A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (26 page)

And George Sala, writing of an imaginary household in the fifties, describes the attitudes of those taking part. No one, including the man conducting the service, wants to be there. The servants and the children fidget, their minds on other things. They see this interlude as an unwelcome interruption to the day, something to be got over with:

The servants come in, not to morning breakfast, but to morning prayers. The housemaid has just concluded her morning flirtation with the baker; the cook has been crying over ‘Fatherless Fanny’. The master of the house reads prayers in a harsh, grating voice, and Miss Charlotte, aged thirteen, is sent to her bed-room, with prospects of additional punishment, for eating her curl-papers during matins.
²⁹

The emergent middle classes, unsure of their status in society and wishing to be punctilious in their observance of convention, aped the perceived behaviour of the aristocracy and gentry. If these occasions were traditional in country houses, then they must be observed in suburban villas too, for a paternalistic interest in the spiritual welfare of one’s domestics was clearly a badge of belonging to the ‘right sort’. Since servants gossiped a great deal, it might be that the family who employed them did not want news to get out among others of their class that they failed to conduct matters properly.

Although it is undeniable that many Victorians saw religious observance as a tiresome ritual, we must not underestimate the extent to which a live, sincere and passionate belief influenced people of all classes. The country not only sent missionaries abroad during these years but
received
them, and with results that were often spectacular. The missions conducted by two Americans – Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey – had an effect on Victorians that is hard to underestimate now. Moody was a preacher, his partner wrote and played hymns. They had already had a considerable impact on the faith of their own countrymen when they first came to the United Kingdom in 1875, and they returned in 1884. They brought something of the atmosphere of an American tent mission, and perhaps their approach to conversion was more direct than the British were accustomed to. At any rate, they were highly successful. Moody’s preaching was brilliant and inspiring, and the accompanying music in itself was enough to draw many in. They made thousands of converts, and their visits are still remembered as a landmark in British church history. The forceful impact of such an evangelical crusade could result in some unlikely conversions, for it was not only the poor or the dissatisfied who found faith but others who appeared to be content with their lives. One of these was a Mr Vincent, a wealthy retired planter whose passion was for horseracing. Returning from Punchestown races in Ireland one evening, he missed the boat back to England and found himself obliged to stay the night in Dublin. The American evangelists happened to be holding a series of meetings in the city at that time, and by chance he came across them. An author describes how:

He was at a loose end, and not knowing how to spend the evening, took a stroll. He noticed over a theatre the names
‘D.L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey’, wondered what Vaudeville Company this was, and went in. He was amazed to find the place crowded out, and on the platform a number of people in ordinary dress and a man singing. He had a wonderful voice, and was singing words such as he had never heard before. He stood absolutely riveted.

The hymn over, he sat down and heard Moody preach, and strange to relate, instead of going home next day, he stayed on day after day. Finally, one evening he followed a great throng of people who rose to go into the Enquiry Room. Moody knelt beside him and simply said, ‘Mr Vincent, do you believe Jesus Christ died for you?’ ‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Then,’ said Moody, ‘thank Him.’ He did, and he left that room a transformed man.
³⁰

A short time later, in London, he met an old friend, Edward Studd, who was also a planter and racing enthusiast. He persuaded Studd to accompany him to Drury Lane, to which the Americans had now brought their mission. Studd was in his turn deeply touched by Moody’s preaching, and he too returned on subsequent evenings to hear more sermons. Within days he had undergone conversion and his hedonistic, raffish lifestyle had altered beyond recognition:

He withdrew from the Turf, giving a racehorse to each of his elder sons as a hunter, and then sold the remainder. He cleared out the hall of his house at Tedworth and put in chairs and benches; then he rode round the countryside to urge his neighbours to come in on Sunday evenings, and used to get splendid fellows down from London, merchants and business men, to preach the Gospel to the people. They came in their hundreds, filling up the staircase to the first floor, leaning over the balconies to hear. Moody himself came.
³¹

Studd’s new-found faith was no mere passing fad. He preached relentlessly – and effectively – to all with whom he came in contact. When attending Moody and Sankey’s later meetings in London, he took his carriage, and his granddaughter recalled that ‘he would come out at half time and send in the coachman and footman, and hold the horses himself.’
³²
He also gave financial assistance to the building of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which rapidly became a power-house for the training of evangelists. He died only two years after his conversion, but his family carried on his work, principally in the overseas mission field.

