liberals were the men of economie studies. Thornton, the mill-owner in North and South, is frequently using the common arguments of the economists, and the heroine of the novel therefore very appropriately addresses him as "an economist like you." 1 In Past and Present Carlyle reproaches the manufacturers that they defended the Iawless anarchy by which they profited.
The novelists who in their books paid attention to the problems of the day—and most of them did so now and then, although few feit induced to write special social novels, like Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell—naturally took sides with the humanitarians, and for various reasons. In the first place it may be said in general that art and business are two spheres of life which represent its extremes, the one only concerned with idealism, and the other chiefly with materialism. And in Early Victorian times the gulf between them was perhaps wider than ever. A contemporary English writer considered that one of the prevalent causes Which obstructed the advancement of literature was "the common doctrine that we need in this country useful knowledge, rather than profound, extensive, elegant literature, and that this last, if we covet it, may be imported from abroad in such variety and abundance, as to save us the necessity of producing it ourselves." The author speaks of "utility work", and complains that "at the present moment English books want much which we need. The intellect of that nation is turned now to what are called useful and practical subjects." 2
Further the artistic mind of a writer of fiction is struck more forcibly by surrounding evils than those of most other persons: artists are highly sensitive to outward impressions, and are led by their feelings only, when reacting upon them. Greg was therefore quite right, when he spoke in this connection of two groups of men, the feelers and the thinkers?
The fact that novelists were to be found in the humanitarian camp, while Benthamite Utilitarianism and Orthodox Economy found its most powerful supporters in commercial and industrial circles, had a great influence upon the manner in which the business world is
1) North and South, p. 114.
2) The Importance and Means of a National Literature, by William miery Channing, pp. 11, 12, 28. London, 1835.
3) W. R. Greg, op. cit., p. 177.
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represented in fiction. It induced many novelists to draw portraits of merchants and manufacturers that were mere embodiments of the general mental attitude in the hostile camp. Another circumstance tending in the same direction was that, not knowing so much of practical business life and the daily work done in the counting-house and the mill, authors would consider it a very convenient method to endow their business people with all the qualities that were supposed to make up the utilitarian character. This led to the conception of a Benthamite business-man as a new literary type, which is found back with surprising regularity in many Early Victorian novels.
Now the popular conception of the character of Benthamite Utilitarians and Orthodox Economists was not a flattering one. The first had long been regarded with great distrust by every respectable person, who feared to commit himself before 1832 by meddling with their schemes of reform, while every religious person shrank back from their rationalism. Even when about 1832 their political confederates, the Philosophical Radicals, succeeded in carrying many of their reforms through Parliament, other parties still regarded them with aversion. This is proved by a passage in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, where he says that his father held opinions "both in politics and religion, which were more odious to all persons of influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen in that generation, than either before or since." 1
Political economists enjoyed a reputation which was hardly better, as we shall see presently. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that, when novelists used this type of men as representatives of the trading middle classes, the result was not as a rule a very prepossessing portrait.
The most elaborate of such literary portraits has been drawn by Mrs. Gaskell in the person of the mill-owner John Thornton, whom we have already mentioned on other occasions. The principal
1) Autobiography, p. 3. London, 1873. Punch, which in its early volumes is perhaps the truèst mirror of Early Victorian times that has come down to us, speaks of the Radicals in the same strain. "To be a radical, was,—in the early days of Radicalism, to be pariah—a foul vile thing—an ulcer in the body-social—a blotch to be extirpated by fire or knife." But by 1841 things had completely changed. The writer continues: "In due season coronets were waved to the goodly presence of Reform, and Radicalism was the synonym of patriotism. Vol. II, p. 210.
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features of this person's character are found back again in most other business-men belonging to this type. They are chiefly: a cold rationalist view of his place in society and his relation to its other classes, which is of a purely economie nature, somewhat like the "cash nexus" of which Carlyle repeatedly speaks in Past and Present; a greatly exaggerated feeling of independence in the management of his affairs, sometimes leading to a kind of unfounded pig-headedness that is not very convincing to the reader—Thornton has taken measures to abate the smoke nuisance of his own free will, but would have refused to do so under compulsion—; a strong and indomitable will, when he is opposed or thwarted; a strong and clear faculty for going straight to the core of a question in a logical marnier; not so much unjust as unfeeling in his dealings with others, "reasoning as if commerce were everything, and humanity nothing;" possessing an innate hatred of scènes, and a great contempt for all people showing emotion, as in his eyes it betrayed a want of selfcontrol. John Thornton's mother is of the same stamp, and the usual talk between mother and son is "about facts, not opinions, far less feelings."
Such a character description tallies in a wonderful way with what we read of the leaders of the utilitarian and economie school of thought. Of Bentham Leslie Stephen tells us that "he was always dealing with concrete facts, and a great part of his writings may be considered as raw material for acts of parliament ... he had not that knowledge which we ascribe either to the poet or to the man of the world. He had neither the passion, nor the sympathetic imagination. The springs of active conduct which Byron knew from actual experience, were to Bentham nothing more than names in a careful classification ... at eighty he had not found out of what men are really made." 1
Harriet Martineau, the author who used fiction as a medium for the diffusion of orthodox economie principles among the lower classes, tells us that at 11 she put a question to her brother about "the old difficulty of foreknowledge and freewill." At eigtheen she studied the Bible "incessantly and immensely" by getting hold of all commentaries and works of elucidation that she could lay hands
1) Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 233. London, 1900.
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to any impressions in others which do not further or impede his own purpose. On his return to England he sets about the management of the family estate in a manner which shows that he intends to run it on commercial lines, and next sets up as a Radical in the county, without consulting his mother, a proud Tory lady, in anything, and without caring greatly to know even what other people thihk of him. "He had the energetic will and muscle," the novelist says, "the self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination which make what is admiringly called the practical mind." She further descrdbes him as a clever, frank and agreeable person, a good-natured egoist, unsentimental, unsympathetic, unspeculative.1
As a last instance of the qualities of a utilitarian economist embodied in a literary portrait we may cite that of Lord Marney in Sybil. It is true that Lord Marney did not belong to the mercantile middle classes—factories are enterprises for the canaille according to this noble lord,2—but still he possesses the unmistakable qualities of Bentham's cBsciples: cynical, devoid of sentiment, arrogant and selfish, literal, harsh, anti-ecclesiastical, a rationalist, and an economist are the epithets bestowed upon him. That Disraeli drew such a character, not in the person of a mill-owner, but as a landed proprietor, is a curious fact which requires some elucidation. A French critic8 cites this portrait as one of the proofs that Utilitarianism had even permeated the aristocracy of the period, but this does not seem to be a very strong proof for such a highly improbable fact.
In our opinion there was a special inducement for the author of the political novel Sybil to draw this picture. His chief object in writing the book was to attack the stagnant, dormant, fox-hunting, do-nothing Tory nobility, as it was described by the scathing pen of Carlyle in Past and Present. He wished to arouse those pseudo Tories, as he called them,4 and to reform them for the purpose of carrying his Young-England ideals into practice. To show us how much this aristocracy needed to be reformed, and how great the evils were which' it tolerated, or even produced, he attributed to it,
1) Felix Holt, the Radical, chapters I, VIII
2) Sybil or the Two Nations, p. 154.
3) L. Cazamian, op. cit.
4) Sybil, p. 49.
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not only the agricultural misery on the estate of Lord Marney, but also the industrial degradation in the mushroom town on the estate of Lord Mowbray. Here his zeal for Young England reforms led him astray, however, for Lord Mowbray, the chief owner of the land on which this industrial conglomeration has sprung into existence, can hardly be considered accountable for the state of affairs there. His only fault is that the factories have "trebled the vast rental" of the landlord, but he is in no way connected with the mills and their hands. These are left to the tender mercies of masters like "those villains Shuffle and Screw." Yet it is not those rapacious mill-owners that figure in the novel, but a Mr. Trafford, a model employer and in every respect the opposite of the type who considered "cash nexus" as the sole relation between man and man. "He feit that between employer and employed there should be other ties than the payment and receipt of wages," Disraeli tells us, with a distinct echo of Carlyle's words.
From these facts it seems clear that it is the landed proprietary who are held responsible for all evils, agricultural and industrial alike, and not the new middle classes. This view of Disraeli's attitude is strikingly corroborated by the following passage in Sybil: «You—i.c, the English aristocracy—have of late years dexterously thrown some of the odium of your polity upon that middle class which you despise, and who are despicable only because they imitate you—i.e., in their treatment of their dependents—."1
In accordance with this standpoint the author was of course to a certain extent under the necessity of endowing a nobleman—Lord Marney—with the usual literary attributes of a Benthamite: cynicism, lack of sentiment, arrogance, harshness, anti-ecclesiastical tendencies, protection of Dissent, a knowledge of the doctrines of the economists, etc.
One of the most prominent features of the Benthamite commercial classes we are discussing in this chapter is perhaps their selfish heartlessness and often cruelty, and their indifference to the great sufferings of their fellow-men. No doubt Early Victorian novelists could show some very good grounds for this general conception. In the first place we may point to the fact that there were a large number of self-made man among the rising middle classes, and it has
1) Sybil, or the Two Nations, p. 278.
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been rightly observed that "many a self-made man worships his own maker." 1 As at all other periods of a great social upheaval, many new men were borne upwards by the great economie waves produced by the French wars and the industrial revolution. These men were of course sturdy workers and daring adventurers, seeking their success in the accumulation of money, and such men frequently make hard masters. Having succeeded in life themselves by hard work and unrelenting exertion, they were equally exacting for their dependents, and despised their weaker brethren, who had been trampled upon and wiped out of existence in the general scramble for money. Such people were apt to reason like Thornton, who held that masters and men both had to run the risk of going under, and had no right to complain, if they did.
Further it may be observed that the success these self-made men had achieved in life, tended itself again to bring out their bad qualities with all the greater force, while it suffocated the better hnpulses that lay latent in their characters. As in the case of Mr. Hillary, the great merchant in Warren's Diary of a Late Physician, the instinctive propensities of a low and coarse mind often made such men as tyrannical and insolent in success, as in their struggles they had been mean and abject.
Finally we must keep in view the fact that as economists the business community took it as a law of nature that social misery was inevitable, being only due to the carelessness, improvidence, and a great many other vices of the lower classes. As Greg cynically puts it: "they have made for themselves the hard bed they lie on." 2 This was the generally received opinion of the orthodox economists, who had not progressed far enough in their social science to see that it was exactly their poverty and misery that prevented the poor from making another bed, and that it would be possible and necessary to raise their moral Standard by improving their material conditions of life. The only panacea of the economists was to teach the labouring classes the economie laws as they had been formulated by Ricardo and Malthus, thereby showing them that resignation was the best cure for all evils. Hence the unceasing efforts of people
1) Advice to Young Men, by William Cobbett. Introduction bv Henrv Morley, p. 5. '
2) R. W. Greg, op. cit, p. 102.
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like Jane Marcet, Miss Martineau, Fox, Nassau Senior, Whateley and others, to diffuse the knowledge of sound-i.e. orthodox-economie principles among the people, which efforts are satirized for instance in The Chimes, where Filer tells Richard and Meg that it is a crime for them to marry as long as the young man has no better prospects.
Before concluding our chapter on the utilitarian man of business, we wish to make a final observation on the real character of these men.
That the utilitarian economists sincerely believed the truth of their own teachings does not leave the slightest room for doubt. The tone of great sincerity, as well as the somewhat offensive assurance in putting forth their intellectual arguments, show that they really believed that the new science had all but reached the final degree of development. Nor were the Benthamites and individualists in their private lives the heartless monsters and cold rationalists their opponents have been used to call them, even down to the present time.1 Ricardo is described as an indulgent father and husband, an affectionate and zealous friend, who was never slow to come forward to the reliëf of the poor and the distressed, supporting at his own expense an almshouse and two schools for the poor.2 Bentham himself was at one time a partner in the firm running the New Lanark Mills on somewhat philanthropic principles. Even Engels, a vehement socialist writer of that time, is forced to admit that the English bourgeois of the mercantile and industrial class have all sorts of private virtues, appearing as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois, while "even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans." 3 In his Autobiography John Mill makes an observation about the discrepancy between his father's Malthusian principles of marriage, and the fact that in his own life he married rather improvidently and had a large family. John Mill himself is likewise in several respects open to the same charge of inconsistency. One instance of it is afforded by the remark Brandes made about him in 1870, after his wife's death, of whom he was
1) G. K. Chesterton even doubts whether Bentham had a soul! The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 36. London, 1920.
2) Introduction to Works, pp. XXIX, XXXI. London, 1852.
3) F. Engels, op. cit., p. 276.
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constantly talking then. The Dane observed that Mill could not "be reproached with considering marriage a mere contract, as somethnes has been done owing to the extremely rational standpoint that he took up on the question of women." 1
This doublé aspect of the character of the members of the business community is also reflected in various novels of the Early Victorian times, especially in the social novels of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, who both make an effective use of it for their treatment of psychological character development. Both Thornton in North and South, and Robert Moore in Shirley are hard and haughty in their factories, showing a pugnacious and bulldog spirit in their fights against the "hands," but in private life they show a quite different side of their character. What one of the mill-operatives said of Thornton, as regards his being "two chaps in one," is almost literally repeated of Robert Moore by that person himself, when he says: "I find in myself, Lina, two natures, one for the world and business, and one for home and leisure. Gérard Moore is a hard dog, brought up to mill and marketj'the person you call your cousin Robert, is sometimes a dreamer, who is elsewhere than in Cloth-Hall and Counting-house."
In both manufacturers a gradual change is wrought, partly by the force of circumstances, but chiefly by love. The hard and selfish spirit of the utilitarian economist and man of business is forced into the background, while the more humane and humanitarian side of their character is strengthened. This shows itself in both novels in a greater interest taken in the welfare of the workmen, and in a more or less philanthropic management of their mills.2
1) Cited by Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature. 1830—1850. Vol. I, London, 1920.
2) The novels of the two friends present a strikingly large number of points of resemblance, too many perhaps to be put down entirely to mere coincidence.
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CHAPTER II.
Attacks on Utilitarianism and Political Economy»
One of the earliest attacks made in literature upon the dominant body of thought represented by the combined teachings of Benthamites and economists, is found in Disraeli's story of Popanilla, which appeared in 1828, and whose chief aim is to hold up to scorn the utilitarian commercialism of the time.
In the opening chapters there is a beautiful description of the happy life of the natives of the Isle of Fantaisie, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. "They are an innocent and happy, though a voluptuous and ignorant race. They have no manufactures, no commerce, no agrkulture, and no printing-presses; but for their slight clothing they wear the bright skins of serpents; for corn nature gives them the bread-fruit, and for intellectual amusement, they have a pregnant fancy and a ready wit ..." They are shown us as leading a sort of Arcadian life, without cares or troubles, dancing in the twilight or in the moonshine under the beautiful trees of their virgin forests, and sleeping in the daytime.
But this happy and idle life is disturbed one day by the fact that one of them, Popanilla, who was "the delight of society and the especial favourite of the women," finds a chest full of books on the shore of the island. The study of these books opens the eyes of the native to the fact that his companions, hitherto regarded as "the most eligible portion of the visible creation," were nothing more than a "horde of useless savages."
This conviction brought in its train a determination to enlighten his fellow-islanders on their deplorable condition, and to civilize them.1 "But he was determined," the author says, "not to be too
1) This is a satire of the efforts made by economists to enlighten the mass of the people on the causes of their miserable condition. Cf. pp. 35, 36.
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rapid, as ancient prejudices cannot be eradicated in a moment, and new modes of conduct instantaneously substituted and established. Popanilla, like a wise man, determined to conciliate. His views were to be as liberal as his principles were enlightened. Men should be forced to do nothing. Bigotry, and intolerance, and persecution were the objects of his decided disapprobation." Here Disraeli lays his finger on one of the weakest spots in English Liberalism of the Early Victorian period. Its latitudinarianism must have been particularly hateful to a young man with a powerful imagination and an Oriental temperament like Disraeli. It was this same aversion to compromise and conciliation that caused him to attack the "Peelite" reconstruction of the Tory party in his subsequent novel Sybil. The only principle put into practice by those Conservatives, he says, was to give way constantly to their political opponents.
In order to convert his ignorant companions to his utilitarian and commercial view of society, Popanilla makes them long speeches "in sentences which would not have disgraced the mellifluous pen of Bentham." The islanders, who seemed to think that their only object of life was to enjoy themselves, "to dance and sing, to crown themselves with chaplets, and to drink wine," were now told that there was no utility in pleasure, so that it could profit no one. "If, therefore, it was improfitable, it was injurious; because that which does not produce a profit, is equivalent to a loss; therefore pleasure is a losing business; consequently pleasure is not pleasant."
This sally at Bentham's teachings was no doubt suggested by the fact that according to this philosopher the basis of social organisation was the greatest happiness—identified by the Benthamites with pleasure1—of the greatest number.
Popanilla further showed his fellow-islanders that "man was not bom for himself, but for society; that the interests of the body alone are to be considered, and not those of the individual; and that a nation might be extremely happy, extremely powerful, and extremely rich, although every individual member of it might at the same time be miserable, dependent and in debt."
1) Graham Wallas, op. cit., p. 106.
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In this passage Disraeli shows us the great fault attaching to political economy in its early stage. Instead of aiming at the promotion of the well-being of the citizens of the State, it only considered the welfare of the State itself in its theories. National wealth and power were the chief object of the author of The Wealth of Nations and his disciples, the orthodox economists. As a modern writer observes,1 the very name of political economy "suggests that the subject of study is not so much the welfare of human beings, as the advantage of States—although," he adds, "happily the study itself is more humane than its title." It is curieus to observe in this connection that there were even persons who spoke of the science as political arithmetic, showing that figures expressive of "wealth" were in their eyes the essence of economie studies.
