LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES

Documents Biography Criticism

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Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century

Chapter IV

INTRODUCTION & INDEXES

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

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Preface

Contents Vol. I

Prelude 1

Prelude 2

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Contents Vol. II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Note to Chapter XV

Contents Vol. III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

‣ Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Note to Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Note to Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Note to Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Index of Persons

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CHAPTER IV.

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THE LAND WE LIVE IN, a monthly illustrated publication, was commenced by me in 1847. It had, to a certain extent, the same object as “Old England,” of describing monuments of the past, but those notices were always in connection with the aspects of our latest civilization. In the first number I said, “We have to look upon many things which are scarcely picturesque, some wholly modern, but which have the elements of grandeur in their vastness and their moral influences. The courts and offices of government, legislation, and the administration of justice; the halls of science, art, and letters; the seats of education; the emporiums of commerce and manufactures; the havens of maritime power; the material improvements of our day viewed in connection with the moral; the manners and social characteristics of the people. All these features, and many more which it is better here to suggest than enumerate, make up the wonderful whole of ‘The Land we Live in.’” The great Railway Revolution, and the facilities which steam navigation created for rapid communication, had rendered points of these islands once remote easily accessible. Thus: “the material improvements of our day viewed in connexion with the moral; the manners and social characteristics of the people,” were laid more open to observation than at

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any previous period. The locomotive, in many an instance, cleared the way through a “bush,” where ignorance, and pauperism, and many other evils consequent upon the segregation of little communities, had been far removed from the stranger’s ken, and had flourished unseen from generation to generation. There was a village lying in one of the little valleys under the range of Surrey hills called the Hog’s Back, where more than half the people were in a state of hopeless idiotcy, or not far removed from it. The same cause which has been irreverently held to account for the intellectual condition of some of the royal stocks of Europe was in operation in this “Sleepy Hollow.” Intermarriages were the rule of the cottagers. The Law of Settlement had here accomplished a signal triumph of the system of binding the peasantry to the soil.

As I am unable to assign a defined locality for my

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village, I may be excused for giving it a name that has a generic character—I will call it Combe. A long straggling street of cottages never whitewashed; patches of gardens with broken pales and without a flower; a pound, where occasionally a stray donkey is starved to death; a church with mildewed walls; a manor-house with broken windows. The squire of the parish is an absentee; the parson is a pluralist. There is an endowed school, of which the incumbent receives the stipend, but he is always absent, and the school-house becomes the dwelling of a superannuated gardener. There was once a cottage of a better sort in the village, where an intelligent man, who had been the steward of the old squire, had obtained a living by teaching a few sons of the shopkeepers and small farmers. When the new possessor of the estate had gone abroad, no stewardship was wanted. A London speculator had taken the manor-house, with much of the adjacent land, which he made a game preserve. A sharp attorney was the agent of the absentee squire, and he duly appeared in Combe every half year to exact payment at his audit, to the utmost farthing, and on the first lawful day. Loud were the complaints of the farmers that the hares and rabbits destroyed their young wheat, and that there was a gamekeeper always ready to lay informations against them if they carried a gun without due qualification. The small cultivators, thus tyrannised over, had their own system of legal tyranny. The schoolmaster became unpopular with his class, for he had some views of his own as to the influence of the parish gravel-pit, and the plan of the cultivators to employ the labourers who drew the largest allowances and

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worked the least, in preference to those who maintained themselves without the weekly dole. The schoolmaster lost most of his pupils. He had a hard-working son, who supported himself and assisted his father, by going to and from the neighbouring town as a carrier. A hare, not duly labelled with the name of the qualified person who had shot it, was found in his cart, and he was heavily fined by the Bench. In disgust he left his home to work as a navvy on a new railway. The schoolmaster was saved from absolute starvation by cultivating an acre of ground belonging to his paternal cottage. His wife died; he fell sick. The cottage and the land were sold, and the schoolmaster, who had long warned the labourers to keep aloof from the slavery of the parish, could obtain no work whilst he was supposed to have any independent funds, and was himself fast approaching the state of pauperism. Date this sketch 1834. The Poor Law Amendment Act comes into operation. The Parish Workhouse is absorbed in the Union, and the schoolmaster becomes an inmate of the new building. The children are wild and disorderly. There is as yet no settled provision for Workhouse education, but the schoolmaster obtains permission to teach them something for a trifling salary. The most prejudiced of the farmer-guardians begin to perceive a change for the better, and consent that reading and writing should take the place of oakum-picking. The system of instruction in workhouses becomes general, and our schoolmaster is advanced to the dignity of an official position. Our navvy has prudence amidst dissolute fellow-labourers. He is ridiculed, but he works on and saves money. The village of Combe is not wholly redeemed from serf-

