Renowned writer and transformer of London’s architecture, Samuel Hughes, has written an interesting piece for Stripe Inc.’s tax write-off Works In Progress about why ‘Victorian elites’ were so successful. The idea is quite attractive; the Victorian era was such a success because it was run by people who drank a lot, got up late and had long lunches in their UK clubs. It was a well-written and decently argued piece; unfortunately it had two rather insurmountable problems — the Victorian elite didn’t do this, and the Victorian era wasn’t a success.
Hughes argues that the Victorian system of boarding schools, the two universities and the London social scene knitted together a coherent ‘Gemeinschaft’ (a fancy German word for a community formed around common sentiment and tradition) which oversaw a ‘Gesellschaft’ (a fancy German word for a community formed by force and law) called the British Empire. It ran this empire very successfully, despite the fact that none of the elites knew any mathematics. This is because they spent all night drinking with each other and worked very short days, not doing much. This is because they rowed at Oxford. This is because they had homosexual flings at boarding school. Because of this, at the end of the Victorian period, Britain was a hugely successful nation that had left its rivals in the dust. The Victorian expansion of the British Empire had rendered her unassailable.
To make his point, Hughes defines the Victorian elites quite narrowly, while defining the successes of the Victorian era quite broadly. The rise of boarding schools meant that ‘elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family.’ Then ‘most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge’ and, in adulthood, ‘the elite of Victorian Britain congregated in London for what was called “the Season”.’ This gives us a pretty narrow definition of the elite. This would probably exclude, say, men like Joseph Chamberlain, Cobden and Bright — who came from the portion of the industrial middle-class that felt the existing social arrangements disprivileged the naturally meritorious and productive. These men were inclined not towards leisure and boozing — but more often temperance, austerity, religious non-conformity, the protestant work ethic and the politics of the liberal Radical tradition. Instead, it is the small group of upper-class bluffers, that Hughes argues formed the ‘Gemeinschaft’ which so successfully ruled Britain. It is their way of life which he explores, and suggests was the source of British excellence.
First, schooling. Among boarders, ‘quasi-romantic… relationships were quite common.’ Jan Morris (WHO remembers proper transvestites?!) is quoted in support: ‘the public school system…meant that male relationships were full of emotional nuance and undertone.’ Of course, what the elites were taught at school must have formed part of the reason for their success. ‘Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek.’ As a classicist myself, I was cheered by this. Patrick Collison, da mihi argentum! Not only did Latin predominate, but the headmasters themselves were hesitant even to teach science.
Not that Latin itself was very useful. Two whole students are quoted to demonstrate this. “I have gladly forgotten all my Latin,” wrote unknown war poet Charles Sorley. The relatively more famous Winston Churchill admitted that he had never managed to learn any in the first place. Therefore, Latin was important because it taught the ‘soft skills’ of ‘self-discipline, memorisation, and applying rules.’ Foreigners, of course, don’t have any of these things, explaining why the Victorians wiped the floor with all of them.
Hughes also argues that schools didn’t dedicate much time to teaching — Rugby School, for example, had a weekly timetable of just 21 hours of teaching, although that might seem reasonable given that my own school timetable had 25. Instead, they spent about half their time playing sports [sic], and this is where Texas high school football comes from. Yee-ha! Foreigners, meanwhile, preferred to study their books. Hence why the German chemical industry never got off the ground, and the French never worked out how to, erm, “Create Streets” that could rival Queen Victoria’s rookeries.
Next there is a section on Oxbridge, including a breathless description of a typical day-in-the-life of a student at the time. I must say, I didn’t find this very impressive. They had lectures in the morning, a nice lunch, ‘tutorials’ (Mr Hughes letting the reader know where he went) or ‘supervisions’ (I went to Cambridge, by the way) in the afternoon, before a formal dinner. This is presented as being extraordinary. Of course, anyone who did an arts degree at Oxbridge knows that this is still how the day goes, yet there is no Works In Progress article praising today’s Oxbridge graduates for how well Britain is being run today.
There follows a nice bit of cherry-picking by Mr Hughes. He points out that even as late as 1910-14, only 13.7 per cent of Oxford degrees were awarded to science students. But compare Cambridge in 1905:
‘In June 1905 there were 647 tripos candidates, 146 for the Natural Sciences, 127 for History, 111 Classics, 95 Law, 63 Mathematics, 28 Mechanical Science, 25 Theology, 13 Modern Languages, 5 Moral Sciences, 5 Economics, 1 Oriental Languages.’ If we combine Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Mechanical Science, we can see that 237 of the 647 tripos candidates (again, Oxford and Cambridge were much, much smaller before the First World War) did STEM subjects, or 36.6 per cent. It is also worth remembering that to obtain a Cambridge BA in those days, candidates had to pass the first-year Mathematics examinations.