As regards the above view that the science itself is more humane than its title would lead us to expect, this may hold good for modern political economy, but it certainly could not be said of the doctrines of orthodox political economy. A very. striking and painful instance of the heartless indifference of economists of the Early Victorian period towards the welfare of the people when the interests of the business community and of the trade of England were concerned is afforded by what McCulloch, one of the most influential members of the orthodox school, wrote in his Dictionary of Commerce with reference to the import duties on spirits before the year 1786. "Our policy," he wrote, "if we may apply that term to so revolting a display of short-sightèd rapacity, had no other effect than to lessen the public revenue and the enjoyment of the people." But when Pitt had reduced the duty on "geneva" by 50 per cent.," the economist enthusiastically assures his readers, "the effect of his wise and politic measure was such" that in the next decennial period the imports for home consumption rose from 80,000 gallons to nearly'450,000 gallons. When we remember that these 450,000 gallons of gin had to be consumed by nine millions of people, we may well doubt, not only the wisdom and policy of Pitfs measure, but also whether in their individualism the orthodox economists saw deep enough
1) Conrad Gill, National Power and Prosperity, p. 89. London, 1916.
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into their science to distinguish between the interests of the "State" and those of the individual units forming "society."
The first English author that plainly set forth the mistake of the Utilitarians that the wealth of the State—an "enchanted wealth" and "the gold of Midas" he called it1—was the great object to be attained, was Carlyle. He showed his contemporaries that the prosperity of the People was quite a different thing, and this message is, as Chesterton calls it, his real glory.2
Another novelist who, like Disraeli, wrote about Bentham's utilitarian creed in those early days is Edward Bulwer. In his novel The Disowned, which appeared in the same year as Popanilla (1828), he describes the character of one Mr. Vavasour Mordaunt as follows: he was a "shrewd, sensible, ambitious man of the world, persevering, steady, erafty, etc.," to which the author adds that he was "what might be termed a mistaken utilitarian: he had lived utterly and invariably for self; but instead of uniting selfinterest with the interests of others, he considered them as perfectly incompatible ends." By this observation the author, who, as our readers remember, passed through a short period in his career when he was—or pretended to be—a disciple of the teachings of Bentham,8 clearly shows us that he was fully alive to the dangers Benthamism contained, if his famous self-interest principle coinciding with the general interests was used by a rascal as a cover for his malpractices. That those dangers were for from imaginary is easily proved by the doctrines of economists like Nassau Senior, who taught that "the pursuit of wealth ... is, to the mass of mankind, the great source of moral improvement",* and his successor at Oxford, Whately, who wrote in a similar strain,5 which statements are again mere repetitions of what the great master of the economists had written more than half a century before in his Wealth of Nations* There were a great many contemporaries of Bentham who, like Wedderburn, openly expressed
O Past and Present, pp. 5, 6. London, 1919.
2) G. K. Chesterton, op. cit, p. 55.
3) L. Cazamian, op. cit., p. 90.
4) Cited by Cazamian, op. cit., p. 198
5) Cf. p. 14.
6) On page 12 we have quoted a very instructive passage.
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Peacock's Crotchet Castte, which appeared in 1830. The author continually attacks and ridicules the Scottjsh school in the person of Mac Quedy, the economist, who "will talk to you about the exchangeable value by the hour" and "turns all the affairs of the world into buying and selling." Mac Quedy himself tells the other guests at the Castle that "in logic and moral philosophy (they)— i. e., in "sweet Edinbroo"—are at home," while "to all this (they) have added political economy, the science of sciences." (pp. 204, 195)
The author who made the fiercest and most persistent attacks upon the creed of Bentham and his allies, the orthodox economists, philosophical radicals, and mill-owners of the Manchester school, was Charles Dickens. He must have deeply feit the nefarious influence utilitarian intellectualism exercised in his country, as practised by heartless economists, and by business people whose sole aim was to get rich by the aid of their "free competition" principle.
It is not so much in business people like Scrooge, Ralph Nickleby, or Arthur Gride, that we must look for traces of Bentham's influence; they are represented to us rather as victims of avarice, and of the Mammonism of the period, whose altar, to use Disraeli's words, had blazed with triple worship since the passing of the Reform Act. Nor are we to look for a Benthamite economist in the person of Paul Dombey, whose besetting sin is heartless pride, but in whose character we do not read Dickens's intention of castigating the mercantile spirit of his age. It is rather in persons like Filer in The Chimes, and Bounderby and Gradgrind in Hard Times that the novelist attacks the all-pervading influence of the Utilitarians. Dickens wrote three stories in which these attacks occur with gradually increasing vigour. The first is found in the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association, a short satire appearing in Bentley's Miscellany (1837—39). Amongst a great many other "absurdities" observed by the author in the daily life around him, it is political economy that he makes fun of. He seems almost to identify the science with statistics.1
1) The early volumes of Punch also contain numerous passages in which statistics and statistical figures are ridiculed, e.g., vol. 1, p. 110; vol. II, p. 112.
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Statistics was a comparatively new study at the time, which may be said to have been created by economists as a basis for their social investigations. One of the pioneers in these studies was a Scotch landed proprietor, Sir John Sinclair (f 1835), who is even said to have introduced the word "statistics" into English, to denote the researches economists were then beginning to make, in order to give a solid basis of reality to their teachings, which hitherto had been merely abstract speculations. Sinclair even adopted the modern method of circulating a number of queries to all the clergymen of his country, in order to obtain information about population, production, and other economie data. Another of those early statisticians, Sir Frederick Norton Eden, employed an agent who travelled about the country with a similar set of queries.
It is evident that the collections of facts which thus became available to the students of political economy, must have been a valuable asset to them as a reliable basis for social theories. To Dickens, however, these "facts and figures," as he contemptuously denotes them over and over again, were merely signs of the deadening mathematical spirit animating Utilitarians and Economists in their study of social problems. In his eyes they were the men who, like Mr. Filer, had reduced such problems "to a mathematical certainty long ago," by means of their inquiries and statistics. Moreover utilitarian politicians made use of the materials thus collected in two manners that were both equally odious to a thoroughly humanitarian novelist like Dickens. In the first place they used statistical figures as a proof of the necessity of legislative measures like the much abused New Poor Law of 1834. The heartlessness of this piece of utilitarian legislation, inevitable and useful as it may have been, was demonstrated by Dickens in his workhouse story in Oliver Twist. That the facts as stated by him were no exaggeration is proved by the many instances of cruelty and harsh treatment of the paupers that may be found in books like Engels'.
Of course it is quite another question whether the pauperism of those days, which had assumed appaUing proportions, could have been effectually checked in a humaner manner. Dickens's political friends, the Radicals, who got the measure through
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Parliament, evidently thought not, and the results of this much abused piece of legislation have fully justified its introduction.
In other cases again Dickens saw utilitarian economists use their statistical figures to prevent the introduction of legislation, if it interfered with their principle of "laissez-faire" and "free competition." This was especially the case when the humanitarians under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Sadler, Oastler, and others attempted to mitigate the evils of the factory system by legislative measures for the protection of its victims. The standpoint of political economists in these questions was absolutely the same as that of the parties interested in the maintenance of unbridled freedom in every direction, namely the mill-owners.
The evils attendant upon this system, as we have described them briefly in a previous chapter, did not of course escape the notice of the economist, but he either laid the blame of all the misery at the door of the poor sufferers themselves, like Greg;1 or he simply declared that State interference was impotent for good; that the masses could not be raised out of their misery, but had to raise themselves; or again he said, as we read in Alton Locke, "that, however glad he would be to help (them), it was impossible—he could not alter the laws of nature—that wages were regulated by the amount of competition among the men themselves," which is the same kind of reasoning as that of John Thornton in North and South, who also showed "on sound economie principles" that in periods of depression "a certain number of masters as well as of men must go down into ruin," against which the heroine's heart rose up in revolt, "as if commerce were everything, and humanity nothing." How the figures collected by statisticians were used as a powerful weapon by the Manchester school to resist humanitarian measures is strikingly illustrated by the speech one of them made in Parliament in the course of a debate on the protection of workmen in the mills. This member, John Bright, said, "It was proposed the other day to spend millions in boxing off our machinery. We have in our mills about a thousand workpeople. In fifteen years we have had five accidents. We have three carters. In the same space of time two of them have been killed ...2
1) Cf. p. 35.
2) Cited by Dicey, op. cit, p. 236.
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In the proceedings of the above-mentioned Mudfog Association we read among others of one the members, Mr. X. Leadbrain, reading "a very ingenious communication, from which it appeared that the total number of legs belonging to the manufacturing population of one great town in Yorkshire was, in round numbers, forty thousand, while the total number of chair and stool legs in their houses was only thirty thousand, which, upon the very favourable average of three legs to a seat, yielded only ten thousand seats in all. From this calculation it would appear—not taking wooden or cork legs into account, but allowing two legs to every person—that ten thousand individuals (one half of the whole population) were either destitute of any rest for their legs at all, or passed the whole of their leisure time in sitting upon boxes." 1
In his second great Christmas story Dickens repeats his attack on what might be called the "social mathematicians" by drawing the picture of Mr. Filer, who denounces poor Toby Veck for eating tripe on the great man's doorstep.2 "But who eats tripe?" said Mr. Filer, looking round. "Tripe is without an exception the least economical, and the most wasteful article of consumption that the markets of this country can by possibility produce. The loss upon a pound of tripe has been found to be, in the boiling, seven eighths of a fifth more than the loss upon a pound of any other animal substance whatever. Tripe is more expensive, properly understood, than the ho thou se pine-apple.8 Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within the bills of mortality alone; and forming a low estimate of the quantity of tripe which the carcasses of those animals, reasonably well butchered, would yield; I find that the waste on that amount of
1) Stories and Sketches, p. 408. London and Olasgow.
2) Christmas Books, p. 81. London.
3) Op. cit., vol. II, book IV, p. 35.
This "hothouse pine-apple" is a satire of one of the favourite illustrations used by orthodox economists to prove that unimpeded freedom of production and trade in general are the essential conditions for a sound economie development of a country, and that a large quantity of labour is wasted in consequence of different countries striving to produce commodities for which they are utterly unsuitable. Adam Smith had first illustrated the argument by vine grapes that could, if required, be grown in Scotland.
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tripe, if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over." At which lengthy economie al and statistical disquisition poor old Trotty stood aghast. "He seemed to have starved a garrison of five hundred men with his own hand."
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he is "banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not," but the author does not show us the great man in any of his multifarious pursuits. For a story purporting to strike a blow on behalf of the manufacturing labourer this is a great defect. The reader would have wished to witness a struggle between the two hostile powers in industry that have faced each other ever since in endles conflicts, with a clear exposition of all the principles and passions moving them. Nothing of all this is to be found in Hard Times. The wage question is not even mentioned in it, unless we take Mr. Bounderby*» parrotlike cry that "they all want to be fed on turtle soup and venison and eat with a gold spoon" as a treatment of it.
What Dickens says of the mill-owners of Coketown as a class is also little more than the general observations that were current at that time among philanthropists, and which were commonly drawn from the parliamentary speeches made by representatives of the Manchester school. The "millers" complained of their being ruined, if they had to send factory children to school, admit inspectors to their mills, protect their hands from being injured by the machines, prevent the smoke from their chimneys from becoming a nuisance,1 etc All these remarks may be found in Hansard and are repeated in much the same strain in books like Dr. Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures.
Mr. Gradgrind, the embodiment of political economy as Dickens fancied it was, is less successful from a literary point of view. Of the inner workings of his mind we perceive very little. Perhaps the author omitted on purpose to endow him with any spiritual hfe, to show us, how dead his soul really was, but still we cannot help thinking that as a human picture he is not a great success. He is intended to represent the barren influence of rationahsm and Benthamism in private life, just as Parliament, "the national cinderheap " was the social outcome of this school of thought. Two of Gradgrind's children were called Adam Smith and Malthus and their eminently practical father had them trained to mathematical exactness. Everything in and about his household in as cold and mathe-
1) The smoke nuisance of the numerous factory chimneys s referred to, not only in Hard Times, but also in North ^SoMp. 55,Pa^ and Present, p. 254; Popanilla, p. 409 (Novels and Tales, vol. IV, London, 1881).
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matical as the house and its very name of Stone Loöge itself. But Gradgrind is painted too much upon the easy method of mannerisms and peculiarities, tricks of speech or of carriage which Dickens adopted so often.
Dickens's hatred of figures and averages—the wickedest and most enormous vice of the time, as he wrote to his friend Charles Knight1 —led him to a violent attack upon the schoolmaster Mr. M'Choakumchild, who, with "some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had lately been turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs." The author exclaims that if this man, who only inculcates facts in the juvenile minds, but murders every tracé of fancy there, "had only learned a little less", he "might have taught much more." This sally curiously contrasts with the general principles of enlightenment so strenuously advocated by the very men whose opinions must have been the most congenial to the author, such as the above-mentioned Knight, the editor of the Penny Magazine, a popular periodical for the spread of knowledge among the masses.2
It might also lead modern readers not conversant with the history of English elementary education, to believe that English schoolmasters were already suffering from an excess of learning a little more than ten years after State aid had first been granted for the upkeep of training colleges for teachers, and less than ten years after Government had begun to grant State aid for the payment of staffs possessing a certificate of competence.
Though she does not, like Dickens, single out some special department of political economy for her attacks, Mrs. Gaskell's opinion of the social science is hardly more favourable. We can gather this from a conversation between an old spinner, Job Legh, and a mill-owner, Mr. Carson, in Mary Barton.3 In the course of their interview the workman says to the master that he is not given to political economy. When the latter talks of facts having proved the desirability of self-reliance for the workers, Job replies that "you can never work facts as you would fixed quantities, and say, given two facts, and the product is so and so. God has given men feelings and passions which cannot be worked into the problem,
1) Hard Times, Introduction, p. XII.
2) Imitated in this country by the Penning Magazijn.
3) Mary Barton, p. 454.
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CHAPTER IV.
Free Enterprise*
Besides its statistical inquiries and arguments, contemptuously denoted by Dickens as "stutterings", there were also other aspects of the gospel of business^ people that attracted the notice of Early Victorian novelists, and were commented upon in their works. One of these, which undoubtedly deserves to be mentioned first, was the principle of free competition, both in its more restricted business acceptation of all efforts made to undersell and cut out others in the same trade, and as a term of political economy, to denote what is generally called "free enterprise", i.e., those social conditions which leave every citizen entirely free in the pursuits he has selected as the most suitable for himself. A third form of free competition, namely that in trading with foreign countries, usually denoted as free trade, also finds some weak echoes in Early Victorian fiction.
Disraeli is again one of the earliest writers of the period that treat of competition. In Popanilla we find a humorous caricature of competition between shopkeepers in a description of what happened to the hero in a shop in Hubbabub, which is London. Popanilla entered this shop for the purpose of buying a purse, and was told that its price was four crowns, upon which the proprietor of the opposite establishment ran in to offer him one for three crowns. The original shopkeeper then reduced his price to two crowns. His rival next offering a purse gratis, he also offered) the customer one on the same terms, with a crown inside. When Popanilla put this purse into his pocket, his companion explained to him that this was not "Cheating" as he had innocently called it, but "Competition".
In Past and Present Carlyle also makes frequent references to business competition, and his words have, as was to be expected, a deeper sense than the above witty sally of young Disraeli. The
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which fact induced the local authorities to refrain from making use of the Settlement Act. In Afary Barton we are told that after the death of the mill operative Davenport the Board, instead of sending the widow back to her husband's parish, allowed her to stay in Manchester, and even paid the rent for her miserable area dwelling.
From the same novel we have already cited an example illustrating the gradual shifting of the rural population to the new centres of industry, and proving that the "free labour market" had actually been created by the new economie circumstances. Disraeli speaks in Sybil of the agricultural labourers being "sent down by Pickford's van into the labour market to bring down (the) wages." 1 It was especially the great prosperity enjoyed for a time by the handloom weavers which induced numerous field labourers to take up that calling. But during the succeeding period of the war with France this swollen market led to great disasters, and the weavers suffered great hardship, which was soon aggravated by the introduction of the powerloom.2 In Sybit the hard lot of such an unfortunate workman is described in the person ofWarner the handloom weaver.8 In 1844 Engels spoke of "workmen on tramp", in search of employment in other towns, a phrase that is likewise used by Thornton in North and South; when he speaks of the necessity of shutting up shop, he says "that hands and masters (may) go alike on tramp." In Hard Times it is Stephen Blackpool, the mill hand, who leaves Coketown with his bundie under his arm, to seek work elsewhere.
One of the greatest competitors in the free labour market appears to have been the Irish immigrant. Bad as the social conditions of England were in those days, there is no doubt that in Ireland the state of affairs was still infinitely worse. Going about in rags, eating nothing but potatoes, and sleeping in a pig-sty, the Irishman was eager to work for the starvation wages that an English workman, who was still somewhat civilized, as Engels observes, could not live upon. We get a glimpse of the Standard of life the Irishman maintained at home in Barry Lyndon, in passages like the following: "I found her (i.e., Molly, a girl the speaker had known before), a slatternly'wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of
1) Sybil, p. 121.
2) W. Cunningham, op. cit., p. 633.
3) Sybit, pp. 140—153.
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children almost as ragged as those of my friend the blacksmith," 1 and a complete picture of Ireland in those days is drawn in William Carlton's voluminousTra/ïs and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, in which Pat is depicted with his family, his pig and, like the Arabian and his horse, all sleeping in the same bed, the pig generally, for the sake of convenience, next the "stock", i.e., at the outside.2
It is no wonder that the close vicinity of the great Lancashire cotton district tempted many a poor Irish devil to cross St. George's Channel, and seek work in the mills there. Carlyle says in Chartism: "Crowds of Miserable Irish darken all our towns." They were not readily taken on, however, except in case of great shortage of labour, for instance when a strike was on at the mills. In such cases millowners availed themselves of Irish labour as knobsticks, and even sent over to Ireland sometimes to import large numbers of them. We read this in North and South, where Thornton, at the advice of his mother, orders forward a large gang of them, who are lodged in one of the wings of his mill, as they dare not leave the premises for fear of being molested. Of course such people were but very poor substitutes for the regular operatives. The work in the mill was new to them, and their aptitude to learn it was no doubt very small in view of their utter lack of civilization. We are therefore not surprised to hear that Thornton had not been able to execute his orders, "owing in some degree to the utter want of skill of the Irish hands" and that "much of their work was damaged and unfit to be sent forth." Engels, who devotes a whole chapter of his book to the problem of Irish immigration, accurately weighed the value of such "hands" when he said: "The newly hnmigrated Irishman, encamped in the first stable that offers, or turned out in the street after a week, because he spends everything upon drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand."
