England in the Eighteen-Eighties
Excerpt from Lynd, Helen Merrell, England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom (London: Oxford University Press, 1945) (permission Staughton Lynd)
Excerpted by Aimee-Marie Dorsten
Contributor’s note: Footnotes from the original. I have preserved the style of the original notes.
I. The Eighteen-Eighties
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England in 1880 was aware of a new apprehension about the future. Half a decade of world depression had brought fear of foreign competition and imperialist rivalry. While a century of world industrial supremacy had engendered a vast complacency within England, insistent questions were now being raised: Were the ‘days of great trade profits over’? Was ‘liberal enterprise’ at an end? Had the world ‘at this precise year of grace come to the “end of its tether” in regard to the development of its industrial resources’? 1 Looking back from the nineteen-forties we see in the years following the Congress of Berlin the sharp emergence of the question regarding the future of the British Empire and even of industrial society with which we are now so familiar.
On 1 January 1880, the London Times began its leading editorial:
A new year begins every morning ... But there are no the less ‘tides in the affairs of men’... we have many motives for exchanging with a more than usual heartiness the customary wishes for a ‘happy New Year,’ ... We leave behind us in 1879 a year which has combined more circumstances of misfortune and depression than any within general experience ... The combination of untoward influences during 1879 has been unique ... War in two continents ... Commerce stagnant ... Agriculture has suffered from an adversity so severe as to impose a heavy burden upon all the classes connected with land ... weak points in our financial organization are revealed ... party spirit in politics has displayed a bitterness which the most experienced politicians confess to exceed anything within their remembrance.
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Reading the fears and hopes of our own time into a comparable period of the past can easily become an over-plausible occupation. But there is much in the England of the eighteen-eighties as compared with America in the nineteen- thirties and ’forties to lend support to the belief that changes in life and thought in England not infrequently precede by about half a century similar changes in the United States. Certain developments in industry and in social philosophy in the two countries have been similar. But America’s later industrialization, use of the ‘frontier,’ and greater distance from Europe have given rise in the two nations to different timings and sets of urgencies. England from the eighteen-eighties on had to face problems that America has been able down to the present time largely to disregard. For America, too, these years of grace are now past. If we do not press the historical comparison too far some insight into possible directions of change in this country—their opportunities and hazards—may be gained from a study of this critical period in England.
Then, as now, theoretical panic was added to practical confusion. There was, as Cliffe Leslie pointed out, a new sense of being in the dark, surrounded by the unknown: ‘it is the consciousness of not seeing their way on the part of the people that is new.’ 2
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Accepted institutions and accepted philosophies were being sharply challenged by changes in economic conditions. A letter to Reynolds’ Newspaper in 1880 said:
When he wrote [his] description of jobbery and callousness to the poor in aristocratic countries, it would also seem that de Tocqueville had the government of Lord Beaconsfield in view ... And it may confidently be predicted that unless we reform and renovate most of our institutions, and abolish many, nations will fast give us the go- by in commerce and other matters, and we shall no more be able to compete with America than our old stage-coaches of fifty years back could hope to run successfully against the railroads of the present. 3
Then, as now, political ‘democracy’ served as a shibboleth and a symbol of hope with an accompaniment of skepticism about almost every one of its actual instruments. Re-shuffling of political alignments and of political principles to meet immediate situations seemed to be the answer to the disillusionment with Parliament and with parties. Liberals observed glee- fully that the Conservative Party as a party had ceased to exist. Tory legislative acts took on the character of political scoops. The Tories held that if reforms must be passed in any event, they had best be effected under the auspices of their own party, a method which the Spectator characterized as an effort to turn the flank of radicalism. 4 Liberals of the old school, in revolt against their own party, cried for leaders who would show ‘that they will not slip down the inclined plane on which we are all now standing ... letting go of all that has hitherto been understood as sound Liberal Principles.’ 5 Even before the party split over Home Rule for Ireland in the middle of the decade it was apparent that the right wings of the Conservative and Liberal parties and the left wings of each were closer to each other than were the two extremes within each party. ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ were ceasing to have any clear meaning.
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England was developing increasing awareness of national and of imperial destiny. The country was becoming more and more a part of the rest of the world. England could not remain isolated from her own empire, which had now reached nearly eight million square miles and 268 million people, and from countries of the Continent and the United States, whose claims to a share of world trade were making them rivals of British commercial supremacy. At home Englishmen were beginning to emerge from an assured isolationism in which to the man in the provinces ‘continentals were people who provided us with music-hall entertainers, barbers, bakers, cheap clerks, and picturesque guests to see the recurrent Jubilee.’ Within Great Britain communication was increasing and isolation diminishing. Increased literacy, cheaper printing, and easier transportation were bringing the people of England nearer together in large concerns of nation and empire and in small, intimate habits of daily life.
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New problems were being considered. ‘Liberty’ was less taken for granted; the relation between freedom and authority was of interest to others than Matthew Arnold, and was becoming a subject of popular discussion. ‘The momentous problem of our age,’ wrote Bishop Westcott, ‘is the reconciliation of authority with freedom.’ T.H. Green, applying his Hegelian philosophy to such questions as the Ground Game Act and the Employers’ Liability Act, said that:
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The discovery of the kind of social organization compatible with democratic individualism was a problem of this period as of our own.
The chief significance of the ’eighties, indeed, is that this period marked the beginning of a new phase in the recurrent struggle for individual freedom.
T.H.S. Escott, England: Her People, Polity, and Pursuits, London, Chapman and Hall, 1885, pp. 123–4. This volume by the editor of the Fortnightly Review, covering in 600 pages topics ranging from ‘Popular Amusements’ to ‘Imperial England’ and quoted frequently in this study, was reviewed as follows by The Economist at the time of its publication: ‘Mr. Escott’s subject is vast and complicated [...] he has given a wonderfully faithful picture of our daily life [...] The tone and spirit of the book, too, are eminently English [...] He is conservative without being reactionary, liberal, yet not subversive [...]’ (31 January 1885, Vol. 43, pp. 194–5). ↩
Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie, ‘The Known and the Unknown in the Economic World’ (published in the Fortnightly Review, 1 June 1879) in Essays in Political Economy, London, Longmans, Green, 1888, p. 221. ↩
4 January 1880. ↩
Cf. William J. Wilkinson, Tory Democracy, New York, Columbia University Press, 1925. ↩
Hon. Arthur Douglas Elliot, The Life of George Joachim Goschen, London, Longmans, Green, 1911, Vol. II, pp. 252–3. ↩