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dom by the new administration of the Poor Laws. There is a good deal of distress through bad harvests, from 1836 to 1838; and distress has its necessary accompaniment of crime, when the landlord and the clergyman live only for themselves. The game=preservers are rampant. The gaols are filled with poachers, although the Secretary of State warns the magistrates against multiplying convictions for trifling offences. In Combe and other Southern villages, Young England is talking about a happy peasantry and cricket, whilst corn is at protection price, in despite of which the occupation of the Combe farmer is a ruinous one, for he has no capital and no scientific skill. The land is going out of cultivation. Farms are given up, and the rent-roll of the absentee sensibly diminishes. The timber, upon which his fathers prided themselves, is cut down. So we move on till about 1848. The squire has grown a better and a sadder man; for he has seen how political revolution is based upon a neglect of the social relations between rich and poor. He comes home. He finds a railway in progress through his village. It is the only benefit which the London speculator has conferred upon the parish, except the greater good which is the result of his own ruin in the share mania of 1846, through which he is compelled to give up playing the squire and the game preserver. The contractor is the son of his father’s steward, with whom he played when they were boys together. Things are changed. The repeal of the Corn-Laws has not brought ruin. The railway brings wealthy Londoners to settle in Combe. The Church is remodelled. The living is given to the Chaplain of the Workhouse, who has worked well with the school-

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master. Under his advice, the successful contractor builds a National School. Wretched cottages are pulled down, and the village labourers begin to be decently lodged. The cholera of 1849 has made the observance of sanitary laws something more than a dream of science.

Previous to the commencement of the publication of “The Land we Live in,” I had availed myself of every opportunity to visit our great seats of industry, chiefly with a view to observe the progress of Education and to inquire into the general condition of the people. For several years I had contemplated a literary undertaking, the materials for which could not be wholly obtained from books. I aspired to write “The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1815—1845.” The publication of this work was commenced in 1846, and a portion of it, embracing the annals of 1816-17, was written by me. The illness of my partner, and his consequent withdrawal from our business, in which he attended to the financial part, rendered it necessary for me to devote myself almost entirely to my commercial responsibilities. The “History of the Peace” was suspended for some months; and I then was fortunate in finding one of the few persons adequately qualified, not only by the power of writing agreeably, but by unwearied industry and a long course of observation upon the social affairs of the country, to produce a book of permanent value. The composition of this History of Thirty Years was resumed by Miss Martineau, and was completed by her with a success that I might have been unable to attain. The leading purpose of this book was marked out by myself in a Prospectus, which had perhaps too much of the

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character of a Discourse, to be extensively read. A few sentences of extract will introduce the public realities I propose to notice in this chapter, and in subsequent Passages of the third Epoch of my Working Life. Thus I wrote in 1845:—

“In our days the course of events is essentially governed by the ruling spirit and condition of the people. Never, at any period of our history, were the energies of the Nation so wonderfully called forth, as viewed apart from the direction and influence of Government. Private Capital, chiefly in association, has accomplished enterprises of the most gigantic character—enterprises which could only have been carried forward by the Accumulations of Industry, which, for twenty years previous to the peace of Europe, we had been burying in many a bloody battle-field.” . . . . . “But it is not the accumulation of Capital alone that has given the great impulse to the immense physical improvements of our times. Capital has been working with Science, and with improved economical arrangements; and these again have been left free, with some striking exceptions, to do their proper work, through the intellectual advancement of great masses of the people. Where the people are not so advanced, there is a combat still going on between elementary principles and baseless prejudices. Little as the Government has done for the Education of the People, that animating power has proceeded at a rate which the most hopeful amongst us could scarcely have dared to look for a quarter of a century ago.” . . . . . “It is a necessary consequence of the Diffusion of Knowledge, that those who, for the want of a better name, are called the Working Classes,

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have, during the period of which we are about to treat, been raised far higher than at any previous period in the scale of social importance. Whatever they may be destined to gain in direct political power depends upon their progress in the career which is now opened to them; but of one thing we cannot doubt, that the People, in the largest sense of the word, have become, during this period of general improvement, of far higher consideration, as an essential element of political calculations, than at any previous period. A beginning has at any rate been made in the conviction, that, without reference to their physical comforts and moral cultivation, all improvement is in a great degree valueless.”