All three of his sons became Christians. They were known throughout the country during the eighties because – as outstanding cricketers – they had all, in succession, been captains of the Cambridge University XI. That one of them, Charles (‘C. T.’), became a missionary tells us something significant about the extent to which active Christianity had penetrated the social and intellectual elite. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, missionaries had been, almost without exception, poor men from humble walks of life. William Carey, for instance, the Baptist evangelist who made an immense impact in India at that time, was a shoemaker. Missionaries were therefore people who – seen from a worldly point of view – had not given up much in the way of material comfort or future greatness to ‘follow the call’. Such was the power of Christian revival that at Cambridge University in 1885 – amid a spate of conversions – Studd and six others volunteered to devote their lives to working for the China Inland Mission. ‘The Cambridge Seven’, willingly turning their backs on comfortable backgrounds and bright prospects for the work of the Gospel, became national celebrities. Studd’s daughter described them. They included:

The stroke of the Cambridge boat, and the stroke of one of the trial eights, a dragoon Guardsman, an officer of the Royal Artillery, and the son and heir of a titled family in Norfolk. In the history of missions no band of volunteers has caught the imagination of the public as much as these seven. Queen Victoria was pleased to receive a booklet giving their testimonies [each one’s account of his conversion]. Such was the stir among the universities that their sailing had to be put off so that they could go to Edinburgh and speak at the urgent request of the leading professors. In a hall packed with 2,000 students they were cheered again and again as they rose to speak.
³³

While Studd’s father had undergone conversion to the Christianity of the Gospel mission, it is worth remembering that equally sincere tendencies could lead in the opposite direction. John Patrick Crichton-Stuart inherited a vast fortune, together with the title Marquess of Bute, six months after his birth in 1847. His father had belonged to the Church of Scotland and he had been brought up in the Church of England. At Oxford he changed his Anglicanism for an equally devout Catholicism (and was therefore asked to leave); his conversion caused a considerable stir in London society, and was described by Disraeli in his novel
Lothair
. Until his death in 1899, Bute remained a highly influential champion of Catholic interests.

By the end of the century the Church had lost a good deal of its monopoly on charitable work. Secular organizations and political bodies had taken on much the same functions and this meant that religion and charity were no longer seen as synonymous. Science also battered at the gates of Christian orthodoxy. Until Victoria’s reign there had been no alternative to belief in divine creation of the world, and it had been established by theologians that this took place in 4004
BC.
The science of geology was able to prove that the earth – and even
animal life – was very much older than this. The publication of Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species
in 1859 – and the work that followed in 1871,
The Descent of Man
– offered an alternative to the concept that man was created, suggesting that the whole of human life was the result of circumstance. In addition to this, theologians discovered that the translations of the Bible on which Anglican worship had been based for centuries were inaccurate, and therefore that parts of the Scriptures were open to doubt. The unreliability of some of the Bible laid the rest of it open to doubt in many minds. The Christian Church had never in history faced challenges like these to its basic tenets. The apparently flourishing condition of religion at the end of the century, when millions still regularly attended services and religious organizations continued to receive widespread support, is testimony to the strength of faith within all branches of Christianity.

Throughout Victoria’s reign, the Christian life of Britain expanded in all directions. The Catholic tendency spread its influence at the same time as the Gospel missions. Religion therefore became much more all-encompassing, and succeeded in offering something to virtually everyone. By the end of the century, no one could possibly accuse the Church of irrelevance, indifference or ineffectuality. It had not solved all the problems that beset it at the beginning of the era, but it had adapted, been revitalized and had managed to give an effective lead in many crucial areas. For all the criticism that it was bound by ‘humbug and hypocrisy’ it had become more vital, accomplished more, and greatly widened the debate.

