James Hobson - Radical Victorians

RADICAL

VICTORIANS

RADICAL VICTORIANS

THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO DARED

TO THINK DIFFERENTLY

JAMES HOBSON

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

PEN AND SWORD HISTORY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright James Hobson, 2022

ISBN 978 1 39900 826 6

eISBN 978 1 39900 827 3

Mobi ISBN 978 1 39900 827 3

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ConclusionWords Not Deeds

The History of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it

Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)

What was a Victorian radical? Surely the long reign of Queen Victoria and the vague nature of the word radical means that a book of this size cannot do justice to the subject?

With a working definition of radical as one who thought differently from the majority and therefore wished life to be different, there are indeed, too many Victorian radicals for a book of this size. So, a process of selection is necessary, and this is where the vast size of the Victorian era comes to our rescue. The book is about radical Victorians whose ideas were not much acted on during her sixty-three-year reign. These radicals changed the future; a future they (mostly) did not see themselves. They may have reached important milestones in their campaigns, but never lived to be totally vindicated and celebrated; some are waiting still; some perhaps do not even deserve to be celebrated.

So, there is no room in this book for Edwin Chadwick, a public health visionary, as his views had become mainstream by the death of Queen Victoria; factory reformers had chased young children from factories; Charles Bazalgettes sewers had been built. The Chartists of the 1830s could see history turning in their direction by 1900. Florence Nightingale died a national treasure, with the government hanging on to her every word despite being a pain in the side of the War Office in the 1850s. Charles Darwin the evolutionary biologist is absent from this book; Darwinism had triumphed by the time the old queen died, but some of his followers, with even more radical conclusions, do have a place in the book.

In other ways, our radicals are a mixed bag. Some of their ideas, like eugenics, repulse many people today. Atheism, socialism and republicanism are matters of opinion, but their relevance cannot be doubted. Spiritualism, in the meaning of actively seeking out communication with the dead rather than the concept of spirituality, is alive and well, if not very reputable. Some ideas, like cremation and birth control, have shifted into the area of practical personal preference, although there is a philosophy and ideology behind these subjects as well. As well as womens social and political rights, the book covers areas that attracted people of enhanced sensibility vivisection, vegetarianism and animal rights.

Some radicals struggled to produce newspapers that the ordinary citizens failed to read and held meetings that contained tens of fellow believers. They still managed to regularly fall out with each other, but their ideas became a part of mainstream economic, political and social discussion in the twentieth century. One or two have broken into the standard history books, but most are quite obscure. To use a clich, they were ahead of their time, and on the whole this made their life very difficult. In order to be a Victorian radical, you needed resilience, bloody mindedness and, in the case of many of them, an inability to suffer fools gladly and total confidence in your own opinions. They are not, generally speaking, ideal desert island companions.

The good news is that there are women in this book as well, put there by the fact that they made strenuous efforts to improve womens rights, and by doing so put themselves outside mainstream opinion and condemned themselves to constant struggle. They were mostly clever women from privileged backgrounds whose fathers were principled, apathetic or dead enough to allow their daughters an education.

The book focuses on the intellectual elite who were organisers, propagandists and authors. With a few exceptions, there are more resolutions than riots, more chairing the subcommittee than manning the barricades, and very few people who were born poor. Taken as a group, they are very middle class indeed; the aristocracy was too entrenched in its privilege, and the poor too brutalised and disempowered to take an active part. They were the first metropolitan liberals, the progenitors of the chattering classes; its a class that has never gone away.

Behind their socialism, spiritualism, vegetarianism, free press and free thought were the wider themes that this book covers; the dissolution of firm religious belief in one of historys most religious societies; the effects of industrial capitalism on the mind as well as the spirit; and the reaction against the dominance and hypocrisy of men.

The structure is simple each one is a radical idea through the prism of one or two of its proponents. Most of them crossed over into other radical areas, and this has not been overlooked, but one radical idea has been given prominence. Other radical thinkers, not all of them less important, are mentioned en passant. Some of them appear in the book as background when they interact with other main characters; for the most part, their image as a bit player is an illusion caused by the need to put the emphasis on others; another book could have been written with a different name for each chapter. Perhaps it should be.

Anna Kingsford

In a freezing February in 1888, a vicars wife lay dying at the tragically early age of forty-one. Her husband was the vicar at Atcham, Shrewsbury, but her deathbed scene unfolded at their rented flat at 15, Wynnstay Gardens, Kensington, a newly-built mansion block of apartments for the respectable middle classes. She had known she was dying since the previous November, but it was taking a very long time. Recuperation in the South of France and the Italian Riviera had not helped. She had suffered with her lungs all through her life; now they were killing her.