At this period a beginning had been made by legislative enactment in establishing some public provision for the intellectual advancement of the adult population of large towns. In 1845 an Act had been passed for enabling Town-councils to form museums in towns or boroughs where the population exceeded ten thousand. One of the most indefatigable friends of education, Mr. Ewart, obtained, in 1849, the appointment of a Committee of the House of Commons to receive evidence and to report upon the state of our public libraries, to which every one might be admitted, free of charge and without any special recommendation. Chetham’s Library in Manchester was the one solitary instance of such an institution. The parochial libraries were very numerous at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The committee could trace the existence of more than a hundred and sixty such libraries, but they also found that the greater number had fallen into a state of decay—“the books lie exposed to chance and

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liable to be torn by the children of the village.” The report of this committee produced such a conviction that the establishment of public libraries, open and free to all comers, was a national want, that in 1850 an Act was passed for enabling Town-councils to establish public libraries as well as museums in places less populous than required by the Act of 1845. In a few years many towns availed themselves of this enactment, the inhabitants not grudging the payment of a rate of a halfpenny in the pound to accomplish this good. In too great a number of towns, however, the proposal continued to be rejected by the ignorant and selfish majority of rate-payers. The city of London, above all other places, was conspicuous in the expression of its opinion, that, after the hours of labour, its artisans and shopmen could be better employed in public houses and casinos than in the cultivation of their understandings.

The good or evil of the ability of the apprentice or the shopman to have the command of an hour or two of leisure, came to be agitated in the metropolis, and in many other industrial communities, in a struggle for the early closing of shops. In November, 1846, at the request of the Manchester and Salford Early Closing Association, I went from town to attend a Meeting in the Free Trade Hall. I had been told, in the name of “the young men of the middle classes,” that it was to them a source of unfeigned regret that by the late hour system many thousands, who are engaged in carrying out the details of the commercial affairs of the country from day to day, were unable to peruse the works which had been provided, by myself and others, for the improve-

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ment of the masses. This was a call which my interest as well as my duty equally inclined me to regard. It was very agreeable to me to see how heartily men of different ranks and pursuits joined in the advocacy of this measure. The chairman was Mr. Wilson, one of the foremost of the Anti-Corn Law League. One of the most earnest speakers was Lord John Manners, of whose conservatism no one could doubt. He was supported by Dr. Vaughan, who had sufficiently proclaimed his liberal principles as a historian. The necessity for the friends of education to advocate this cause continued for a few years. The Metropolitan Early Closing Association had made a marked progress in public opinion, when, on the 11th of March, 1848, the Lord Mayor presided over a great meeting at Exeter Hall, at which the Bishop of Oxford and the Earl of Harrowby were the chief speakers. I was called upon to take a part also in this meeting. Not entering upon any discussion of the socialistic doctrines of this particular period (for the meeting was held a fortnight after that revolution which established the Government Commission of Labour in Public Workshops in Paris), I said: “Without even alluding to the great questions affecting the regulation and reward of labour, I may observe that this movement cannot possibly injure the employers. On the other hand, I think it will tend to promote their interests, by cementing that union which ought always to prevail amongst the payers and the receivers of wages, and on which their mutual relations ought to be based.”

Adult education, as provided for in Mechanics’ Institutes and Literary and Scientific Societies, had at this time taken deep root throughout the country.

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On the 8th of May, 1847, I had the honour to deliver the inaugural address of the Sheffield Athenæum. Fifteen years before this, Sheffield had established her Mechanics’ Institute. Amongst my auditors was one upon whom I looked with no common reverence, James Montgomery. I could not offer in his presence such a tribute of admiration as I had long felt, but I could venture to notice his public career in Sheffield:—“Who can sum up the amount of good that an honest, tolerant, and benevolent local newspaper may accomplish within its immediate range, when we look back and recollect what mind presided over one of your newspapers for more than thirty years? Who can calculate the benefits that have been shed upon a past generation, and upon this generation, by your adopted son, James Montgomery—who, when he retired from that life of labour which, begun in party persecution, ended in one unanimous tribute of homage to the writer and the man, said, ‘I wrote neither to suit the manners, the taste, nor the temper of the age, but I appealed to universal principles, to imperishable affections, to primary elements of our common nature, found wherever man is found in civilized society, wherever his mind has been raised above barbarian ignorance, or his passions purified from brutal selfishness.’ Such was James Montgomery. Such, with the example of the editor of the Sheffield Iris before them, have been many newspaper writers, provincial and metropolitan, from his day.” But the labours of Montgomery and the later journalists in Sheffield in the cause of public freedom, were powerless to put down that most hateful of private tyrannies, the oppression of workmen by workmen.