Here is a question I picked at random from a Cambridge mathematical textbook of the 1870s. Can you solve it?
It’s not that hard — if you’ve read and really studied Apollonius’ Conics — but would you say someone who can solve such a question would be part of an elite with no interest in the sciences? It’s clear that the average Cambridge graduate in those days would have better mathematics not just than the average modern Englishman, but better than the average modern Cambridge graduate. And the mathematics required became more advanced as time went on.
Not all the elite went to Oxbridge, of course — not even then. The universities were much smaller, with fewer colleges and fewer courts. Some of the elites instead went to Haileybury College, where they were trained to run India. If we want to find out what made a great and successful Victorian, we should look no further!
Hughes quotes from David Gilmour’s paraphrase of the memories of one John Beames, a man who graduated from Haileybury in the 1850s. The day consisted of traipsing to chapel in one’s dressing gown, before retreating to one’s rooms for a claret-fuelled breakfast. After two or three hours of lectures, during which apparently some students didn’t pay attention — can you believe it?! The students broke for lunch (with beer — LEGENDS!) before going rowing or going into Ware or Hertford to play billiards. Then they would have dinner, another chapel service and then have a few more drinks before bed. Well then, drinking and playing must’ve made Britain successful - how else can we explain it?
Of all the arguments levelled by Hughes in this article, this is the worst. Haileybury at the time was really called the East India College, being run by the East India Company, and had little to do with the Haileybury College which opened on its abandoned grounds four years later. John Beames left Haileybury in 1858, the year it was closed down, because the East India Company was closed down, because its administrators had just provoked — and barely survived — the greatest rebellion in British colonial history, the Indian Mutiny. The graduates of this college are not at all the models of success. Their predecessors transformed the East India Company’s holdings from a well-run territory of manufactories and trading stations, which once turned a profit, into a bloated mess that lost money every year. The fallout of the Mutiny was Britain’s Victorian elites deciding to rule India directly, creating a huge drain on the Exchequer. In this unfortunate decision to conquer and rule all of India, Britain’s rulers took up the worthy burden of Empire, Conrad’s idea that “you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.” Beames and Co. unwittingly laid the foundations for Britain’s imperial overreach.
Into adulthood, Hughes’s elites have moved to London. We are told they all lived on either side of Hyde Park, in Mayfair or Belgravia. They lived in the West End but would walk into Westminster or the City to work, usually at mid-morning because the early part of the day was dedicated to sorting through and replying to correspondence (I think that is reasonable enough). They would have a nice lunch, perhaps at their club, and then carry on working until about five o’clock. A few hundred of them, sitting in Parliament, would slink off there around that time to catch an evening session. Dinner would be served around eight o’clock. The elites liked to dress for it — a practice which Hughes neglects to point out was facilitated by the glut of domestic servants in those days.
Between February and July, these elites would go to balls that lasted until the small hours of the morning (although it seems most people would’ve left by about two o’clock — from Hughes’s description these balls were pretty similar to the one described in James Joyce’s story The Dead). At these balls, everyone would drink. It is in this section that numbers are conjured to illustrate just how much Victorian elites drank: ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends.’
This is an interesting quote, as much as we can see Hughes’s cack-handed attempt at a sleight-of-hand on the reader. This article is supposed to be about the men who built and ran the British Empire, and how they drank a lot, yet the only time in the whole article that actual quantities of alcohol are cited is from an etiquette guide recommending how many “glasses” it would be acceptable for a woman to drink. We are not even told how much wine would’ve been in a glass. No mention is made of the fact that Claret in Victorian times was only about 9% and Burgundy maybe 10% (outside of ultra-cheap brands avoiding tax, a modern wine-drinker would be disappointed in anything weaker than 13.5%, and would prefer 14%). So young women at dinner might’ve had three thimbles full of weak wine, and established matrons five or six. Is this more than the average American dweeb at a San Francisco house party would drink? Yes. Is it proof of the world-conquering benefits of being a pisshead? No.
So we have our elites, but what did they achieve? At first glance, this seems a stupid question. Wasn’t the Britain of 1901 richer and more powerful than the Britain of 1837? Wasn’t her empire bigger? Her subjects richer? Did railways not criss-cross her islands, and indeed, her colonies? At Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the old widow ruled over 400 million subjects — about 1 in 4 of every man, woman and child on earth. Such a country must have been ruled by people who knew what they were doing!
There are two problems: the successes are exaggerated (this was understood at the time, e.g. see below Kipling’s Recessional, written for the jubilee) and the successes were those of the Victorians’ Georgian predecessors or of their non-elite countrymen. The successes of Empire were fragile, and liable to be undone by self-congratulation:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe…
Hughes at least admits it is a possibility that the Victorian elite was ‘parasitic’, but I would argue it is inescapable. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, was a product of the 1740s. The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater was perhaps the most Georgian man in history; enormously fat, he forewent the possibility of marriage and an heir because he was obsessively trying to make an extra penny or two on each ton of coal from his mines. It was the ruthless competition of George II’s reign that forced him to dig his famous Bridgewater Canal, in response to the Sankey Navigation. James Watt was so lowly that he could not even afford to become an apprentice, but his improved steam engine changed the world.