We need not be surprised to find, in view of the above facts, that philanthropists and humanitarian reformers looked upon this Irish influx with anything but sympathetic feelings. They fully realized that as long as those people continued to work at starvation wages, not only no improvement for English workmen would be possible, but that, as Carlyle said, "the condition of the lower multitude of
1) Works, vol. XII, p. 213. London, 1878.
2) Vol. I, p. 410. London, 1843.
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English labourers approximate(d) more and more to that of the Irish." This expiains the great dislike of Irishmen so frequently expressed by authors writing about the condition-of-England question. Carlyle depicts the "Sanspotatoes" in the following flattering terms: "The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all the highways and byways," and he covers a whole page of Chartism in the same strain.1 Charles Kingsley is equally prejudiced against the poor Irishman. In Alton Locke he heaps contemptuous ridicule on the person of Kelly, depicts a despicable demagogue and low-grade journalist in the character of O'Flynn, and a traitor of his fellowworkmen, who later on turns sweater, in Jemmy Downes. Christian Socialists, the men who, as we shall presently see, had devised practical methods for combating the evils of free labour competition, had of course a special inducement to be thus prepossessed against the wretched immigrants that aggravated the very evils they wished to suppress.
When novelists make reference to the economie notion of a free labour market, it is always, as was to be expected, in a somewhat sarcastic strain. Carlyle was the first to draw a caricature of this politico-economic innovation, with its wages depending upon supply and demand, just as prices in all other markets.2 "My starving men," says the rich mill-owner: "Did I nothire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for?" This refers to the utter absence of any human tie between masters and men under the new system. In another passage he speaks of the "lawlèss anarchy of supply and demand," where "market wages alone" are paid, while the so-called freedom of the labourer to seek the best market for his work is ridiculed, by comparing him to a horse: "The master of horses, when the summer labour is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses: Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you, but work exists abundantly over the world: are you ignorant (or must I read you Political Economy Lectures) that the steam engine always in the
long run creates additional work? Railways are forming in
one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much cartage is wanted;
1) Collected Works, vol IX, p. 18. London, 1858.
2) Past and Present, pp. 141, 187, 254.
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and to alrow them to reap the full benefit of their work. The divine spirit of association was thus to take the place of the unchristian system of selfish competition devised by a heartless and rational school of economists. But these associations could only prosper, when carried on as commercial enterprises, for they had to compete in their business with individualistic firms, so that at bottom these associated workmen acted on the same principles of. selfishness and profit-making as their rivals. When this was pointed out clearly by the bookbinder Sully, there were idealistic leaders like Maurice, who at first in their misplaced idealism protested against this view of the movement, while economie writers like Greg were not slow in pointing out that the hateful competition the Christian Socialists sought to kill, was only introduced into society by them in another form. They found no difficulty in proving the fact by merely citing, as Greg did, the very words used by Kingsley ir, his above-mentioned pamphlet Cheap Clothes and Nasty. "We will hoard our profits," Kingsley had written there, "and not spend them till we have squeezed out all the sweaters one by one. Then we will open our common shop, and sell at as low a price as the cheapest of the show shops ... Let us then encourage the journeymen to compete with Nebuchadnezzar & Co. at their own game In this, as in many other questions, it appears that an idealistic reformer often has but very hazy notions of the full bearing of his own remedies.
Early Victorian literature affords numerous other instances, where humanitarian novelists fall into the same error of combating competition by identically the same economie weapon. Kingsley himself does so in another passage in Alton Locke, where he describes what he calls "Lord Ellerton's perfections." This nobleman is a landed proprietor with a deep sense of the high duties of a landlord, which he shows by his measures of improvement: one of these is to expel the old bankrupt race of farmers from his estate, and to advertise widely for men of capital and science, at the same time lowering his rents. The author does not seem to be aware that this/ is tantamount to competing with other landlords, by drawing the best farmers from their estates. Similarly Lord Ellerton gave his cottages to "the most intelligent artisans whom he could draft from the manufacturing town hard by."
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In Past and Present Carlyle tells us of "a practical manufacturing Quaker," whom he calls Friend Prudence. "Prudence keeps a thousand workmen; has atriven in all ways to attach them to hhn; h«8 given conversational soirées; play-grounds; bands of music for the young ones; went even the length of buying them a drum; all which has turned out an excellent investment." Next Carlyle describes another master with a thousand men, who has done nothing for them: they "are perpetually getting into mutiny» into broils and
Disraeli likewise describes a miU-owner who does everything in his power to promote the moral and material welfare of his men and their families. This Mr. Trafford also succeeds in this way in getting together a model staff at bis works, But both Carlyle and Disraeli seem to have: entirely overlooked the fact again that such humane mill management brings into play the very competition in the free labour market which they and their friends denounce as the greatest evil of orthodox economy. Instead of furnishing arguments for the necessity of a humane treatroent of mill hands by their employers, their examples go to prove the usefulness of a free market where every master can take his choice.
The higher moral tone and the greater efficiency of Prudence's and Trafford's staffs can neithef be put down entirely to the humane treatment they receive at the hands oi their masters, as Carlyle aad Disraeli wish to show by their illustrations. There is a second factor ia bringing about this superiority of such staffs. By their philanthropic management masters like Friend Prudence and Trafford attract into their service only the steadiest class of workisg people, while the more inoorrigible ones, those who are not amenable to moral influences, soon leave such uncongenial and in their eyes duit and saintrlike enviroos. This fact is strikingly though probably unwittingly illustrated by Disraeli himself. He tells us of one of the factory ghls, Caroline by name, who has left Mr. Trafford's mui. She fully admits that it is a great thing for a young person to be
employed there already, "but then it was so dull and then
Iamno scholar, and never could take to learning. And those Traffords had so many schools." In another coaversation the same girl complains that "at the Traffords' the greatest fun (they) ever had was a singing-class."
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Free trade, the third form of free competition, is almost entirely left undiscussed by Early Victorian literature, which may seem strange, as it was one of the principal tenets of orthodox economists. In Past and Present Carlyle shows himself an advocate of an unrestricted trade with foreign markets, chiefly in connection with the Corn Laws that were still in force in 1843, but were already doomed to disappear in consequence of the unwearying propaganda of men like Cobden and Bright with their Anti-Corn Law League. As one of Carlyle's biographers points out, Carlyle is somewhat inconsistent in this matter: though advocating free trade, and agreeing with the British policy of coercion with regard to China, for the purpose of compelling the Celesta! Empire to open its ports to English traders, yet he condemns the same free' dealings between dass and class at home.1
As far as we remember, -there is only one other author of the Early Victorian period that refers to the Corn Laws, namely Disraeli, who in Popanilla attacks the aristocracy for the high prices they exact from the people for their corn.» In his later political novels, when he had staked out the direction of his future career, he carefully abstained from making any reference to this question. In Popanilla he advocates the principle of non-interference, not only with regard to the import of corn, but for all foreign trade as weü as in the colonial policy of his country.
1) J. Nicholl, Thomas Carlyle, p. 210. London, 1918.
2) See also note 3, p. 57.
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CHAPTER V.
The New Rich.
Like all great social upheavals, the French wars and the Industrial Revolution in England were attended with the phenomenon so wellknown to students of present-day economy that the large masses of the people became desperately poor, while the accumulated wealth came into the hands of a small class of new rich. These new capitalists, having generally risen from the lower ranks of society still bore the stamp of their origin and mostly lacked the necessary culture to occupy their new rank in life in a proper mannen
The first Early Victorian author that used this theme in his work is Disraeli. "Butlers were at a premium, coachmakers never slept," he tells us in describing the immense trade boom in the Island of Vraiblusia, which is England, the country of the True Blues. Coaches were in his time considered to be an unmistakable sign of the owners belonging to the upper ten thousand, and were almost held to be the exclusive privilege of the nobility. There are frequent references to this fact both in the literature and the history of the period. When a man had made a fortune, he—or more often than not his wife— set up a carriage, as a proof that he had arrived, as the French say, and intended "to sink the shop for the rest of (his) days," as Mr. Hillary put it.1 Thus we see Tittlebat Titmouse, as soon as he has come into a large fortune, hurry to a fashionable tailor's first, and then to a ditto coachmaker's. Mrs. Turnbull, the rich whaler captain s spouse in Jacob Faithful, likewise sports a fine coach in her London suburb.
There is no doubt, however, that it still required some pluck in a rich "tradesman" to drive in his own carriage, and the equipages
1) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. II, p. 277. London, 1844.
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in Hyde Park still belonged to "the fashionable world," middle class people not appearing there.1
This is evident from an account given in Disraeli's papers of an incident that took place in Parliament shortly after the Reform of 1832. Sir Francis Burdett one day tokf the assembled members that on the occasion of a Parliamentary election his means had been crippled to such an extent that Lady Burdett had only one norse to her carriage. "The effect of this remark," Disraeli says "on one of the early reformed Parliaments, full of retired tradesmen, many of whom had assumed wealth, but had never plucked up courage to keep a carriage, may be conceived." 2
Many of those nouveaux fiches of course also tried to emblazon their wealth by a coronet. Disraeli sarcastically says in Popanilla, that "the demand for arms at the Herald's College was so great that even the mystical genius of Garter was exhausted." There is an Observation in Emilia Wyndham to the same effect: the author of this novel speaks of "the rich harvest of knights of all descriptions and for all reasons—the happy result of our victories both in arms and commerce."
In Sybil Disraeli also refers to the large "infusion from the middle class" into the patrician party by Sir William "Petty", who made peers of "second-rate squires and fat-graziers", while he also "caught them in the alleys of 'Lombard Street and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill." 8
A very lucrative business appears to have sprung up in this line, for in Sybil we read of the large fortune the heraldist Mr. Hatton, "a discoverer, inventor, framer, arranger of pedigrees", has succeeded in amassing by assisting his numerous clients in their suits to the Herald's Office.
Other wealthy business people again, like the above-named Mr. Hillary, are trying to satisfy their ambitions by seeking for their daughter a son-in-law "that will clap a coronet on her head," but caring very little all the while whether by so doing they are promoting the child's happiness. In the same way Mrs. Dudley's vain imagination is dazzled by the notion of intermingling her blood with
1) H. D. Traill and J. S. Mann, Social England, vol. VI.
2) W. F. Monypenny, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. II, pp. 368, 369. London, 1912.
3) Sybit, p. 28.
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"Nkmility".1 Thackeray's recipe for such people is: "Doublé your name, and stick an "e" to the end of it, and you are a gentleman at once." s
The counterpart of the rich tradesman desirous of being ennobled is also met with in literature, though not so frequently. We mention Viscount Scamp, whose marriage with Mr. Hillary's daughter "would place his f inancial marters upon an entirely new basis," while further there is the Scotch earl in Marryafs novel The Pirate, "who went to London with a bevy of nine (girls) in a Leith smack, to barter blood for wealth." In connection with Miss Osborne's marriage in Vanity Fair Thackeray speaks of a "host of fashionables who have all married into Lombard Street, and done a great deal to ennoble Cornhill."3
We need not be surprised at the comparative scarcity of noblemen of this sort in literature, however. In the first place the English nobility of the period were wealthy landed proprietors, with inalienable rights in their propertjes, who as a rule need seek no alliances with tradesmen's families for the purpose of gilding their arms, while further the gulf between them and the trading and manufacturing classes was still so great at that time that Marryat tells us of a younger son of a patrician family going into a banking house, who, in consequence of this step was "as decidedly cut by his relations as a young lady, had she committed a faux pas." * Lady Marney in Sybil speaks of "some monster of the middle class, some tinker or candlestick-maker," who will stand for their borough, "with his long purse, preaching reform, and practising corruption," while her son considers manufactories to be "enterprises for the canaille."
The width of the gulf between "tradespeople" and aristocrats is also clearly shown in a passage in Lady Shelley's Diary, where she tells us that her father, who lived at Preston, had become "disgusted with the erection of factories" near that place, which was the residence of the nobility and the county families. "One day," she says, "my father left his oW house, never to return. He had gone as usual in the morning to select his fish for dinner. On his arrrval
1) The Diary of a Late Physician.
2) Cox's Diary; Works, vol. III. London, 1899.
3) Vanity Fair, p. 537.
4) The Pirate, Ch. I
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at the fishmonger's, he found himself forestalled in the purchase of the finest turbot by a Mr. Horrocks, a cotton spinner."1 This happened at a time when advertisers in The TUnes addressed themselves to "the nobility, gentry, and the publicl"
When reading all the satirical observations made by novelists upon the aspirations of the rising business classes to become members of the old aristocratie caste, one cannot help thinking that there is a good deal in their pfetures that is due, not to actual facts observed in daily life, but to literary traditions handed down from preceding stages in the development of the novel. The poor young noble seeking to fill his empty coffers by a marriage with a wealthy middle class girl is too common a type in the literature of every country to be considered a special feature of the Early Victorian period.
Many are the satires levelled in fiction at thë supposed or real lack of good manners of the new middle classes. Disraeli devotes a whole page to their description in Popanilla* The c har act er is tic of the many millionaires produced by the economie conditions Of the Island of Vraiblusia was the snub nose. When the new people had imitated the old aristocracy in the display of wealth and luxuiy, they found out to their dismay that they did not know how behave in society. "Accustomed to the counting-house, the factory, or the exchange, they looked queer in saloons, and said "Sir!" when they addressed you; and seemed stiff and hard and hot." 2
"But," the young author continues, "help was soon forthcoming to these would*be aristocrats." Treatises and dissertations appeared for the distribution of fashionable knowledge, just as in recent years we have seen advertisements appear in the papers, in which similar knowledge was offered to be taught to War Pröfiteers. It may wel! be said indeed that there Is nothing new under the sunl
The Vraiblusian Government also took the matter of educating the new millionaires in hand. It issued an edict for the invention of a new literature, in consequenoe of which "Burlington, A Tale of
1) The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley, p. 3. London, 1912. That "tradesmen" had always experienced much difficulty in obtaining due recognition of their merits from other classes, appears from the fact that Defoe thought it necessary to devote no fewer than nine pages to prove "the Dignity, Antiquity, and other Honours due to Trade" to the "self-vain Gentry that would decry Trade as a universal Mechanism." A Plan of the English Commerce etc, by Daniël Defoe, pp. 5—13. London, 1728.
2) Novels and Tales, vol. IV, p. 428.
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Fashionable Life, in three volumes post octavo" was set forth. One cannot help thinking that we have to do here with a satire of the Silver Fork School, which represented a class of fiction that was extremely popular at that time, though literary critics! do not agree as to the cause of that popularity. Some say that the large sale of the works of Theodore Hook and his followers was due to the fact that middle-class readers eagerly bought them, in order to complete their detective education; others again are inclined to believe that they owed their popularity to the satire they contained upon the unpopular and envied new rich. Possibly the sales of these novels may have been stimulated by both causes.
A more violent, though far less witty attack upon the manners of the trading and manufacturing classes is to the found in Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year. It is given in a description of the newly reformed Parliament of 1832, and is no doubt sorely biassed by political prejudices, the author repeatedly showing himself a thorough True Blue in his book} JHe says of the new House that it almost turned John Bull's stomach out, when he saw it, for "as far as outward appearance and behaviour went, there seemed scarcely fifty gentlemen among them." 'it was," the author adds, "as though the scum had risen to the surf ace of the caldron."
That the new House was indeed quite different from the old ones is no doubt true. The time was past, when members went up to Westminster provkled with quotations collected from their Latin grammar,1 and when reporting of their speeches was considered a breach of privilege by them.2 The fashionable young gentleman representing a rotten borough had been replaced by some earnest business-man representing a large manufacturing town in the North. No wonder that the new debaters showed more passion, and even violence, if need be, than the old' orators.
When portraying merchants and manufacturers in private life, novelists also frequently show them as awkward men, feeling ill at ease in drawing-rooms and at social functions. Tittlebat Titmouse can hardly be given as a specimen of such portraits, as he was only a "counter-jumper," not a business-man. Warren has drawn us a
1) Wellington is said to have done this. Walpole, History of England, vol. IV, p. 11, note.
2) lbid., p. 6.
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fine specimen, however, in the person of Mr. Dudley,1 a self-made merchant and a worthy man, "a rich and racy specimen of one of those glories of our nation,—a true English merchant." The author shows here an appreciation of the merits of the mercantile class that is but too rare in the literature of his time, and even Warren's appreciation is limited to some eulogistic expressions but rarely showing itself in the manner in which he delineates the mercantile character or describes the social functions performed by trade and industry.
In the character of Mr. Dudley the author has made us feel the restricted circle of interest and the limitations of the businessman's mind: "he could never be said to breathe freely—and really to live —'but in the City." This is of course chiefly to be accounted for by the lack of an all-round education of this merchant. Indeed, the author himself says that Mr. Dudley "was seldom or never to be seen amid the throng and crush of company that crowded his house evening after evening. The first arrival of his wife's guests was his usual sign for seizing his hat and stick, dropping quietly from home whereupon he used to repair to a simple place in the City, where he spent his evening in simple company.
It was not only from not feeling at home in such circles that this merchant evaded them, but also for another reason: he is described to us as an economical, and even parsimonious man in his habits, so that we need not be surprised to see that the extravagant splendour of his wife's domestic arrangements are highly uncongenial to the simple-minded business-man.
And even though not from any motive of parsimony, yet a wealthy tradesman may, like Captain Turnbull in Jacob Faithful, feel in his own drawing-room "like a buil in a China shop," simply because he wishes to live quietly and happily.
The helpless attitude of the self-made man in fashionable circles has perhaps never been better portrayed than by Dickens in the person of Mr. Merdle, the great speculator in Little Dorrit, who "carries the shop on his back rather—like Jewish clothesmen with too much business," as his witty son-in-law, Mr. Sparkler, puts it. Mr. Merdle can accommodate himself so badly to the society his wife is dragging him about in that though the latter may announce "that
1) The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. II, p. 406.
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lines, intending to make it pay.1 Squire Lavington would not, from ignorance and indolent habits, adopt such modern methods, but it is evident that small holders with properties often mortgaged up to the hilt, could not follow the Lord's example.