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It was not for me to say much regarding this opprobrium of Sheffield, but I ventured to say this: “Let your institutions for the communication of knowledge have fair play, and if the heart-burnings and jealousies which really belong to interests ill understood on all sides do not speedily vanish, assuredly the echoes of violence,—partial, and isolated, and rare, no doubt, but still violence,—will never again make the stranger ask, Is this England?”

On the 3rd of March, 1848, I presided at the Annual Soirée of the Nottingham Mechanics’ Institute. The town was at this period prosperous, and amongst its commercial men there was a liberal spirit which was not afraid of encouraging the spread of knowledge, although Feargus O’Connor was close at hand, proclaiming chartism and physical force as a remedy for social evils. It was an exciting period, but no one could have conjectured from the tone and temper of this assembly of six hundred persons that there was any general disposition in the country towards political change. In point of fact there was none. The Repeal of the Corn Laws had produced its tranquillising effect upon the community, and the real leaders of the operative classes saw that many of the means of social improvement were in their own hands. My hearers heartily responded when I said:—“I consider that in selecting me to preside over your Meeting this evening, you chiefly regarded the principle which is in some degree associated with me. That principle, I venture to think, is this,—the utmost extension of knowledge,—the utmost extension of the refinements, the amenities, the brotherly love, the good feeling that proceeds from the cultivation of the liberal arts,—the extension of these

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benefits to the largest number of the community.” I spoke in the presence of enlightened local journalists, one of whom had taken a high position as a poet, and I was surrounded by other educated men, who would know that I did not overstate the benefits of a diffused intelligence. The Nottingham Mechanics’ Institution was unusually flourishing, compared with many similar institutions. But the Committee in their Report repeated the observation which they had made the previous year—“the number of our members is not at all proportionate to the population which surrounds us.” I took up this text and said:—“I think that particular remark of your committee, with reference to the population of Nottingham, is an observation that may be applicable to mechanics’ institutions in general, and to all other literary and scientific societies that propose similar benefits to the great bulk of the community.” I declared my opinion that mechanics’ institutions originally started upon too utilitarian a principle. They started upon the principle of offering to every working-man the possible attainment of something very hard, very abstruse, and very difficult of attainment in perfection by the most educated, to be arrived at by a royal road to learning,—the attendance upon a few lectures. I went on to say, without reference to the Nottingham institution, that I thought there had been too much discouragement shewn in such institutions with regard to the social opportunities they offered of conversation, of amusement even, but above all, of instruction and entertainment in the most beautiful of arts,—music. Looking over the classification of the works that had been issued from the library of this institution, I had observed that

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works of fiction had been circulated four times as much as any other description of books. Upon this point I thus expressed myself:—“Works of fiction have a direct tendency to carry forward the civilization of the country. No one can hesitate to agree with me that poetry,—associated in this catalogue with novels, under the head of works of fiction,—that high, noble, universal poetry is one of the things that has the greatest tendency to refine and elevate the mind. I am sure that, speaking to an audience to whom the name of one of the most gifted of England’s sons is perfectly familiar—gifted, alas! like the possessors of many other such gifts of Heaven, to be devoted to a premature death—I am quite certain that the townsmen and townswomen of Nottingham cannot take a low estimate of poetry, when they recollect that Kirke White, the butcher’s son, was one of her citizens. But it is scarcely necessary to go back half a century to remind you of the poetical associations connected with your town. When we have the honour to see in this room the accomplished translator of Dante—when I know that here also is the gifted author of Festus—when I speak of Charles Wright and Philip Bailey, I need not go very far back to say that Nottingham has pre-eminent claims to assert that it is poetical.” There was a point urged by me in my address at Nottingham which recent experience, even in the humbler institutions of Working Men’s Clubs, would shew to be worthy the consideration of those who do not believe that all intellectual culture depends upon books and lectures. I said that such institutions ought to possess the power of familiarising the mind with the best models of imitative art. “I think it is a step

