victorians. (p. ix)

The mentions of vinyl records and the ‘last quarter of the twentieth century’ remind us that this book is now forty years old.   It was written before the various ‘turns’ that have spun historiography around during the last 35 years (the ‘linguistic turn’; the ‘cultural turn’ etc.).  Although it styles itself a ‘companion’, it is in fact a history, but largely shorn of the historian’s footnotes and references.

There are a number of factors that complicate any attempt to examine Victorian literature or society generally.  The first is that ‘Victorian’ covers so many years, and multiple epochs, extending even beyond the 63 years of Queen Victoria’s reign.  As he points out:

Seen in a century’s perspective, the age merges at either end into epochs of a very different tone, from which, retrospectively in the one instance, by anticipation in the other, those earliest and latest years acquired their distinctive coloration. p. 1

He is thus careful to distinguish between ‘early’  and ‘mid’ Victorianism, and in several respects notes the decay of Victorianism even before Victoria’s reign was over.  He notes that the 1830s were a period of transition from the romanticism of the early 1800s, and that the early years of Victoria’s reign were “bathed in [the] gawdy twilight” of the Regency era.  The prudery and strict moral conduct that is synonymous with ‘Victorianism’ in our mind today began, in fact, during the Regency period, evidenced by the publication of Bowdler’s santized version of Shakespeare (from which we get the term ‘bowdlerism’) in 1818.  What we know as ‘Victorianism’ did not spring forth fully formed in 1837, and it did not stop in its tracks in 1901.

Second, in examining Victorian literature in particular, it is both an expression and a product of its time.  Author and audience are both ‘Victorian’ and each shapes the other.  Altick discusses Dickens, Eliot, Wilde and Ruskin both as authors who were forming the mind-set of their readers, but also as products themselves of their own intellectual and social milieu. He doesn’t discuss individual works as such, but he does use their characters  to exemplify the major  themes, concerns and mentalities of the day.

As such, this is a light-touch intellectual history, with well over half of the book devoted to utilitarianism, evangelicalism,and attitudes towards art and culture. There is quite a bit of church history here, but this is important in defining the Victorian temper.  Hence he explores the development of evangelicalism first within the Anglican church then as it split oft into non-conformism, and the influence of the Oxford Movement and Tractarianism. He distinguishes between utilitarianism (in its purest form known as Benthamism) and laissez-faire, and the political and social implications of each. He suggests that if you depicted utilitarianism and evangelicalism as two irregularly shaped designs, and then superimposed one upon the other, you would be struck by the number of portions that would merge into a single image.  Both promoted the value of work (evangelicals for its moral benefit; utilitarians for efficiency and because it is a ‘good’) and both looked askance at artists (evangelicals disliked their warped morality; utilitarians saw them as parasites).

Periodization of an individual’s thinking is complex.  As a biographer/historian, I find ‘habits of mind’ the most slippery aspect to pin down.  I am working on a man born in the closing decade of the 18th century, educated in the Regency years, whose career was at its zenith (such as it was) during the decade immediately before and after Victoria’s ascension to the throne, yet to all intents and purposes is very much ‘the Victorian man’.  But how old is the core of him?

Thinking of myself,  I was born in the 1950s and hence ostensibly a baby-boomer, and I have tumbled into a different millenium in a digital, market-oriented world.  But if I had to nominate the decade with which I most closely identify, it would be the early 1970s when I formed my political ideas, embarked on my bed-rock career and became at my core the adult I am.  This core has been overlaid by later experiences and influences, but at my very centre is a Whitlam-era, middle class, suburban Melburnite.  Is it common for the age of roughly 20 to be the setting-point for an individual generally, or was there something about those particular years in my case?  What about you- what decade is the core of you set in?

And so, I have found this book useful in teasing out the intellectual currents and concerns that manifest themselves in the 19th century English worldview that was tucked up and carried to different outposts of empire.  It does not pretend to explore them at any great depth and does not do so, but it does complicate and give depth to the ‘Victorian’ mindset so definitively stamped into our literature and culture generally.