It is curious to observe that men like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other leaders of the laissez-faire school of economics, who unwearyingly advocated the principle of absolute freedom and the natural growth of society, strenuously opposed the extinction of the small man in agriculture, which was nevertheless one of the corollaries of growing capitalism. Their belief was that the small proprietor was the most industrious and the most succesful of all land-improvers.2
Attempts were also made to check the tendency to stamp out the Peasant Proprietary, and it is a curious sign of the spirit of the Early Victiorian period that one of the best-known of these attempts took the form of a joint stock enterprise: in 1844 Feargus O'Connor, the great Chartist leader, founded the National Land Company, whose shareholders were entitled to ballot for small holdings with a house, but which had to be wound up in consequence of the illegality of the lottery that was thus connected with it
Of the great effects the above changes had on the conditions of life of the farm-labourers, which are described m Yeast, and likewise in Disraeli's Sybil, we need not speak here, as they fall outside the limits of this work.
The Early Victorian novel gives almost as many instances of business people who became landed proprietors as the history of the time itself. We need only remind our readers of some of them. "Whatever capital he could spare from his business, he never sunk in speculation, but took a patriarchal pleasure in investing it in land,"—thus we read of John Halifax, and the author adds that he did so, "chiefly for the benefit of his mills and those concerned therein,"3 evidently seeing no other alternative for surplus capital to be safely employed. Halifax wishes to emulate the Cannings, Huskissons, and Peels, he tells his children, when he goes to live at Beechwood Hall, "to found a family" there, as his eldest son exclaims with sparkling eyes.
1) Yeast, pp. 85, 86.
2) See quotations given by Parker, op. cit., p. 169.
3) John Halifax, vol. II, p. 140.
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In Dickens's novel Hard Times it is the manufacturer Bounderbv who becomes a landed proprietor by buying an estate at some distance from Coketown. In Yeast there is another instance of a "tradesman's family" changing into landed proprietors. Mr. Obadiah Newbroom had stood behind a loom when he began life, but he ended as a member of a large firm of cotton-lords, as the cotton manufacturers were often called in those days. What the father had begun with little means, his son continued with great ones, and finally the latter bought Minchampstead Park, and became Lord Minchampstead. Of course the Squires of the county at first swore at the "Parvenue", but we have no doubt they will soon have given that up.
As we observed already in a previous chapter, the really wealthy class in the early decades of the nineteenth century were still the landed proprietors with their tens of thousands of acres of ground, and rent-rolls likewise running into tens of thousands sometimes. The novels of the period give various hints that bear out this fact. In The Disowned some one congratulates "my dear Linden" upon his accession to fortune: "five thousand a year, Scardale, and eighty thousand pounds in the funds." In Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician we read of a rent-roll of twenty-five thousand pounds, and not less than two hundred thousand pounds in the funds. Tittlebat Titmouse, the hero of the same author's Ten Thousand a Year, inherits a large estate with a rent-roll of twenty-thousand per annum. Ainsworth's novel The Spendthrift opens with the words: "Heir to twenty thousand a year at twenty-one!" Finally there is a passage in the above-mentioned Diary, in which the author clearly states the fact that in point of wealth the noble landlords came first. It says that the sons of very few of the highest nobility had handsomer allowances, when studying at Oxford, than the rich merchant Mr. Dudley's son.1
1) Vol. I, p. 418. How greatly circumstances have altered in the nineteenh century appears from the following passage in W. H. Mullock's book Social Reform etc. (London, 1914): The landrent in this country, relatively to the national income, is a fraction which, instead of increasing constanüy, grows less and less. In the year 1801 the landrent of England and Wales amounted to 20 % of a total income of £ 180 miflions. To-day, out of a total income of more than £ 2000 millions, it barely amounts to so much as 4 % (p. 203). See also J. C. Stamp, British Incomes and Property, p. 49. London, 1916.
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Over against the above details we can place some data, likewise furnished by literature, about the fortunes possessed by rich people of the trading classes. Captain Turnbull, a retired whaler captain and shipowner in Jacob Faithful, left at his death a fortune 'amounting in all to close upon eighty thousand pounds. Mr. Hillary, the rascal porfrayed in the Diary of a Late Physician, intends to give his daughter a plum on her marrying Viscount Scamp, and Warren calls the same person "a stupid millionaire." The Norton Bury Mercury, a newspaper mentioned in John Halifax, speaks of the "grasping plebeian millionaires," meaning the wool-spinners. We think, however, that the term "millionaire" must be taken here, as in so many other instances, cum grano salis. It is a fascinating word, and a very convenient manner to denote some rich person, but in many cases the truth will no doubt fall far short of the six noughts. The imagination of the superficial and especially the poor observer is often so affected by a few conspicuous cases of large fortunes that he is led to believe that they are the rule instead of the exception.1 Probably Mrs. Gaskell, who knew the cotton spinners and other mill owners of Manchester intimately, is nearer the mark, when in Mary Barton she speaks of the tens of thousands these had made by their trade. Ure, writing of English manufactures in 1835, refers to the "very great number of Bills of Exchange, rather small in their character, yet the aggregate well kept up," 2 while in the same chapter the author speaks of persons beginning with large capitals not succeeding so well in general, as those who begin with small ones cautiously administered. There are further a great many evidences in contemporary fiction and political and social literature that the greatest accumulations of capital were in those days in the hands, not of the manufacturing classes, but of the loanmongers, speculators, and other financiers of the period of the wars, and of the people who had returned from the colonies after making a fortune there.
Accurate data as to mercantile incomes will not be easily obtainable, at least not before 1842, when an Income Tax was levied
1) A very interesting anecdote is told in this connection by Andrew Carnegie in his book The Empire of Business.
2) This statement he had found in the Report of the Committee of Manufactures, Commerce and Shipping of 1833.
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for the first time in England.1 The national capital, estimated at £ 2700 millions in 1812, had risen to £ 4000 millions in 1845, and the population from 18 millions in 1811 to 27 millions in 1841. This increase of 50 per cent. is called a slow one by an anonymous English writer who eompares it with what took place in the next 30 years, when it increased to 8500 millions of pounds, i.e., about 100 per cent.2
In his Dictbnary of Commerce McCulloch estimates the capital invested in the cotton industry at £ 40 millions, and the profits of the manufacturers,—plus wages of superintendence, renewal of machinery and buildings, and coals—at £ 13.5 millions, or say £ 8 millions nett, while their number was, according to the same economist, about 2000. This would work out to an average profit of 20 per cent, or £ 4000 per factory.
1) There was a temporary Income Tax from 1799 to 1816.
2) The State Debt and the National Capital, p. 7. London, 1920. This increase in the capital is reflected in the deposits at the Bank of England, which rose in the same period from about 15 millions in 1845 to nearly 30 millions in 1872. R. H. Inglish Palgrave, An Analysis of the Transactions of the Bank of England. London, 1874.
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CHAPTER VII.
Religion of the Trading Classes*
Though there is perhaps no domain of life where religion plays a less important röle than in business, it is curious to observe that among the pictures of merchants and manufacturers drawn in Early Victorian novels there are such a great number of Dissenters and Quakers. Abel Fletcher in John Halifax was a Quaker, likewise Carlyle's philanthropic manufacturer Friend Prudence. In Yeast we read of Lord Minchampstead's father, Mr. Obadiah Newbroom, that he was a Dissenter, while his son became a Churchman. Kingsley repeated this process in Alton Locke: Uncle Locke was a Dissenter, but he sent his son to Cambridge to qualify for the Church. In Samuel Titmarsh we make the acquaintance of John Brough, "who was a great man among the Dissenting connection," while his partner, Mr. Hoff, is described to us by Thackeray as "a young chap, very quiet and steady, of the Quaker persuasion." Mr. Tag-rag, the linen-draper in Ten thousand a Year, was also a Dissenter, while his wife is introduced to us by Warren, as she "sat reading a profitable volume, entitled "Groans from the Bottomless Pit, to Awaken Sleeping Sinners," by—as he was pleased to dignify himself—the Rev. Dismal Horror." 1
The actual state of affairs in Early Victorian times quite corresponded with the picture presented by literature. We have already observed in a previous chapter of this essay that the Established Church had lost much of its influence over the English people, owing to its tendencies towards eighteenth century liberalism and rationalism. One of the consequences of the rationalist tendencies of the Church, and of the great abuses it tolerated among its clergy, such
1) Vol. I, p. 164.
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as non-residence and immense wealth of many bishops,1 had been the second Evangelical revival, to which we also referred in the above-mentioned chapter, and which gave rise to a renewed Sabatarian movement,2 attacked by Dickens in his Sabbath under Three Heads.
Another consequence of the above circumstances, which did hardly less harm to the position of the Anglican Church, was the great increase of Dissenters of all denominations. While in 1812 there had been 4302 chapels in England, their number had increased to 8490 in 1836.* George Eliot refers to this growth of Dissent in her Scènes of Clertcal Life, where the Rev. Amos Barton is faced in his troublesome district by "the acrid Radicalism and Dissent of the handweavers." In Felix Holt the Radical there is another reference to the same phenomenon. The author says that "the gables of Dissenting chapels now—i.e., in 1832—made a visible sign of religion." She attributes the growth, not to the causes set forth above, but to the industrial revolution and "the cravings of eager men and women to reconcile themselves to their hard lives in factories and mines by the possession of religious consolation." We read how, with the advent of factories and industry in Magna Treby, chapels have been flourishing at the expense of the Established Church, and how Mr. Lyon, the Minister, confidently challenges the Rector to a public debate, a boldness no Dissenting preacher would have dared to take before the new era, and which is far removed indeed from the
1) The proportions non-residence—i.e., the practice of the incumbent of a benefice to live elsewhere—had assumed appear from the following figures published by Wright in a series of letters in the Morning Chronicle in 1813, and cited in the Black Book, vol. 1, p. 288: On 10,801 benefices selected there are only 4490 said to be resident, so that there were 6311 confessedly non-resident incumbents. Of these 6311 there were 1523 employing a resident curate, leaving 4788 with neither a resident curare nor incumbent.
With reference to the wealth of many bishops the Black Book gives twenty-six "right re verend sinecurists," headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, "drawing from the pockets of the industrious more than £ 220,000 per annum," while by way of contrast there is a list of livings given in which there are twelve not exceeding £ 10, say ten pounds per annum, and 3998 with less than £ 150 (vol. I, pp. 302, 306).
2) The first was initiated about 1800 by Wilberforce and others.
3) In the Black Book the number of places of worship of the Established Church and of the Protestant Dissenters is stated to be 11,600 and 7,634 respectively.
4) Scènes of Clertcal Life, p. 18. London, 1919.
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Sometimes we find the two professions combined, as in the case of Isaac Nibbs (The Spendthrift) and of Levison (Henrietta Temple).
In the so-called sweating-system, developing in the tailoring trade towards the middle of the century, the Jews also played a great róle, for which reason they are vehemently attacked by the author of Alton Locke, who shows us "Shechem Isaacs, that sold penknives in the streets six weeks ago, now a-riding in his own carriage, all along of turning sweater." 1
Whatever other trade a Jew may follow in literature, we may be sure that he is invariably represented in an unfavourable light. The only instance of a more favourable picture drawn of a Jewish business-man, though he still strongly reminds us of Shylock, is Isaac Levi in It is Never too Late to Mend, the man who brings about the rascal John Meadows' downfall, and assists the hero of the novel, George Fielding, in a most disinterested manner. But then this portrait was not drawn until 1856, when manners had no doubt gradually ohanged, and novelists had become more just in their treatment of Jews and Dissenters; when the times were past when a Jewish candidate standing for Parliament had to wince "beneath the cries of "Old clothes! Shylock" and various complimentary epithets," like Disraeli in 1837.2
1) Page 109. ^-
2) Monypenny, op. cit., vol. II, p. 375.
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CHAPTER VIII.
The Technical Side of Business Life*
Modern readers, accustomed as they have been by the neo-classic and the naturalist schools to accurate details in works of fiction, are struck by the great defects Early Victorian novels often show in this respect. It is true that there are some domains of life in which novelists had already attained a high degree of accuracy in technical description; such departments as law and seafaring life can boast of pictures that are accurate down to the minutest details. We have already pointed out that Warren and Dickens were faithful delineators of the legal profession, while Marryafs novels enable us to reconstruct a complete picture of life at sea and English shipping a hundred years ago. But it is especially in the description of business life that Early Victorian novels show great defects in this respect. Numerous though the business people may be that play a röle in those novels, there is hardly one amongst them of whom we can closely follow the daily pursuits, either at the office or at the Exchange or elsewhere. About most of them there is a kind of unsatisfactory vagueness, not as regards their characters, but with regard to the professional side of their lives.
We can best illustrate this lack of precision by citing a few specimens of business people in Dickens's works. Paul Dombey, whose proud figure fills almost the whole of the hundreds of pages in the novel bearing his name, is portrayed full length as the embodiment of cold and heartless pride. That this is pride in the glorious name and the power of the firm of Dombey and Son, is only a matter of secondary importance, however, and quite accidental: he might have been a nobleman proud of his ancient lineage and ancestral hall, and this fact would have entailed little if any change in the general features of the novel. But what
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Dombey's daily pursuits are, how he must be straining every nerve to increase the greatness and wealth of his firm, we are not called upon to witness. It would even be hard to say what the exact nature of his business was, beyond the fact that the firm dealt in leather, and that shipping was also among its commercial pursuits.
Another powerful king in the world of business Dickens has portrayed is Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit. This personage is still infinitely more unsatisfactory from our point of view than Dombey. While we are atlowed a few glimpses of the doings at the latter's office now and then, we do not even Iearn enough of Mr. Merdle's business to make out exactly what it is. He is in fact little more than a general personification of the great mania in the "Railroadshare epoch" of 1825, to which the author alludes in his preface. The nearest approach to actual facts stated about Merdle is found in the words Pancks uses of him: "He's a man of immense resources, enormous capital—Government influence." For the rest we only meet him at home, during the splendid parties his wife gives, but we never see him at work upon his gigantic financial machinations and his famous "investments." Dickens makes it even hard for us to believe that this stupid, dull and awkward fellow should be capable of being the "greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows."
As a third instance of too great vagueness in the portraits of Dickens's business-men we may point to Ralph Nickleby, whose pursuits are described as follows: „He was not strictly speaking what you would call a merchant, neither was he a banker, nor an attorney, nor a special pleader, nor a notary." 1
It is not only a certain vagueness that may be noticed in Dickens's portraits of business-men, but he also often delights in imparting to them a kind of mysterious air, surrounding them by secrets that direct their doings, and might explain muon in those doings, if revealed to the reader. Thus we hear of certain events that happened long ago in the business of the Clennams, which are not fully revealed to us, but which have resulted in the mysterious relation between Mrs. Clennam and her faithful clerk or servant, Mr. Flintwioh, whose secret movements about the old house greatly
1) Nicholas Nickleby, ch. III, p. 3.
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excite our curiosity. The house itself where this strange couple conducts the firm's business is as full of mystery as a romantic castle of Walter Scott.
There are other novelists besides Dickens, whose business people are likewise depicted in a vague and unreal manner, often incompatible with the actual facts of mercantile life. Bulwer has tried his hand at the commercial genus in the person of Richard Crauford, whom we have already learned to know as a utilitarian.1 When describing the downfall of this rascal, we hear nothing about the exact causes of his failure; we are even left in the dark as to what kind of business he is conducting, and cannot teil for sure whether he is a money-lender, a stockbroker, or a merchant. The only glimpse we can catch of what he is actually doing at his office is that "weaving in his close and dark mind various speculations of guilt and craft, he sat among his bills and gold." 2
When Nemesis at last overtakes the rascal, the condition of affairs his downfall reveals to the world is described in the following vague, non-committal manner.
when houses of the most reputed wealth and profuse splendour, whose affairs Crauford had transacted, were discovered to have been for many years utterly undermined and beggared, and only supported by the extraordinary genius of the individual by whose guilt, now no longer concealed, they were suddenly and irretrievably destroyed; when it was ascertained that for nearly the fifth part of a century, a system of villainy had been carried on throughout Europe, in a thousand different relations, without a single breath of suspicion, and yet which a single breath of suspicion could at once have arrested and exposed;" etc. etc. Of course all this is mere hoeus-pocus, utterly incompatible with even the most extraordinary events ever witnessed in the mercantile world.
There are other novelists attempting to enter into details, when describing the doings of business people, but the results are frequently as doubtful as in the above instance. One of Samuel Warren's most complete pictures of a trader is that of Mr. Dudley
1) See page 42.
2) The Disowned, p. 231
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in The Diary of a Late Physician, of whose business transactions we learn some interesting details.
We are told that in a few years' time this merchant had amassed half a million by negotiating bills at tremendous discounts, and doing other similar things.1 It may be objected to this statement that it would be very doubtful, to say the least of it, for a billbroker to amass such a fortune by dealing in third-rate paper, as those bills no doubt must have been, considering that they were sold "at tremendous discounts." A sound bill may occasionally be sold at a tremendous discount, but this will only be done by people placed in the position of Mr. Mantalini, who applies to Ralph Nickleby for "demnation discount," because money is "demd scarce," and therefore consents to drop exactly one third of the nominal value.2
In another passage of the same chapter of Warren's book we read of a bill for 4000 pounds made payable by Mr. Dudley at a bank where he believed to have a sufficiënt balance to meet it. The balance appears to have been exhausted by his wife, however, who had drawn upon the account without her husband's knowledge, and a clerk comes to Mr. Dudley, who is in the country that day, to teil him that his draft has been dishonoured in the morning. To this story it may rightly be objected that in the first place the drawee was entitled to three days of grace, before his bill could suffer dishonour. Further it is highly improbable that a bill on "a king on 'Change," as the novelist calls Mr. Dudley, would be returned by his banker without the slightest warning to his cliënt.
When at length Mr. Dudley becomes involved in financial difficulties, partly owing to an unfortunate attempt at loan-mongering abroad, he has to find means to meet some heavy demands at short notice. The manner in which the great merchant tries to procure the ready money required for these payments is so strange and contrary to all business principles that the reader is inclined to ask whether his senses have not entirely deserted him in his distress. He wants his clerk to call in the money advanced on somebody's property, to which the clerk replies that in that case— a foreclosure is evidently contemplated—a third of the loan will be lost. In the first place it might be argued that this mortgage
1) Vol. I, p. 409.
2) Nicholas Nickleby, ch. XXXIV.