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in a very right direction when I see your hall covered with paintings. I would not have in any mechanics’ institution, as I would not have in any school throughout the land, bare naked walls for the eye to rest on undelighted. I do know, and the experience of the wise teaches me to believe, that we cannot be surrounded too much with the beautiful in art; in civic halls, and wherever men congregate together for public business, or meet for social purposes; in our own houses, where prints and casts of rare sculpture are the best and least expensive luxuries; and, what is still more to the purpose, in the humblest cottage in the land. I do not think it is possible to make the people too familiar with high models of art, because in so doing a refinement is given to the understanding, and what is spiritual and grand in our nature may be developed by the presence of these beautiful creations, which, without presumption, I venture to think are emanations through the mind of man of the power of the Deity.”

I trust that I may be excused for having occupied some space with personal experiences that may appear to have only a temporary and local interest. But rightly considered, the progress of these institutions, their merits and their defects, are subjects of lasting importance. As schools of instruction, or even as places of recreation, for the classes indicated by the name Mechanics” Institution, they must be acknowledged to have failed, when tested by the expectations which were originally formed of their influence upon the humbler members of the artisan class. About ten years ago I was talking with Dr. Hudson, the accomplished secretary of the Manchester Institute, as to the description of persons

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who attended the lecture-rooms and classes there. These, he said, were chiefly clerks, shopmen, overlookers of various departments of great manufacturing establishments, but—“the fustian jackets never come here.” “How do the fustian jackets employ their evenings?” I inquired. He took me to a window and pointed to a van, then passing, piled up with empty bottles. These, he told me, would be replaced in the course of the day by a similar load of full bottles, each representing the ginger-beer consumption of the neighbouring casino. The fustian jackets were there amused by listening to songs and recitations, and smoking for an hour or two. Every hour from seven o’clock to midnight there was a renewed set of these pleasure-seeking youths, but there was no intoxication, for the sale of ginger-beer and lemonade was as fifty to one compared with that of stronger liquors.

It was a very long time before the inefficiency of Mechanics’ Institutes to contend with the seductions of the public-house, and of such establishments as the Manchester Casino, was fully understood by those who sought to direct the real mechanic to a profitable and agreeable employment of his time after his hours of labour. Working Men’s Clubs have been naturalized amongst us only during the last three or four years. But in 1848 I saw at Birmingham a real working-man’s club, which combined the recreative principle with that of mutual improvement; offered a well warmed and ventilated room, supplied with books and newspapers; could furnish wholesome food at the cheapest rate; and was wholly self-supporting by the payment of one penny a week from each of its numerous members. This practical

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good was not effected through the platform speeches, or even the countenance, of persons of local or national influence. There came to reside at Birmingham, at the period of the greatest depression of the stocking manufacture, an intelligent “stockinger” of the name of Brooks, who had been so steeped to the lips in poverty that he was glad to accept the means of living, as many others were, by labouring upon the public roads and bye-ways. At Birmingham his zeal and intelligence secured him friends amongst the sect to which he belonged, and he soon came to be employed in the establishment of “A Ministry to the Poor.” A society, in connection with various Sunday-schools, was formed for the purpose of giving some instruction to the very poorest and most destitute children. But what I have called a real working man’s club was engrafted upon this sort of ragged school. I passed some profitable and pleasant hours in the society of Mr. Brooks, who knew more of the habits of the poorer classes, even of the mendicants, than any one whom I have ever met with. He took me to his “People’s Instruction Society.” I there saw men diligently occupied in reading—not the seditious miscellanies, nor the demoralizing penny novels, which were then in vogue, but the best newspapers without any party distinctions, and even the higher periodicals, such as the Quarterly Review. There was a room, if I recollect rightly, for chess playing, and another where the men might smoke, but without the stimulus of alcoholic drink. A brief account of this institution was given in the second volume of “The Land we Live in,” which thus concludes:—“Let those who would wish to do much with little means, see what

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earnestness of purpose can accomplish. This ‘Ministry to the Poor’ seems to have but small funds at its command, yet it has set on foot a People’s Instruction Society, Sunday-schools, a Provident Institution, Day-schools for children, Evening-schools for adults, and District-visitings to those whom small contributions in money, food, or raiment might really serve. In short it is an attempt to penetrate down to those classes which Mechanics’ Institutions and Benefit Societies have never yet reached. All honour to such an attempt!”