When George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822 it was the first royal visit to the country for over 160 years, and there were no useful precedents to guide the public. Local newspapers received numerous letters from gentlemen asking what was the form of dress to be worn when attending public places such as roadsides to watch the King pass by. There was no such dress, and therefore no satisfactory answer. Nevertheless one member of the public, who seemed to know what he was talking about, wrote that the correct costume consisted of white denim trousers and a navy-blue swallow-tail coat. This was widely accepted, and in the event was worn by many men. Such a situation could have occurred at any time during the nineteenth century, for correct dress was as important as correct behaviour, and those who sought respectability always went in
terror of not knowing the right thing to do. An unexplained but categorical sentence in a book on manners that states ‘As a matter of course, young ladies do not eat cheese at dinner parties’
¹
would have been accepted without demur in thousands of middle-class homes.

This level of respect for conformity is difficult to understand from a modern perspective, but until the 1950s society was run from the top, with modes being created by the aristocracy (the concepts of ‘street fashion’ and ‘street credibility’ would have been unthinkable to Victorians other than as a form of fancy dress). This fortunate class, even if it was steadily losing power and influence throughout the reign, still appeared to be a keeper of secrets to which others wished to be privy.

Etiquette was not peculiar to the Victorians, who inherited a good deal of social ritual from the preceding era. In the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, there were forms of behaviour that were practised by the ‘best people’ and imitated to a greater or lesser extent by those farther down the scale. Where there was no established etiquette for a particular situation, it seems to have been necessary to invent it. An authentic-sounding practice might well be thought up on the spur of the moment and become enshrined in custom.

Victorian society was obsessed with status and social advancement. The era saw the rise of a huge and wealthy middle class whose members – pleased with their attainments but unsure how to behave – looked to the aristocracy for social guidance (the nobility responded with varying degrees of disdain). As a result, what were perceived to be the habits and practices of the traditional ruling class were imitated or adapted in thousands of bourgeois homes. The newly genteel, or the aspiringly
genteel, needed a good deal of specific and detailed guidance on how to dress, what to eat, where to be seen and – crucially – how to entertain. Because this class went in fear of committing social
faux pas
, publishers provided them with a battery of books and articles to address these issues. Some were in the form of ‘agony aunt’ newspaper columns that advised anonymous enquirers about specific difficulties. Others were text-books of behaviour, some with reader-friendly subject categories that were designed to be kept handy and used for reference. Often they were anonymous, or written under such pseudonyms as ‘A Lady’ or ‘A Member of the Aristocracy’, implying that some well-bred personage was willing to pass on, as a public duty, the necessary knowledge. The large number of these produced from the middle of the century is evidence of the extent of society’s preoccupation with social niceties.

Though entirely forgotten today, the complex procedures for giving and receiving social calls occupied the energies of many thousands of women, in towns and cities throughout Britain, until almost within living memory.

‘Leaving cards’, a handbook on manners informed its readers, ‘is the first step towards forming, or enlarging, a circle of acquaintance.’
²
Whether the visiting lady met the owner of the house in person or merely left her card with a servant, this was an important social rite, a way of stating one’s own – and one’s family’s – social credentials (or pretensions) and recognizing those of others. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, when women were increasingly taking advantage of opportunities for education and employment, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the middle class to work. With household
staff to relieve them of much of the domestic drudgery, the exchanging of visits and the consequent maintenance of social rituals filled a large part of the lives of many Victorian ladies. The time for making these calls was mid-afternoon, for the morning would be spent planning menus, dealing with household accounts and writing letters. Only at a suitable interval after luncheon would a lady send for her carriage and set out to fulfil her obligations.