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The strike in question took place in the summer of say 1850.* In the middle of that year, shortly before it broke out, Thornton "had bought cotton largely," and "locked up a good deal of his capital in new and expensive rriachinery," for the execution of large orders he had on hand then. The strike prevented the completion of those orders, and Thornton had to pay heavy fines for the nonfulfilment of his contract. Now in our days a strike would generally be considered as a case of force majeure for a manufacturer, and we are inclined to believe that in those days the judges will have taken the same view. At any rate, if this was not the view held by English courts then, a manufacturer, contracting for the supply of cotton goods, under heavy penalties in case of non-delivery, could hardly be called a "prudent" man,* if he omitted to insert a clause in his contracts exempting him from all liability in the event of strikes, which were of frequent occurrence in those troublous times.
However this may have been, Mr. Thornton had to pay his fine*, and his position is evidently greatly affected by them, for the fact is mentioned twice in this connection.
"For many months," say till the end of that year 1850, the embarrassments caused by the strike were an óbstacle in Mr. Thornton's way, we read next.3 This must of course mean that he was hampered in his production, so that he will probably not have been able to work off his large stock of raw cotton.
Then there comes "a great rise in the price of cotton," and we meet Mr. Thornton in the train on his return from Havre, where he has tried to "detect the secret" of this rise. This was in April of the next year, 1851.4 This rise must have come as a boon to the mill-owner who had large stocks of raw materials on hand, for now he could work up this cheap cotton into cloth, and sell it at a great profit proportionate to the great rise in prices. Whatever may have heen done with the purchases of 1850, they must have been
1) There is no hint in the novel as to the years in which the events narrated took place, but at the time of the strike "the windows were half open because of the heat (p. 169)." For convenience' sake we have put the strike in 1850.
2) The author calls Thornton so.
3) On page 413.
4) On page 342.
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7



exhausted: Mrs. Gaskell tells us that in the early spring of the year 1852, which brought ruin upon the hero of the novel, "bills became due for the cotton he had purchased," and this cannot of course have been the cotton bought two years earlier, as bills with a currency of two years do not exist in business and certainly not in the cotton trade: for cotton or so-called 'American' bills three months was the rule.1 They were not even used in those days, when bills at long usance were the rule in foreign trade, owing to the slowness of transport and Communications, when months often elapsed before goods consigned across the sea could be heard of.2 We may therefore conclude that Thornton had had to lay in a fresh supply of materials after the strike, and consequently he must have benefited by the great rise of 1851 to no small extent. Nevertheless he fails in the depression of 1852. The author explains this failure by pointing among other things to the fact that his capital is locked up in machinery, and that he loses the interest on it, but this is equally incompatible with the above-mentioned fact that his mill was kept running ever since the strike of 1850. Another cause of Thornton's downfall mentioned by Mrs. Gaskell, is "the constant drain of expenses for working the business," but it is hardly more convincing than the first circumstance, and is, moreover, flatly contradictory to it, for there can only be loss of interest on machinery, when it is idle, but in that case there are no working expenses!
1) Report of the Committee of Manufactures, Commerce and Shipping of 1833, p. 91.
2) A. W. Kirkaldy, British Shipping, p. 158.
It is true that we find references in literature to a longer currency even; Samuel Warren tells us of a young man's "long bills accepted payable on his reaching twenty-one;" they were not commercial bills, however, but belonged to money-lenders' practices. (The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. II p 184) In those days the usual terms of credit were fröm 3 to 6 months in' mdst trades. In the China and East India trades, since they had been thrown open to all, twelve months' bills are said to have become general, but this fact was repeatedly commented upon by various witnesses before the Secret Committee of Commercial Distress of 1848, by whom they were called bills of very long dates! M.. .
There remains of course the possibility in Thornton s case tnat lus dius had been regularly renewed by the brokers during those two years. 1 his was done in some trades, such as that to the south west coast of Afnca, but in the cotton trade it was only practised by speculators. Moreover, we do not hear anything of Thornton's drafts being renewed.
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The journey of a Darkshire cotton-spinner to Havre for the purpose of finding out the cause of a rise in the prices óf cotton is rather strange. Darkshire is Lancashire. Now the chief cotton market of the world, then as now, was Liverpool, and not Havre1 England imported about four times as much American cotton at that time as France, so that the secret of the increased prices could be cleared up much nearer to Mr. Thornton's door' As a further instance of detective knowledge of business we point out the somewhat unsatisfactory manner in which Kingsley describes a run on a bank in Yeast. Instances of such deficiënt knowledge of the technical side of business are likewise found in Charlotte Brontë's exposition of the affairs of the manufacturer Robert Moore, the hero of Shirley. As we believe to have given a sufficiënt number of proofs of what was lacking in Early Victorian novels in this respect, however, we shall not continue this enumeration.
1) M^u,.1°cn' Dictionary of Commerce, p. 454.
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CHAPTER IX.
Mercantile Clerks and Offices*
Though in view of all the facts stated in the last chapter we may safely conclude that novelists had on the whole but very hazy notions about what business-men really did, it is curious to observe the general dislike, not to say aversion, shown by most personages in Early Victorian fiction to the daily work done at business offices. When Jacob Faithful is employed by his benefactor, Mr. Drummond, to keep the books of the concern posted up, he is constantly hankering to get away from the office. Born and bred on Thames barges, the young man had only been temporarily appointed as "underclerk," till a new one could be procured. His benefactor points out the very desirable situation he might have as a clerk, but in spite of all his arguments, Jacob confesses that he "could not bear it—seated nearly the whole day—perched upon a stool—
turning over Dr., contra Cr "1 His clerical career ends rather
abruptly after a tussle with the head or senior clerk, who tears up an invoice made out by Jacob, and when the latter refuses to write it over again, throws a dictionary at his head, whereupon our young hero knocks his superior down with a ruler and quits the office."2
In The Merchants Clerk3 Warren speaks of the "dismal drudgery" the hero had to undergo at his office, while the same dislike to clerical work is expressed even more forcibly by Frank Fairlegh, who tells us that when his father died, his mother applied to an uncle of hers, engaged in the West India trade, to procure a clerkship for hhn in a mercantile establishment. This
1) Jacob Faithful, p. 55. London, Author's Edition.
2) Md., p. 60. ..... o«:
3) The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. II, p. 26o.
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uncle advised him to study French and bookkeeping. The young man began to study hard, so that after a few months he could "jabber French" with tolerable fluency, and worked out Doublé Entry and "other horrors of the like nature," from which he delighted to escape soon.1
From the short time it takes Frank to master all those "horrors," it appears that the author had but a vey poor opinion of the accomplishments required for the performance of office duties. Nicholas Nickleby shows even greater aptitude still, for what took Frank Fairlegh a few months, he mastered in a fortnight: at the end of two weeks he reports his proficiency in the "mysteries of bookkeeping and some other forms of mercantile account" to Tim Linkinwater, who, after a practical test in the ledger and the daybook, pronounces that the City can't produce his equal, which favourable opinion of Nicholas he chiefly bases on the fact that the latter "dots all his small i's and crosses every t as he writes it," while his capital B's and D's are exactly like Tim's own.»
Indeed, we are far removed at present from such old, jog-trot business methods. At the counting-house of the Cheerybles there is not the slightest tracé of hurry and excitement, neither in the behaviour of the two charitable old gentlemen, nor in that of their old clerk and friend Tim Linkinwater. The latter "performed the minutest actions of the day and arranged the minutest articles in ttife little room, in a precise and regular order," while every article of the office requirements, down to the oldfashioned pounce-box and string-box and fire-box, had their accustomed inches of space." 9
When reading such a description of a mercantile counting house, however, we must not forget that in this matter Dickens was as much behind his time in 1838, as in a great many other things of daily life he deligthed to describe. He continued to let his personages travel in stage-coaches, when these conveyances had gradually lost all social importance with the advent of railways, and were within a few years of their complete extinction. No doubt he was likewise behindhand in the pictures he has drawn of mercantile offices and people working there. The scramble for
11 v- ï ,Sm^er/,,frank FairteSh> vol- I, pp. 166-168. Leipzig, 1864.
2) Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 199, 200
3) Ibid., p. 199.
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money and the "blazing altar of Mammon" of which Disraeli speaks in Sybil required other methods and places of business than those we find in Dickens with his quiet and snug little nooks and corners, or his dark and dirty closets and "tanks". In all his novels we remember only one large business office arranged on modern lines, viz., that of the Anglo-Bengalee, and this was a kind of office nobody can feel much sympathy for.1 The contrast between this brilliant establishment of the swindle company, with its large staff of employees, and the old-fashioned businesses like those of the Brothers Cheeryble and Mr. Fizziwig clearly shows how Dickens regretted the advent of the new large-scale methods of the Industrial and Commercial Revolution, just as much as Kingsley did, as we have already pointed out.
There is only one Early Victorian novelist who has tried to make his readers feel something of the hurry of modern business life. In Coningsby2 Disraeli introducés a personage, whose name appears to be Mr. G. O. A. Head, whose short and rapid sentences and Yankee-like talk flavour of the modern business-man.
We must now make a few remarks about the clerks working at mercantile offices. There are already a rather large number of representatives of the clerical profession in Early Victorian literature, and most of them are to be found in Dickens. The usual type of clerk this author delights to portray is that of the old and faithful employee of the establishment. This type is the direct descendant of the older literary type of the faithful servant whose origin may be traced back in its various forms to one and the same prototype viz., Sancho Panza. This type, introduced into English literature by Fielding in the character of Partridge, assumed various characteristics in the later novels of SmoHett, Radcliffe, Hook, and Scott» In the latter's work there is already a specimen of the new variety of the type, the bookkeeper Owen, mainly serving his master in a clerical capacity. It was in Dickens's novels, however, that the new type was fully developed in a great many portraits, of which Scrooge's nephew, Newman Noggs at
1) See below, chapter XIX.
2) Book IV, Chapter II
3) W. Dibelius, Englische Romankunst, vol. II, p. 367. Berlin und Leipzig, 1922.
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Ralph Nickleby's office, Tim Linkinwater, Chuffey, the old servant of Anthony Chuzzlewit, and Mr. Flintwich, Mrs. Clennam's servant and clerk, may be mentioned here. As a rule Dickens does not show us much of these servants in their clerical capacity, but chiefly uses them as a counterfoil to their employers. Sometimes the clerk even lives in his master's house, as in the case of the "little, blear-eyed, weazen-faced, ancient in a decayed black suit," called Chuffey, who sits all day long in an inner closet in Anthony Chuzzlewit's room, which he only creeps out of at meal-times, while he dozes away the long evenings in the chimney corner. Flintwich in Little Dorrit also lives permanently in his mistress's house. He is presented to us as "a little keen-eyed, crab-Iike old man," who "might from his dress, have been either a clerk or a servant." Here Dickens himself evidently feels that his clerk is merely a variety of the old type Of servant.
In Marryat we find an example of a somewhat different relation between employer and employee, in Mr. Drummond and Jacob Faithful, viz., that of protector and protected, likewise a couple of literary types of long standing.
In the case of the Chuzzlewits this close relation between private and business life, as it appears from the pictures of the office clerks, is further emphasized by Dickens in the description he gives us of the residence of these merchants. The "dirty, smoky, tumbledown, rotten, old house," in which the firm transacted its business, was at the same time the dwelling-house of the two partners. But business had "shouldered comfort out of doors, and jostled the domestic arrangements at every turn." The bedrooms were filled with files of old correspondence, fragments of old patterns, and odds and ends of spoiled goods, while the sitting-room, which had more office stools than chairs in it, was "a chaos of boxes and old papers," with a huge desk and an iron safe.
In Samuel Warren's story The Merchants Clerk1 we find a more life-like description of an office clerk and his daily work in Early Victorian times. The hero of the story, Henry Elliott, is a young man who has had to give up his university career, and his occasional inquiries after a situation have led to the informatiOB
1) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician.
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that there is a vacancy for an "outer clerk" in a large City office.1 Perhaps this information has been supplied to him at a Registry Office, for, as the readers of Nicholas Nickleby remember, there were already establishments of this kind at that time, where applicants were requested to inquire within "for places and situations of all kinds."2
Elliott's life at the office was not a very easy one. Warren shows him to us, constantly on foot for two thirds of the day, running errands, and hurrying from place to place. Especially on "foreign post nights" there was a rush of work at the office; he was detained on such days, and had to slave on till nine or ten at night, "copying letters, and assisting in making entries and balancing accounts till his pen almost dropped from his weary fingers." Only an hour was allowed for dinner—then taken at noon as a rule—, but even during that short interval he was often kept at work.
The salaries office clerks received for this hard work varied in Early Victorian novels from fifty or sixty pounds to ninety for an under-clerk understanding his business. Office boys are said by Dickens to earn a few shillings a week only, while senior clerks and managers of offices are spoken of as earning as much as five hundred, or even six hundred a year. The high salaries John Brough of the West Diddlesex Association paid to his twenty-four "young gents" can of course hardly be taken as a Standard for those days, as they were a reward, not for their clerical services, but for procuring clients and shareholders for the Company.
The general impression we get from literature is that officeclerks, though working hard—Mr. Brough made his staff slave for ten hours a day—could not afford many luxuries. Dickens shows us the "early clerk population," pouring into the City in the morning, in one of his Sketches, entitled "Beginning business." He speaks of middle-aged men, whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plodding steadily
1) An 'outer' or 'under clerk'—terms that have gone out of use now— was a clerk who had to work in the outer, or as it is now mostly called, general office, where the staff are doing their work, in contradistinction to the inner or private office, where the employers are sitting.
2) Nicholas Nickleby, p. 78.
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along, and evidently having no money to go by bus.1 Small office boys, in receipt of seven shillings a week, "hurry along in pairs, with their first coat carefully brushed, and the white trousers of last Sunday plentifully besmeared with dust and ink." 2
In the advertisements of The Times of the Early Victorian period we hardly ever find salaries mentioned, unless in such vague terms as: "The salary will be very small, but progressive" (for a junior clerk of about 14 or 16 years old). In Business Life, an anonymouë booklet (2nd ed., 1861), there is a passage reading: "Thus we have, in the event of advertising for a clerk, even at an almost nominal salary, hundreds of applicants (p. 26)." It is also a significant fact that numerous advertisements of clerks "desirous of meeting with a situation," offer "douceurs" to those procuring them a position. In one instance in The Times newspaper we found an offer of £ 200 plus an annuity of £ 50 for a mercantile situation of £ 250 (April 8th, 1840)!
Besides offices and the official exchanges as places for the transaction of business, coffeehouses have always played a great role, ever since these establishments were introduced into Western Europe from Turkey.3 Such world-famous institutions as Lloyd's Association and the London Stock Exchange owe their origin to coffeehouses where special classes of business people met for the bargaining of their transactions. The first of the institutions mentioned originated in Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in Lower Thames Street in the second half of the seventeenth century; the Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan's coffeehouse in Change Alley * Early Victorian novels m ention many of such meeting-places. Nadgett, the man who made the necessary inquiries for the AngloBengalee, "would sit on 'Change for hours, looking at everybody who walked in and out, and would do the like at Garraway's and other business coffee rooms." 5 In It is Never too Late to Mend we
1) Buses had made their appearance in the London streets in 1828 nf tafe was 6d. for a drive, whether a long or a short one. H. D. Traill
and J. S. Mann, Social England, vol. VI p 138
2) Sketches by Boz, p. 21.
3) Kirdaldy, British Shipping.
4) A complete list of the coffeehouses in Change Alley is to be found on the map in J. B. Martin, The Grasshopper in Lombard Streetv. 190. London 1892.
5) Martin Chuzzlewit, p. 228.
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read of Peei's Coffeehouse,1 while Dickens tells us in the Pickwick Papers that the lower class of attorneys, those of the Insolvent Court, had no office, but frequented the coffeehouses round the court'for the transaction of their business. Even political affairs were transacted in such rooms: the famous People's Charter, the first step in the great Chartist movement, was agreed to at the British Coffeehouse.
1) Page 181.
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CHAPTER X.
Peculiar Features of Business in Early Victorian Times.
Notwithstanding all the detective descriptions of business transactions referred to in the preceding chapters, it should not be supposed, however, that modern readers cannot glean any accurate ideas from literature about Early Victorian business and its methods. There are many peculiarities in commerce and industry which have entirely disappeared now in the never ceasing changes of practical life, but which are still much in evidence in the literature of that period.
Perhaps the most striking of all these characteristics was the prominent röle played in England's foreign trade by the West Indies. Numerous references to these colonies are to be found in novels. Ships usually sailed for the West Indies, either for trading purposes, or to the naval stations out there.1 Rich business people often made their fortunes by the West India trade, or by owning plantations there.2 In almost the only instance Dickens ever wrote a story of seafaring and colonial life, he laid the scène in the West Indies.8 At the beginning of the century Pitt still estimated that out of every pound of income for his income tax profits from abroad amounted to 7d., mainly from the West Indies.4 It is true that between 1831 and 1850 the principal exports from those islands
1) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. I, p 407Marryat, Peter Simple, p. 327.
2) W. M. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon, p. 331. Howard, Rattlin the Reef er, vol. II, p. 71. London, 1836. In Marryafs novels the West Indian trader also figures prominently.
3) Charles Dickens, Stories and Sketches, p. 100.
4) W. H. Mallock, op. cit., p. 86. McCulloch, op. cit, p. 348. The decline was chiefly due to the exports of coffee, sugar, molasses, rum and cocoa remaming about stationary.
107



feil off by about 65 per cent., but literature, which is always slow to leave the beaten path of tradition, still adhered to the old notion that colonial trade was chiefly carried on with the West Indies. Only Disraeli's Sybil contains two references to the decayed trade of the West Indies.1 It should not be overlooked that, great though the decline may have been, those small islands still occupied the third and fourth rank in the statistics of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom for the year 1854.2 The important röle they played in English trade is further evidenced by the fact that the first docks constructed in the Port of London3 were the West India Docks, whose construction in 1802 was necessitated by the numerous thefts of the costly West Indian products.* This first enterprise was followed in 1805 by the London Doek Co., and in 1828 by the St. Katherine's Docks, both mentioned by Dickens as competing establishments in his Sketches by Boz*
Being the oldest English colonies, and for a century and a half the most important, it is no wonder that in their trade with the mother country certain practices of long standing had developed. In Jacob Faithful we read of a wharfinger, Mr. Drummond,6 that later on he moved in a very different sphere, being then "a consignee of several large establishments." T This points to a form of business which was very common in those days, especially in the West India trade. It was organized as follows. The planter in the colony formed a connection with a mercantile firm in London or one of the large "outports."8 He bound himself to ship his entire erop to this particular firm, for sale on commission in the latter's market. On such consignments the English merchants advanced
1) Sybil, pp. 96, 347.
i ?S1S^^d2W for the storage of timber, dates back
t04)e^StBrmTLppingr p. 493. To the construction of this Doek also dates back the introdurtion* of a regular warehous.ng system, .m.tated by the Dutch "veemwezen." See McCulloch, op. cit., p. \ss>.