Trains and railways were a natural development of the horse-drawn wagonways of the Newcastle coal field. The maker of the first viable locomotive, George Stephenson, was illiterate until the age of 18. His first job was to walk around coal mines wearing damp rags and to use a flaming torch to set off gas pockets before they grew too big. In 1830, he and his son opened the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which could travel between the two cities in an hour. At the end of the Victorian period, the journey was no shorter.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel wasn’t really Victorian either. The great industrialists of the late Georgian period did not emerge from the “London season”. Even from a Works In Progress perspective, the best prime minister of Victoria’s reign was Robert Peel, who repealed the Corn Laws. Peel was born in Bury, moved to Staffordshire as a boy, but fine, an elite nonetheless. Others who campaigned for years in the Anti-Corn Law League — such as Cobden and John Bright — belonged to the abstemious industrial Radical milieu and spoke of the old British elite and unearned privilege, its constitution and pageantry with contempt.
Hughes is right, of course, that the Victorian period really is defined by the emergence of this tightly-knit elite. The expansion of the boarding school system, and its movement away from the Eton of the 18th century (two teachers who read the Aeneid over and over again, between occasional beatings) towards the Rugby of the 19th, did produce a distinctive class which drew from across Great Britain. Hughes admits it excluded Irish Catholics, but he also argues that this tight-knitness allowed Britain to avoid the civil wars which plagued other countries.
This is odd because the Irish Protestant elites (who were in fact excluded from Hughes’s mob, although to a lesser extent than their Catholic compatriots) nearly started a civil war in 1914. Their Catholic rivals had engaged in a campaign of agrarian violence and strikes to cast off the Protestant Ascendancy’s domination of land in the Irish Land War, led by Davitt and Parnell. Irish Catholics started a full and very real civil war in 1916. It was so vicious and bitter that its legacy almost stopped Brexit a whole century later. Perhaps if our Victorian elites had granted Home Rule in the 1880s, Ireland’s view of Britain would be more like Australia’s, instead of their perennial victim narrative. We would be two sovereign nations happily trading with each other, broadly aligned in our foreign policies, rather than awkward neighbours who keep competing to be America’s favourite. But no, our ladies just had to have their sixth glass of wine, didn’t they?
This ruling class did exist, and they were parasitic. They were behind none of the great successes of the Victorian era, and all of its catastrophes. Britain’s pre-eminence was won by the Georgians. India was all but conquered by 1820 and still run at a profit. Canals were followed by railways. Steam was tamed, and steel was forged. Britain had a pretty chain of trading stations lining the route to the Indies. What did the ‘Victorian elites’ do? They overstretched themselves in India, which became a drain on the Exchequer. They bungled the Irish Question until it became unsolvable. They occupied lots of Africa for no clear reason. They allowed Europe to sort itself into two opposing alliances and left their Edwardian successors with little choice but to pick a side. And to top it all off, the Victorian era ended with a bank run and a decades-long slowdown which hit Britain worse than the 1930s.
When the Widow died, Britain was no longer the richest country on earth. She had been overtaken by the United States. Americans were even richer per capita in 1901. Germany was not far behind. Her navy was spread thin over the globe and would soon be summoned home. Her army was thoroughly modern and thoroughly tiny. Despite her immense empire, Britain’s trade was being ground down by Germany and others. The Britain the Victorians inherited had defeated Napoleon. The Britain the Victorians left took three years to beat a handful of Dutch farmers and repeatedly embarrassed themselves and the country doing so. These many failures prompted, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, the patriotic endeavour of the British middle classes and ‘black-coated proletarians’ to replace their blustering elites, but that is a story for another article.
Outside of the realms of war and politics, and despite the global Long Depression of 1873-96, the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were successful. These were in the realms the elites had least to do with, and frankly had little or no interest in. Metallurgy and rivet-making were rarely discussed at London balls. The best thing these elites did was leave alone what was working. In a sense then, them being drunk and lazy may have helped. Britain certainly did improve under the Victorian elites, but this was not because of them. They gorged themselves on the fruits of others’ labour.
This article was written by Don Fox, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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“Metallurgy and rivet-making were rarely discussed at London balls” —
There’s a good bit in Forsyte saga (set in the 1880s) where the family patriarch (who has made all the money) is blackballed from various London clubs because of his historic involvement in ‘trade’. His useless offspring are all allowed to join though.
Feels like you could trace some of the dysfunctions of later British capitalism to this sort of culture.