6) Wharfinlers ar^c^ners of riverside warehouses and of lighters for the conveyance ot merchandise to and from those warehouses .
7) This seems to have been a much used term to denote a business concern in tho'se days; confer: Frank Fairlegh Mary of aJ£ Physician, vol. II, pp. 266 and 284; Jacob Faithful. P- ,25: Mton L0CKe' p. 35.
8) English ports other than London.
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large sums of money, to enable the planter to finance his concern while the erop was growing. As the commission usually amounted to 2y2 per cent., and the London firm, moreover, acted as buying agent for the plantation, charging the same percentage on all the stores sent out,1 we may well believe that this kind of business, which like Mr. Dudley's, was chiefly carried on in Mincing Lane, was a very profitable one.
Though in the first half of the nineteenth century, with its regularly recurring speculative manias, operators mainly sought their field of activities on the Stock Exchange, either in railway shares, company promoting, or foreign loans, there are also indications in Early Victorian fiction of speculations in other domains, notably in colonial produce. This commodity was no doubt one of the most suitable for such purposes, owing to its high prices and the great fluctuations in its value during and after the Napoleonic wars.
Mr. Dudley, the great merchant in Warren's Diary of a Late Physician,2 to whom we have already made many references in this essay, had a floating capital of some hundred and fifty thousand pounds outside his shipping business, and was willing to employ this large sum profitably. As soon as the "brokers" became aware of this fact—i.e., the produce brokers selling the goods for the commission houses described above—they prevailed upon him to place his capital at their disposal. Being fully conversant with the prospects of any article sold in Mincing Lane, they could easily find out which market could be "cornered," as the modern expression runs, with the best chances of success. So "the world heard of a monopoly of nutmegs" one day, while on another occasion a corner was made in atta of roses.
When such a cornered commodity had been forced up to quadruple the cost, the brokers gradually put their stocks on the "gaping market," and handsome profits were realized, in which the capitalist shared. We see that everything was as nicely planned and carried through as on modern exchanges. From the fact that the author adds that "this is the scheme by which many splendid
1) McCulloch, op. cit, p. 363; Colony Trade.
2) Vol. I, p. 409.
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fortunes have been raised," we may safely conclude that it was by no means an uncommon thing in those days.1
Generally speaking it may be said that the impression left upon the reader by the description of business transactions in Early Victorian novels is that all trading, especially to overseas countries, was of a highly speculative nature, and attended with great uncertainty.2 The very word by which overseas business was denoted points to this hazardous nature of such undertakings: the word "venture" was the usual term for them, which in this particular sense has to a great extent gone out of use* The word "speculation" was likewise a favourite term for business enterprises.* It must be added that the method generally adopted of shipping goods on consignment contained in itself a great speculative element, apart from the further uncertainties attendant upon commerce.
We need not be surprised at overseas trade being denoted as "ventures" and "speculations," when we further remember the conditions under which it had be to carried on a hundred years ago, conditions which it is somewhat difficult for twentieth century
1) The anonymous author of Business Life (London, 1861, 2nd ed.) soeaks of produce speculations as a common feature of business uii his tune. He excla nS indignandy: "What is the meaning of speculating in the funds railwfy shares, hops, tallow, corn, tea, sugar, spice, and a thousand other things, where the articles were never even seen, or intended to be purchased, but simplv the dtfferences paid." (p. 103).
2) In the Report of the Select Committee of Manufactures, Commerce, and Steppin* we read that a great speculative feature of the manufactures in produff "on speculation" to wait the chance of a market_a practice denounced in Sft/V/ejJhad disappeared by 1833 (p. 46). This seems to be doubtful, however: the speculation still continued; it had only changeditenaton. STanother witness stated, a practice had greatly prevailedlof yean of making large consignments to foreign countnes (p. 35). The prevalence of This new speculative method is proved by the fact. that older Business Letter Writers are chiefly devoted to this kind of business.
3) Santo says to Antonio: „Believe me, Sr, had I such venture forth the better part of my affections would be with my hopes abroad. {The Merchaml of Venice, Act L Scène I). The oldest company incorporated hi England was called the Company of Merchants Adventurers, this being In fact the ulual designation of foreign traden. Kirkaldy observes (opat p 157): "There was but little regular or systematised trade ... Ut) was ior «ie main part carried on by a system of ventures.
4) When Mr. Dudley has purchased shares ^J^J^^^LZ in business on his own account, Warren says of him: ' In a word, he w«d on conductine his speculations with as much prudence as he undertook ttiem^ittT energy and enterprise." Anderson's MercanUe Corrfpomlenc^ (30th edition, 1890) contains numerous mstances of the «se of the term 'speculation' in this older sense, e.g. on pp. XXXI, 54, 58, 75, mó, <*c.
110



people to realize. The only way of obtaining reliable information on the state and requirements of foreign markets was to ask correspondents to give it by letters that took months and months to reach their destination, and had therefore often lost all value, when they were delivered. Market reports in the daily press suffered of course from the same circumstance, for news that is now flashed from one exchange to another in a few minutes' time, likewise took a long time to be distributed. The press did its best to serve its readers as quickly as possible, but sailing-vessels could not travel faster than the wind made them go.1 A single exchange of letters in any business transaction took an amount of time as great as the round voyage of a sailing-vessel, so that if a merchant made an offer, it might be three months or half a year, before he could expect to hear of its acceptance.2 Payments, which may now be made in one or two minutes to the remotest part of the world, had then to be made by bills at long usance, six or nine months, or even a year, which had likewise to be sent across the seas in a sailing vessel, about whose time of arrival there was little certainty.8 There is a story reported of several London firms failing for lack of ready money to meet their current engagements„ while heavy remittances were on their way to their address in sailing-vessels coming from America, but which unfortunately were detained on the Atlantic by continuous headwinds.
The same speculative element of uncertainty observable in the pursuits of merchants, was likewise of great influence in industry,. and though we are not directly concerned in this essay with what is commonly called the "social problem", which had its rise in the first decades of the nineteenth century, yet we may be permitted
1) The Times of January 8th 1840 contains in its trade reports the following passages: Letters and papers have been received from Mauritius to the 16th of October last—Prices of corn at Hamburg, Jan. 2nd—A rumour was current in the course of the day that the overland mail had come to hand; it proved to be incorrect. On Wednesday April 19th we read: No news has been received from Naples of a later date than the 14th, neither is thereanything from Malta, the Levant mail being three days in arrear.
2) Steamers went faster, but were still scarce. The Directors of the Transatlantic Steamship Company announced in The Times of Jan. 8th 184T> that their (ontyf) steamer, the Liverpool, would sail from Liverpool on Jan 20th, and from New York on Feb. 20th.
3) Sir josuah Child mentions the same spaces, and complains of them A New Discourse of Trade, p. 7. London, 1693.
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to devote a few words to it here, as the manufacturing industry formed the solid basis on which England's trade was founded, while, moreover, the manufacturer had not only to produce his góods, but also to sell them. From what Early Victorian novelists write about this department of the manufacturing industry, it would seem that the general conception about the cause of industrial depressions was over-production. Over-production, glutted markets, unsaleable stocks are the terms constantly used by novelists.1 One of the first that described an industrial crisis was Disraeli in Popanilla. His story of the Vraiblusian crisis is a satire on the light-heartedness with which manufacturers produced goods "on speculation", but it also shows us the fact that the organisation of industry and commerce was yet far from fully developed, and had not yet reached the high degree of efficiency it has attained to in our days, now that the telegraph and the telephone, together with well-informed daily and trade papers, keep every business man so well posted up about the visible and invisible supplies of materials and productions in his particular branch, that "national disasters" like the Vraiblusian are no longer to be feared on that account
In Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley the speculative methods of trade and industry are also vehemently denounced. At the first moment of prosperity, she tells us, after the Repeal of the Orders in Council merchants and manufacturers "prepared to rush into the bowels of speculation, and to delve new difficulties" for some future day. The same view is put forward by Kingsley, when he speaks of Manchester cotton spinners, "madly glutting the market in the teeth of no demand." s On page 110 we have already seen from the Report mentioned there that this form of speculation had practically disappeared at that time—which'view fully agrees with Jevon's observations cited below.
1) As Jevons observes, however, in his Investigations in Currency and Finance, this was the favourite theory to explain any slackness of trade, and "the theme of every short-sighted politician."
2) The Orders in Council were issued in 1808 as England's reply to Napoleon's Berlin Decree; the latter forbade all trade of neutral countnes ■with England, the former all trade of neutrals with France. The Orders gave rise to much friction and even a war between England and America, and were withdrawn in 1812.
3) Yeast, p. 14.
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CHAPTER XI.
Banking*
The development of modern banking, which farms one of the features of the Industrial Revolution, did not of course escape the notice of novelists, when writing upon the social conditions of the country. Before proceeding to discuss what they say about banks, financiers, and the Stock Exchange, we shall first give a brief sketch of the position the banker occupied, before the great change referred to above came over England.
How widely different the financial position of the country then was from what it became after the industrialization of England, is illustrated by the observation Hirst makes1 about "investment (being) a comparatively new word; it was unknown to Dr. Johnson as a f inancial term "
Banks and the Stock Exchange are both the fruits of the saving and accumulation of capital, which in turn have been facilitated again to an undreamt-of extent by these same institutions. It has rightly been observed2 that it is not mere chance that in London the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England lie side by side, surrounded by numberless banks, exchange-houses, and other f inancial institutions of every conceivable kind. Both owe their rise and growth to the creation of the National Debt towards the end of the seventeenth century.
1) F.-Hirst, The Stock Exchange, p. 8. Home University Library. Johnson's definition of the term only reads: Dress; doaths; garment;
hatnt. Too mach importance should not be attached to this fact, however. Johnson's Dictionary, whatever its merits may be in other respects, lacked a great number of business terms that were current long before he wrote it, e.g., 'speculator' and 'speculation', 'drawer* and 'drawee', and several others in connection with Bills of Exchange
2) Md., p. 18.
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Before the introduction of that new method of procuring money for government purposes there was absolutely no scope for the investment of savings, unless in the purchase of land and other property, such as platè and jewellery, or by lending them to some person on his bond in the manner of Shylock.1 About the middle of the seventeenth century ibere was a general practice in London of giving such accumulated specie into the custody of one of the numerous goldsmiths in the City.2 The latter used these deposits to make loans to the King and others at high rates; at first they did not allow any interest themselves. Gradually competition compelled them to do so, however, much to the gratification of their depositors, as appears from the satisfied tone in which Samuel Pepys couched the following entry in his Diary under date of the 30th of March 1666:»
"Up and after much business out to Lombard Streete, and there •received 2200 l and brought it home; and, contrary to expectation, received 35 /. for the use of 2000 /. of it [for] a quarter of a year, where it hath produced me this profit, and hath been a convenience
n Sir losuah Child wrote about the old method of using cash: « before thiway of private banking came up, men who had money were often to^ it He dead by than until they could meet with securitaes Jo Sr 'ÏÏds°» and he complains that few "can be led to lay out their monTy in^land" now. NwDiscourse of Trade, c.ted by J W. Gilbart, ThfHistory, Principles, and Practice of Banking, vol. I, PP. 26, 27. London,
18Bo'th oractices of the old capitalists mentioned in the text we find ijlustrated Both practices oi ine um y November 1666 he wrote that he had m Pepys Diary. On the 12th ot N°ve™e m three thousand
X,n?vl-VlT57 SndSn UB3),wnüe in another passage he tells us Ï^ÖSSStif saysS» Se the«
siejiZr«^
meïha^te to keep the r cash in their own houses again, or to handl it to the
in Lombard Street, p. 285.
3) Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. IV—VI, p.
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to me, as to care and security of my house, and demandable at two days' warning, as this hath been."
This passage shows us that deposit banking had been established in London by this time. Out of it there developed, almost simultaneously, the system of keeping running accounts, or "running cashes", as they are called in the oldest London Directory extant (1677).
Two documents that are of every day use now, were the natural outcome of current accounts and deposit banking, viz., the "check" and the "goldsmith's note."
A "check" was an order given by the holder of a "running cash," to his goldsmith and banker, to pay a certain amount to the bearer.1 The oldest specimen extant reads as follows:
Bolton, 4th March, 1684.
At sight hereof pay unto Charles Duncombe Esq. or order, the sum of four hundred pounds, and place it to the accompt of
Your assured triend
Winchester.2
Cheques are so frequently mentioned by Early Victorian writers that it would appear that the now wide-spread English usage of keeping a banking-account had already made great progress in the first half of last century. Though it had no doubt not yet reached the dimensions of modern times, in which it is said that in English speaking countries "almost every one who is in the possession of a moderate income, say £ 300 a year, or more, has a bankaccount," 8 yet in novels we may even come across instances like that of Mr. Elliott,* whose income feil far below the above-named minimum, and who yet kept his small capital at a bank. It was especially the advent of the joint stock banks after 1834 which
1) American English has preserved this older spelling of the word 'cheque' down to the present time.
2) The G rass hopper in Lombard Street, p. 129
3) Francis Hirst, The Stock Exchange, p. II.
4) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. II, p. 315.
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greatly promoted the increase of this practice. Establishments like the London and Westminster and the London and County, which made it a special business to canvass customers who could only keep a balance of £ 50 or less at the bank,1 did much to inculcate the principles of banking in the minds of small tradesmen, shopkeepers, and the middle classes.
However great the spread of the use of cheques may have been already at that time in London, yet there is no doubt that in the country the old goldsmith's note still formed the principal instrument, albeit under another name. The original goldsmiths' notes were simply what would now be called deposit receipts, but they were soon made use of in a manner that gave them a widely different character. With the increasing want of currency, as a consequence of the growing trade of England, they soon circulated from hand to hand, and thus came to be used as a kind of paper currency, which we may conskler as the first banknotes used in England, and the forerunners of the modern country notes, i.e., banknotes issued by other banks than the Government bank. This practice of circulating the goldsmiths' notes was greatly facilitated by the fact that since 1705 all promissory notes had been declared transferable to a third party.2
The old name of "goldsmiths' notes" is still found in Early Victorian literature in one instance, viz., in Ainsworth's story of Jack Sheppard, the notorious highwayman of the early decades of the eighteenth century. Jonathan Wild, a robber, tells his friends that in the course of his business he has become the owner of a small Dutch sloop, by means of which he can transmit to Holland or Flanders his booty, "as well as occasionally a bank or goldsmith's note which has been spoken with by way of the mail." 3 Later on we hear Wild instruct Van Galgebrok, the master of his sloop, to dispose of the goldsmith's note he had given him the
1) Nowadays London banks announce their willingness to take interestbearing deposits from I/- upwards, "in order to promote thrift."
2) J. W. Gilbart, op. cit, vol. I, p. 103. The notes soon became obtainable in fixed denominations, like Bank of England notes.
3) W. H. Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, p. 143. Leipzig, 1846. Wild means of course that the mails had been robbed in order to obtain the note. Robbenes of mails and travellers were very frequent. Numerous episodes in literature describe such attacks by highwaymen, e.g. in Jack Sheppard, Paul Clifford, Midshipman Easy, Barry Lyndon, etc.
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day before, as soon as he reached Rotterdam, as it would be advertised the next day.1
Two things may be inferred from these passages. In the first place it appears that goldsmiths' notes could also be cashed outside England, probably at the offices of money-changers. It further appears that in case of theft or loss the owner of a note could stop payment of it, and thus make it worthless. This fact would then be announced by the paying banker, but of course in those slow days the news would not travel so fast to Rotterdam. The practice of making the notes payable to a banker only, by means of crossing, which came into vogue for cheques in the first decades of the nineteenth century,2 could not of course be resorted to in the case of banknotes, as this would have hampered their use as paper currency too much.
As most of the banking goldsmiths soon found that their banking business increased more rapidly than their sales of plate and jewellery, and was, moreover, much more profitable, they were induced to devote themselves entirely to what had originally been but a subsidiary branch of their trade, and since 1700 we may consider the two professions of 'plateworkers' and bankers to have been entirely separated.8 Thus^ arose a large number of what are called private banking houses, in contradistinction to the Bank of England, and to the joint stock banks appearing later on. The business of those private bankers included receiving money on deposit, keeping current accounts, and issuing their above-mentioned goldsmiths' notes to the public. Like the old goldsmiths before them, they also exercised the calling of money-lenders. In Swift's Journal of a Modern Lady there is a servant who informs his mistress that a goldsmith is waiting below, and says:
Your dressing-case he'11 be content To take, for interest cent. per cent.
The certainty that the notes of private bankers would be converted into specie on demand depended on the general financial position
1) Ibid., p. 209.
J B M^rtinPTtiCcyamei67t0 towards tne end of tne eighteenth century. 1890—f' HiIt°n P"Ce' * Handbook °f Lott<lon Bankers, p. VI. London,
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Of such persons. During the eighteenth century many abuses and much swindling came to light from time to time. An English authority on the subject, referring to the great currency requirements in consequence of the growth of industry, and to the fact that Bank of England notes had no circulation beyond London, observes that banks of wealth and solidity would have been required for the issue of banknotes, but complains that "multitudes of miserable shopkeepers in the country, grocers, tailors, drapers, started up like mushrooms and turned bankers, and issued their notes, inundating the country with their miserable rags. Burke says that, when he came to England in 1750, there were not twelve bankers out of London; in 1793 there were nearly 400." 1 A large number of them were so weak financially that their capital was not sufficiënt to serve as a security for the notes they had issued, thus being much worse off than Mr. Jessop, whose mortgages, if called in, more than sufficed to cover his note issue.2
Another danger commonly supposed to be connected with the unrestricted issue of such country notes was that bankers used them in boom times to extend credit to trade and industry in the most indiscriminate manner.3 This, added to the fact that the unduly swelled issues were not sufficiently covered, gradually acquired for these notes a rather doübtful reputation in the eyes of a great many people.4 Runs on such institutions were by no means rare, and did not always end in the happy way of that on the abovementioned Mr. Jessop's bank, which is saved by the fact that John Halifax openly carries a bagful of gold into the premises, declaring it to be his intention to deposit it there.
One of the fiercest satirists of the currency conditions of the country was no doubt Thomas Love Peacock, who published a
1) Macleod, Theory and Practice of Banking, vol. I, p. 436.
2) Mrs. Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman, vol. II, p. 158.
3) This charge is denied, however, by Gilbart (op. cit., Section X), wno points out that it is not the increased issues of the country banks which provoked speculation, but that on the contrary it was the spint of speculation which called out the notes, while high prices are likewise considered by tne author to have been the cause, and not the effect, of the increased circulation.
4) The numerous failures of private banks led to a general distrust of paper money; as Meulen observes: "The English tradesman preferred to see gold in his till." Industrial Justice through Banking Reform, p. 79. London, 1917.
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series of what he called "Paper Money Lyrics," written in the winter of 1825—26, as he tells us in the preface to the edition of 1837,1 "during the prevalence of the influenza to which the beautiful fabric of paper credit is periodically subject ..." In his novels this author also frequently refers to the question of paper currency. In Crotchet Castte there is a Mr. Chainmail, who has heard from the political economist MacQuedy that "promises to pay ought not to be kept; the essence of a safe and economical currency being a series of broken promises." In the same novel there is further the banker Touehandgo, who in the American town of Dotandcarryortetown manufactures capital in the shape of banknotes "at the expense of a small importation of pens, ink, and paper, and two or three inimitable copper plates."
It is no wonder that, when in 1844 Peel regulated English banking and currency, he introduced a measure to check the above abuses. Bank of England notes were henceforth considered to be the only means of currency, and country notes have gradually been disappearing since that time, in consequence of the provisions of the new Bank Act. At present less than a million's worth of them may be circulated.
Though from The Little London Directory of 16772 it would seem that most banking houses owed their origin to "Goldsmiths that (kept) Running Cashes," yet this is not quite true. There are also numerous instances of City bankers whose business found its origin in some other trade, either of a mercer, or a clothmaker, or something else. Thus Barclay's bank was founded by a London draper, while the Couttses were originally corn merchants and commission agents as well as bankers.8
But it was especially in the provinces that banks often arose in this manner out of the business of a shopkeeper, a manufacturer, or a merchant. With the unsafe roads infested by highwaymen, of whose deeds literature contains many echoes, as we have already-
1) Works, vol. III, p. 221.
2) London, 1863. Of the 58 bankers mentioned, 38 lived in Lombard Street.
3) This last firm is one of the few banks mentioned in Early Victorian fiction, viz., in Frank Fairlegh, vol. I, p. 167 and in The Memoirs of Mr. C. ƒ. Yellowplush (Works vol. III, p. 274. London 1899). Mention is further made of Child <£ Co. in The Fatal Boots by Thackeray (vol. III, p. 383), and of Smith, Payne and Smith by Dickens in The Posthumous Papers of the Picknick Club, p. 322.
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pointed out, and who carried on their "calling" even in the hnmediate neigbourhood of London,1 nobody liked to travel after dark with money about his person. It frequently happened, therefore, that business people in country-towns offered customers in the district around to keep their money for them in their safer town houses. Thus it gradually became a practice for many such firms to keep running accounts for them just as the London goldsmiths did. Robert Owen's father-in-law David Dale was a silk mercer and a cotton manufacturer, who in later years took to finance, in the same way as Nathan Rothschild, who had made his fortune in Manchester as a cotton manufacturer, dyer and merchant. The Union and Smith's Bank owed its origin to a Nottingham draper,1 while Parr's Bank was established under similar circumstances at War rington.
In Early Victorian novels there are numerous instances in which banking and finance generally are still found combined with some other pursuit. Bounderby in Hard Times was a manufacturer and a banker; Harold Transome returned from Smyrna, where he had been a merchant and a banker;3 Mr Dudley started his career as a shipowner, continued the business of his wife, who was a shipbuilder's widow, when he mar ried her, while later on he became a financier, more particularly a bill-broker and a loan-monger;* Lord Minchampstead from a mill-owner became coal-owner, shipowner, banker, railway directer, money-lender.»
With the great changes in English society brought about by the Industrial Revolution, there came a new phase in the functions performed by banks. As was to be expected in an age when every
1) In 1708 a London banker was murdered by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath (W. Howarth, The Banks in the Clearing House, p. 77. London, 1905). As late as 1850 Kingsley wrote of a gang of London poachers that "after sweeping the country clear of game, (they) would perhaps finish off the season by a stray highway robbery or two (Yeast, p. 117).
2) Daniël Hardcastle jun., Banks and bankers. London, 1842. On p. 33 we read in a note about the firm of Smith, Payne and Smith as follows: The Smiths were originaUy small tradespeople at Nottingham, where, having several thrifty agricultural acquaintances, they turned a retail shop into a bank; and taking deposits upon interest from their friends the farmers, they lent them out to the manufacturers of the town.
3) George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, p. 21.
4) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. I, p. 407.
5) Charles Kingsley, Yeast, p. 85.
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enterprise took the form of a joint stock company, banks also arose in this new shape. It is true that the most important of all banks, the Bank of England, had existed as a joint stock enterprise ever since its creation in 1694, but there the development had stopped for the very simple reason that at the first renewal of its charter in 1708, a clause was inserted forbidding the establishment of other joint stock banks. It was not until 1826 that the English Government, alarmed by the numerous failures of private banks in those critical days,1 admitted joint stock banks oufside a radius of 65 miles from London,2 while in 1833 they were also admitted within that circle.
These outward changes betokened a new era in the inner working and the function of banks. "The old jog-trot days had passed away," an enthusiasfic writer observes, "and a new era had commenced." One of the chief features of the new period was the complete separation of banking from general commerce, and another was the extended sphere of its activities, principally as a medium of public commercial credit. Both these features had of course already been observable in the eighteenth century, but they were not developed to their fullest extent until the advent of the joint stock banks and their large accumulations of deposits.
The rapid development of joint stock banking after 1826, and especially after 1833—in 1836 alone 100 of them were registered, and in 1842 no fewer than 118s— did as much harm to English finance at first as good, for a great many of these banks were mere pwindles, while, moreover, the keen competition amongst all the new institutions induced many of the most respectable even to hold out prospects to their clients which they could never fulfil, and to attract them by a too Iiberal allowance of credit, which' seriously aggravated the crisis of 1837.4
The change over from the old methods to the new ones did not
vol \l ^IX™8 banking is descriDed °y Mrs. Craik in John Halifax,
2) "The precise spot in London, from which the measurement should be taken was never specified, and disputes have been known to arise as to whether a certain point was to be considered within or without this magie circle. J. B. Martin, op. cit, p. 137. s
3) Sir Spencer Walpole, op cit., vol. IV d 154
4) Md., vol. IV, p. 316.
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meet with the approval of Charles Kingsley. In Yeast, a book in which he devotes a good deal of attention to banks and bankers, he describes the evolution as follows: "The ancient firm of Smith, Brown, Jones, Robinson & Co.,1 which had been for some years past expanding from a solid golden organism into a cobweb-tissue and huge balloon of threadbare paper, had at last worn through and collapsed ..." In this case the bank had suffered itself to be drawn into the vortex of railway speculations of 1847; as the head of the firm says: "... the slipperiness of one stagging parson has set rolling this avalanche," whatever may be the exact meaning to be attached to this explanation.2
This contrasting of the "good old time" with the modern conditions no doubt did a good deal to earn for bankers a bad reputation in Early Victorian times, which we find reflected in the characters given to them in many novels: Smith, the good-natured Mammonite in Yeast, Skindeep's banker in Popanilla, "our saintly banker" in Ernest Maltravers, Mr. Touchandgo in Crotchet Castte, etc.8 This can hardly be called fair, however, as we saw in the preceding chapter. Half a century before Kingsley wrote his remark, private banks had shown as many defects as in his days, if not more. We find in Yeast more instances of this fault which is so common among critics of contemporary affairs, and which has been ridiculed by Dickens in The Chimes in the person of the "fat gentleman," who is constantly sighing back to these good old times. Thus Kingsley speaks in another passage of Yeast of "the old chivalrous good faith" of English commerce, and complains of "Englishmen's words being no longer as good as other men's
1) The long style of business firms which Kingsley evidently wishes to ridicule here, was by no means uncommon for a banking-house. We menton the firm of Barclay, Bevan, Tritton, Ransom, Bouverie <S Co., and of Veasy, Desborough, Bevan, TUlard <S Co. as specimens of great length. (W. Howarth, op. cit.)
2) Yeast, pp. 197 and 162.
3) A more powerful cause for the drawing of all these unfavourable portraits of bankers is no doubt that pointed out by Damel Hardcasue m the following passage (op. cit, p. 19): "The Jews, Lombards, usurers, and extortioners who were the first bankers of England made the trade in money universatty hateful and oppressive, while those foreigners were gradually joined by the London Goldsmiths, who rivalled as a body the vices of their predecessors."
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bonds." 1 This does not tally with what the German Engels wrote in 1844 about English versus German business integrity.2
Daniël Hardcastle shows the same preference for the London banker of the old school, by giving a very flattering picture of the serious manners, punctual hours, probity, exactness, frugality, and decorum of such persons, who would have thought it nothing short of insanity to drive to the Derby with four greys to their chariot. With their places of business the "new Bank palaces" are contrasted, with their plate glass, polished mahogany, brass railings, and bronze lamps.8
The great function of banks in the new order of things was their intermediary in the furnishing of credit. Before the Industrial Revolution the use of bank credit for the financing of a business enterprise had almost been an unknown thing. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, when industry and trade developed on an unprecedentedly large scale, the demand for financial accommodation on the part of business-men constantly grew, and the mistaken policy of the Bank of England in persisting in excessive issues of banknotes could hardly suffice to meet the demand for more currency.
Disraeli satirizes this "inflationist" policy which gave rise to as much controversy then as it did a few years ago, in his story of Popanilla. "They issued so many pink shells (i.e., paper currency) that the price of the public funds was doubled." When Popanilla asks an inhabitant of the oountry what would happen, if all the holders were to demand gold for them on the same day, this person observes that he is now talking of the "Great Shell Question", an allusion to the above-mentioned controversies. The same person further suggests that the eminent conchologist of Vraiblusia (i.e., the Chancellor of the Exchequer), will no doubt set such problems right, and if this should prove impossible, he says, "why, then, I suppose, to use a national motto, "something will turn up," " which proves that Mr. Micawber is not the first person having used that motto.
The Bank of England had simply stopped converting its "pink shells" into gold from 1797 till 1819, but the Vraiblusian in-
1) Yeast, p. 199.
2) F. Engels, op. cit., p. 276.
3) Op. cit, pp. 22, 23.
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stitution, when a run was made upon it, bayoneted its creditors, which was a still more unsound basis for a central credit institution.
How deeply the system of carrying on business on borrowed Capital had already taken root in England in the Early Victorian period, appears from the Report of the Committee on Manufactures, Commerce, and Shipping, which was instituted in 1833. In this report it was said that the same trade might then be carried on with only half the capital required formerly, when it was extremely difficult to obtain credit to start in business. Credit is even commented upon by a clergyman, James Martineau, in a sermon published later on as A Discour se on Commercial Morals (London, 1856). This preacher observes that if the precept "Owe no man anything but to love one another" were to acquire a sudden force, no political revolution could be compared with its result in modern society. "If interpreted into a universal obligation of the ready-money system," he says, "the productiveness of industry would be slow, and the exchanges of nations scanty."
In periods of great prosperity, when money is flush and the business world shows a strong speculative turn, there is of course great risk that the necessary prudence in the granting of credit will not be observed by the banks. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to the first half of the nineteenth century; in our own days we have seen many instances in which the same road to rum has been followed.
This indiscriminate granting of credit, even to the most unreliable concerns and to persons without any business integrity or capacity frequently led to serious crashes. We need not be surprised therefore, to see many novelists adopt a very hostile attitude towards the modern method of financing business by loaned capital. It is invariably the dangers of the system that are pointed out by them.
Popanilla's friend Skindeep is ruined by the downfall of his banker, who "had supported that competition establishment, where purses were bought full of crowns." 1
In Disraeli's Sybil we find some vehement diatribes against commercial credit, of which he says that it is the offspring of Government credit, or the system of "Dutch finance," as English
1) Confer p. 55.
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authors of the eighteenth century often called it. Entirely losing sight of the fact that but for credit English commerce and industry could never have assumed the gigantic proportions they then possessed, Disraeli speaks of a gambling foreign commerce, and of credit having corrupted the spirit of public as well as of private life.1 When he complains that credit has produced a spirit "reckless Of consequences, and yet shrinking from responsibility," we feel it less difficult to agree with him.
Charles Kingsley is scarcely less vehement in denouncing the modern methods of financing business. When in Yeast Lancelot Smith's uncle, the banker, is planning to re-establish his credit after the avalanche that has swept his bank out of existence, young Smith gives him a piece of his mind, as regards the credit system, that may be regarded as the author's own view of the matter. Commercial credit is described as the natural outcome of Bentham's universal selfishness: it is merely a counterfeit of mutual trust. Kingsley defects two lies in the system that will inevitably lead to its destruction: first that it depends, not on real worth and property, but on reputation for property only, so that business people are constantly tempted to puff themselves, if they wish to obtain credit. In the second place the author observes that, men's dealings being based on selfishness, there can only be honour and good faith in them, as long as its suits their self-interest." 2
Though Kingsley must have been aware himself that his views as to the moral defects and dangers of the system would not carry much weight with practical business-men and economists—"the
learned votaries of so-called commerce" he calls them yet there
is no doubt that many of his readers must have been set thinking upon the problem in a new light. He himself calls his views of it "an honest sample" of all the questions fermenting in the minds of the rising generation; hence his choice of the name of Yeast for the book.8
1) This same view of the matter we find already expressed in Popanilla where we read on page 399 that the "pink shell system" had soon been introduced in private life as well.
2) Yeast, p. 198.
3) At the time Kingsley wrote Yeast there were, moreover, special inducemente for his hostile attitude. In the Report of the Seeret Committee of Commercial Dtstress of 1848 it was stated by one of the witnesses (Question
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That Kingsley was aware of his defective knowledge of the financial problems of his time he candidly admits by saying that no doubt his hero's speculations "are as full of f allacies as possible." This defective knowledge of political and commercial economy made him an easy prey to the attacks of men like Greg, who, as we have already shown in an earlier chapter of this book,1 found little difficulty in refuting Kingsley's arguments.
1004) that the credit of the English merchants was not so good now, from the many failures among them, though two or three years ago it was as good as ever. "Houses," this witness said, "that were conceived to be enormously wealthy, have now been shown to have been worth nothing; people have been so deceived in their estimate of persons whom they considered to be persons of great wealth, that the credit of the country has been greatly damaged." 1) See p. 65.
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CHAPTER XII.
The National Debt and the Stock Exchange*
We have already alluded in the preceding chapter to Disraeli's attack upon the system of Dutch finance and must now devote some more attention to this second form of credit. It consists in the now universal practice of Governments to borrow money from their subjects at interest. Before the introduction of such interestbearing paper, Kings had borrowed money privately, when they were in want of it. Edward III and Henry the Fifth had fought the battles of Agincourt and Crécy with money obtained by literally pledging or pawning their crowns and jewels with London moneylenders. Cromwell and Charles the Second borrowed money from banking goldsmiths at high rates—twenfy and even thirty per cent. was charged on money bills and tallies1—to anfa'cipate all the revenue of the Exchequer. In 1672 King Charles repudiated a debt of upwards of a million pounas which he owed to the goldsmiths, thus ruining many people, though for a time he paid six per cent. interest.*
The new method of financing the Government which was introduced by William of Orange, and which replaced all the makeshifts mentioned above,3 consisted in the creation of interest-
1) A tally was a willow stick with notches indicative of the amounts lent to the Exchequer. It was split in halves, and kept as a check, one half by the creditor, and the other by the Government. Pepys tells us that he "declared the state of our tallies to raise money by" at Barkeshire-house on November 20th 1666.
2) As this royal debt was funded in 1705, it may be considered as the origin of the English National Debt.
3) That the old method of borrowing money on tallies was not abandoned even in the Dutch King's time is proved by the fact that at Samuel Pepys' death there was a balance of £2807 2s. li/2d. due to him, from the Crown, which was never paid. Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. I—III, p. XLVI.
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earing paper, called the Stocks or the Funds.1 As stated, it was y many older writers called "Dutch Finance," as it had been in se in Holland ever since the Eighty Years' War. This also partly xplains the fact that so much of the early English Government tock belonged to Dutch capitalists, who were used to this sort f investment. This is proved by a passage from Swift's poem The 'outh-Sea Project, where he says with reference to company wrindling:
where directors get a prize (only!),
The Swiss and Dutch whole millions drain.2
Disraeli describes the system of Dutch Finance in Sybil as being method "to mortgage industry in order to protect property (p. 29). 'his view of the Funding System is almost verbally found again 1 a pamphlet published twenty years before Sybil appeared,9 in /hich the author calls it "the easiest way of throwing the burthen f the country from its property on its industry," by which he leans that the rich classes throw the expenditure of the country rom their own shoulders on to those of the people, who earn their axes by industrious labour.
In Holland, Disraeli further tells us, the system worked much etter, as this country was a nation of bankers,4 where "all shared 1 the present spoil, and therefore could endure the future burthen" f Government loans, which is, to say the least of it, a rather trange view of the advantages to be derived from a national debt! And so, to this day," the author adds, "Holland is sustained by ie vast capital thus created (i.e., by those funded loans), which
1) Stock is the abbreviated term for capital stock or capital 'store', as ihnson defines it in his Dicüonary. The term Fund originally denoted the ix or fund set apart as security for the payment of principal and interest, ut later on the word came to be used for the loan itself instead of the ecurity.
2) J. F. Wheeler, The Stock Exchange, p. 9. London, 1913.
3) Piercy Ravenstone, Thoughts on the Funding System, p. 21. London, 824.
4) This view of the Dutch was perhaps partly suggested to the author y the great interests our capitalists had always had ia the City ever since the ays of King William, and which had increased considerably during the eighsenth century. The preponderant position of the old Amsterdam Bank in interational finance also strengthened this position. Disraeli was aware of all ïese cirCumstances; he had visited our country as a young man for the
pcrntintinn nf p lnan
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still lingers among the dykes." It must have been a very doubtful support indeed to this country a hundred years ago, to have "vast capital thus created," consisting in a large national debt, with heavy charges for interest!
In Popanilla Disraeli had shown a better appreciation of the real nature of such wealth. The hero of that tale discovers in Vraiblusia (i.e., England) "that the nation who contrived to be the richest people in the world, while they were over head and ears in debt must be fast approaching to a state of perfection." 1
About the same time when the new system of finance was introduced by the English Government, it also established the Bank of England. It was the bank which from the first issued and managed all the Government stocks, which in course of time rapidly increased. This rapid increase in the quantity of interest-bearing paper led to the rise of a class of dealers in these stocks who were called stockbrokers and stockjobbers, and who about the year 1700 were engaged in dealing in the five millions or so of National Debt then available for the purpose.2 After many changes and removals—they carried on their business at the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, Jonathan's, Garraway's* and other coffeehouses successively—the stockbrokers at length founded the Stock Exchange in 1802.
The above entirely new developments in English finance were bitterly resented by all the political opponents of the Whig Government of William of Orange, Jacobites as well as Tories. The Bubble Act of 1719, followed in Ï734 by another Act to repress stockjobbing, were the first signs of a reaction against the new system. Eighteenth century literature also shows many traces of the unpopularity of the stockbroker and the jobber. In Johnson's Dictionary the latter is defined as "A low wretch who gets money
1) Popanilla, p. 399.
2) Francis Hirst, op. cit., p. 18.
3) At Jonathan's in 'Change Alley, the chief place of business in the eighteenth century, every person who entered paid 6d. at the bar, "for which he (was) entitled to firing, pen, ink, and paper, and a dish of chocolate (Thomas Mortimer, Every Man his Own Broker, London 1761, p. 71). Oarraway's is mentioned by Swift in The South-Sea Profeet, where he says of company swindlers:
Meanwhile secure on Garraway's cliffs, A savage race, by shipwrecks fed, Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs And strip the bodies of the dead.
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by buying and selling shares in the funds," while he illustrates the use of the word by a passage from Swift's poem The Dog and the Thief:
The stockjobber thus from 'Change-alley goes down, and tips you the Freeman a wink; Let me have but your vote to serve for the town, and here is a guinea to drink.
Swift's work af fords many instances of his hostile attitude towards the "gentlemen of 'Change Alley." The stocks are defined by him as "a fund established by the Government, of which the value rises and falls by artifice or chance." In The South-Sea Project cited above he describes the directors of companies as follows:
When stock is high, they come between,
Making by second-hand their offers;
Then cunningly retire unseen,
With each a million in his coffers. In the Pastorai Dialogue, a conversation between two mansions, one at Richmond, and the other at Twickenham, the latter complains:
Some South-Sea broker from the City
Will purchase me, the more's the pity;
Lay all my fine plantations waste,
To fit them to his vulgar taste. The Whig character of the City is evident from the following Hnes quoted from The South-Sea Project:
But these, you say, are factious lies,
From some malicious tory's bram.1 There can be no doubt that to some extent the force of literary tradition has caused this same antagonism to survive in Early Victorian fiction. In Yeast there are stiH one or two allusions to
O See Macaulay's History of England (vat. III, p. 297) on the Whig character of other great institutions like the East India Company, which later on became a Tory establishment under the influence of Sir Josuah Child. Some illustrations from hterature of the unpopularity of the Stock Exchange are also given by Hartley With ere, Stocks and Shares, p. 224. London, 1917.
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the Whig character of the Stock Exchange and the City generally,1 while Disraeli's diatribes against the funding system were no doubt largely dictated by his political antagonism to everything connected with the party of the "Venetian Oligarchy."
The popular idea of the work of "the gentry of 'Change Alley and the coffeehouses," as represented in literature, seems to have been that they went on 'Change in the morning to speculate there, and either made a fortune, or went into the Gazette at one stroke. Thus Bulwer says of Mr. Moses Brown the elder, that "he went one fine morning to speculate at the Exchange, saying to himself: "I shall die a plum." A change of news, sharp and unexpected as a change of wind, lowered the stocks and bligted the plum. Mr. Brown was in the Gazette that week, and his wife in weeds for him the next." 2
Captain Crauford, an unpleasant sort of gentleman in one of Charles Lever's numerous novels, gives it as his opinion that bankers make more out of one morning's robbery on the Stock Exchange than a Lieutenant-General receives after thirty years' service.8
Mr. Handycock, who is to take charge of Peter Simple on his way to Portsmouth, is a highly unpleasant gentleman on the first day of Peter's stay at his house. When at four o'clock the boy opens the door to him, the stockbroker greets him most ungraciously, for as his lady expresses it, "he is a bear just now, and there is somethong wrong on 'Change." At dinner he drinks all the wine and bullies his meek little wife.
But the next day at four o'clock he is all kindness and jollity. He kisses his wife, saying, "Give me a kiss, old girl," jokes with her and Peter, and asks the latter to drink wine with him two or three times.
In Smedl/s Frank Fairlegh there is a disreputable character, called Cumberland, who is expelled from school for stealing a cheque from one of the boys, and who later on "became connected with a lot of bill-brokers, low stock-jobbers,—in fact a very shady set of people."
Captain Roland in The Caxtons has an equally unfavourable
1) Lancelofs uncle the banker was "a stanch Whig ally" of Lord Minchampstead in the House; p. 86.
2) The Disowned, p. 54.
3) The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly, vol. I, p. 14. Leipzig, 1868.
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opinion of this class of business people, as appears from the terms in which he refers to them: "a beggarly, rascally association of stockbrokers," while he is glad that he has "never yet had a lawyer in the family, nor a stockbroker, nor a tradesman." 1
Dickens has also contributed his share to the contemptuous treatment the unfortunate members of the "House" receive at the hands of novelists. In the Pickwick Papers he has drawn two specimens of the genus, Wilkins Flasher Esquire, and his friend Mr. Simmery. The reader is introduced to these gentlemen at the office of the first, and they are described to him in the following manner which clearly shows how low they stood in the author's opinion, betting and speculation being their chief occupations. "Both gentlemen had very open waistcoats, and very rolling collars, and very small boots, and very big rings, and very little watches, and very large guard chains, and symmetrical inexpressibles, and scented pocket-handkerchiefs." 2
Charles Kingsley has left us a hardly less flattering picture of the stock-jobbing profession, in a conversation between the banker Smith, "the old Mammonite" in Yeast, and his nephew Lancelot. The latter sarcastically observes "that there could not be the least harm in share-jobbing, for though it did, to be sure, add nothing to the wealth of the community,—only conjure money out of your neighbour's pocket into your own—yet was not that all fair in trade? If a man did not know the real value of the shares he sold you, you were not bound to teil him."8
The author touches here upon an aspect of business morality that is one of the most important, as it is the most widely spread form of dishonesty in the world of commerce. It is self-interest again that prompts even the merchant possessing the greatest business integrity to practise this kind of deceit, albeit that it does not always assume the proportions Multatuli gives it in the letter Droogstoppel writes to his friend Stern at Hamburg.4
f) Bulwer Lytton, The Caxtons, pp. 57, 68. London, 1855.
2) Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, p. 321.
3) Yeast, p. 197.
4) Multatuli, Max Havelaar, pp. 14, 15, 16. Amsterdam, 1922.
As Mees pointedly observes, such practices find a legal sanction in Artide 1541 of the Dutch Code of Commerce. (Mr. R. Mees, De Moraal in het Handelsleven, p. 24. Amsterdam, 1919.) The article in question reads: De verkooper is niet gehouden, in te staan voor zichtbare gebreken, welke de kooper zelf had kunnen ontdekken.
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AH the passages from Early Victorian novels that we have cited above sufficiently prove that literature took a very low view indeed of the work done by stockbrokers. As we have observed already, this may no doubt partly be attributed to the tenacity of literary tradition,1 which had handed down the unpleasant type from the eighteenth century. However, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century there were other powerful influences inducing novelists unanimously to write about dealers in stocks in such a depreciatory strain. The great speculative manias and subsequent crashes in the commercial world that we have already frequently referred to were, if not actually brought about, at any rate greatly assisted and facilitated by the existence of a large body of men who made it their business to supply the wants of speculators. That this was feit to be so is proved by the fact that Parliament, which had in 1734 passed a measure against stock-jobbing, repeated this step exactly a hundred years later by passing "An Act to Prevent the Infamous Practice of Stockjobbing," with the object of checking speculative deals in stock. In 1810 Thomas Mortimer published a little book entitled "The Nefarious Practice of Stockjobbing Unveited," in which he illustrated by some special cases the dangers attendant on speculating in omnium with a stockbroker. A further proof of this view of the stockbroker's and jobber's nefarious influence is to be found in the many editions of another book by Mortimer, the main purpose of which was to show the general public how to buy and sell Government stocks in the Bank of England, without the intermediary of a stockbroker.2
Evidently Tony Weller and his son had not read this instructive
1) "Er (i. e., the literary type) ist deshalb ein so wichtiger Faktor, weil er eine grosze Zahigkeit besitzt, mit einer gewissen Hartneckigkeit wiederkehrt." W. Dibelius, Englische Romankunst, Band II, p. 373.
2. Every Man His Own Broker, or a Guide to Exchange Alley. London, 1761. The author, who had "lost a genteel fortune by being the innocent dupe of the gentlemen of Exchange Alley", printed the book in "convenient size for the pocket" for his purpose! In chapter III he gives a technical exposition of the methods of transferring the funds without the assistance of a broker.
Seldom did any man predict the year of his death at such a long distance with greater accuracy than this Thomas Mortimer Esq., who wrote in 1761 that "the curious (might) expect (his) last dying speech some fifty years hence", and who died in 1810, forty-eight years hence!
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little book,1 when they inherited some seven or eight hundred pounds' worth of "reduced consols" from the "second Mrs. Weller," for they applied to the flashy William Flasher Esquire for assistance, when they wanted to have those consols transferred to their names. It is in their company that the readers of the Pickwick Papers pay a visit to the Consols' Office at the Bank, where the clerks do not seem to have worked so hard in those days as they do now: when Weller Senior asks "Wot are they all a'eaten' ham sandwidges for?" his son replies that "they're always a' doin' it here, all day long."
As Tony Weller wanted to sell out the Consols now standing in his name, the whole party proceeded from the Bank to the gate of the Stock Exohange where Flasher sold Weller's holding. The Consols market had from the middle of the eighteenth century been gradually removed from the Bank of England to the Stock Exchange, though up to 1834 dealings in the Funds had also continued to be conducted in the Rotunda of the Bank. As this market had in Dickens's time become of inferior status, however, the Bank Act of 1834 contained a clause enabling the Bank to shut its doors to the operators there, which it did at once without ceremony.
While Flasher went into the 'House', his clients had to wait for him at the gate in Capel Court, for they were not allowed to enter the building, which is a private institution, where intruders are still strictly kept out. Perhaps this jealous keeping off of strangers is, as an English writer observes, a relic of the old times, when brokers and jobbers were hardly tolerated in the City.
The manner in which Flasher disposes of Tony Weller's Consols is described rather inaccurately by Dickens, probably on purpose, to avoid repetition. The broker enters the gate, and after a short absence returns with a cheque on Smith, Payne & Smith,1 to the amount of the market price of the day for Tony's stock. Now it is only since 1912 that it has been possible to effect a sale of
1) They might have read it, nevertheless, as a fourteenth edition appeared of it in 1810.
2) In 1841 the styie of the firm had become 'Smith, Payne & Smiths', which spelling points to a difference in the "component parts" of the partnership. J. B. Martin, op. cit, pp. 170, 171.
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Consols in so simple a manner: by the Finance Act of 1911 they were made transferable by deed like registered securites, but before that time personal attendance of the seller at the Bank was indispensable, for the purpose of signing the transfer. After Flasher's return from the Stock Exchange they will therefore have had to repair to Threadneedle Street again, before payment could take place.
Tony Weller calls his stock "reduced counsels," which, apart from the mistaken pronunciation, can hardly have been correct. The number of Government Stocks had considerably increased since the days of their introduction by the Whigs. The endless wars during the eighteenth century had caused the National Debt to run up to 758 millions at the peace of Waterloo, but according to the enumerations given by Dickens's contemporaries, Reduced Consols were not among them, only Reduced Annuities.1 Reduced fundswere much in evidence nevertheless, about the time the Pickwick Papers were written. The appalling interest charge, 27 millions annually, was reduced by various operations undertaken by Government in 1822, 1824, 1825, and 1834, all of which gave a saving of about two and a half millions annually, but which at the same time induced many investors in the Funds to withdraw their money and invest it in South American speculations promising a much higher yield.
The immense National Debt now offered plenty of opportunities for a safe investment of the accumulated capital of the British citizens. Thus a great change had been effected by the system of Dutch finance from the conditions prevailing at the end of the seventeenth century, when Pope's father, flying from London for fear of the Revolution of 1689, had to carry his capital of £ 20,000 in specie with him in an iron box. Students of the rising science of economy in the early decades of the nineteenth century fully realized the important function the Funds performed as an investment market, when hardly any other safe outlet for capital was available, joint stock shares being, as we have seen, but too often
1) A complete list of the various sorts of Funds is to be found for instance in McCulIoch's Dictionary, the Gentlemen's Magazine, March 1802, (cited by Wheeler), and in Robert Hamilton, An Inquiry concerning... the National Debt. London, 1818.
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disguised swifidles. When reference is made to capital in Early Victorian novels, it almost invariably takes the form of Funds. Marryat expressly mentions the three percents,1 the three percents reduced, and the long annuities,2 but mostly personal estate is denoted in a general way as so much "in the funds."
In the early part of the nineteenth century the English money market had been considerably extended as we have shown, not only by the many war loans contracted by the Government to resist the attacks of Napoleon, but also by the issue of numerous foreign loans, which were partly floated under the auspices of the Government, when issued by England's ailies against the common enemy.8
Loanmongers were therefore a very conspicuous class of financiers, who played an important röle in the City. Cobbett speaks of "a race of loanmongers and stock-jobbers" that has newly arisen owing to the prodigious sums raised yearly by Government.* Rothschild, Wilson, Goldschmidt and Baring are the chief figures in this domain, the first being reproduced to some extent by Disraeli in the mysterious personage of Sydonia in Coningsby, while the latter is addressed by him in one of his pamphlets of 1825 as "the proprietor of a princely fortune," a great portion of which had been "acquired by managing the French loan" (p. 60).
Lord Minchampstead in Yeast, to all the other pursuits he had combined, added that of a "money-lender to kings and princes'*; Mr. Dudley in The Diary of a Late Physician lost a large capital in the unsuccessful attempts to contract foreign loans, while in the same novel we hear of another great loan contractor, "the City Croeses whose wealth was reputed to be incalculable."
The loan contractors mentioned here all belonged to the honourable class of business-men, but there were a host of others to whom this epithet could not be applied, as they were little better
1) Percival Keene, p. 90.
2) Peter Simple, p. 291.
3) Gilbart gives a list of 24 foreign loans contracted in England between 1818 and 1825, amounting to nearly fifty-three millions of pounds, twelve of which were South American. Op. cit., p. 64. Ravenstone calculates that the profits of the loan contractors on Englishi debts during the French wars alone had amounted to £ 67,500,000. Thoughts on the Funding System, p. 33.
4) Advice to Young Men, p. 21.
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than swindlers, especially among those who introduced the loans of South American Republics, Greece, and other less solvent states.1 John Brough, the hero of Thackeray's story of Samuel Titmarsh, dealt largely in Greeks and Columbians. Bulwer observes in The Caxtons that "the Polish cause, the Greek cause, the Mexican cause, the Spanish cause (were) necessarily mixed up with loans and subscriptions."2 In Peacock's Crotchet Castte we meet with a specimen of the race, Crotchet the younger, who was a junior partner in the loan-jobbing firm of Catchflat and Company, "in the days of paper prosperity," and who now "applied his scienceillumined genius to the blowing of bubbles, the bursting of which sent many a poor devil to the jail, the workhouse, or the bottom of the river, but left young Crotchet rolling in riches."
The crisis of 1825 was to a large extent due to such "investments," a term which though not to be found yet in that sense in Johnson's Dictionary, was in everybody's mouth then, although it would appear from the depreciatory manner in which authors like Dickens constantly employ the word, for instance in Little Dorrit, that a highly unfavourable meaning was often attached to it.
1) In Gilbarfs list cited above we read of Spanish loans issued ad 30}4 and 56, a Greek loan at 59, and a Mexican one at 58!
2) The Caxtons, p. 22.
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CHAPTER XIII.
Credit in Private Life*
Having treated credit in the preceding chapters in its two public forms, viz., Government and commercial credit, we have a third form left to which we must now devote some attention, namely credit given and taken in private life.
Though the practice of buying all sorts of articles for private use without cash payment is an evil that is inherent in all civilized societies, yet, if we may believe economists anud historians, there never was perhaps in the history of mankind a period at which it was more wide-spread than at the time of the Industrial Revolution in England.
The proportions which it had reached in the Early Victorian period must have been very distressing, judging from the descriptions contemporary writers have left us of it. Johnson complains already of the rampant evil of buying "on tick." He describes the perilous position of people adopting the practice as follows: "He that once owes more than he can pay, is often obliged to bribe his creditor to patience, by increasing his debt. Worse and worse commodities at a higher and higher price are forced upon him; he is impoverished by compulsive traffic, and at last overwhelmed in the common receptacle of misery, by debts which, without his own consent, were accumulated on his head." 1
Complaints of undue credit taken by customers are much older still. In The Compleat Tradesman (London, 1684) we read already of shopkeepers breaking by trusting "Persons of great Estates and Revenues ... who* will keep the Tradesman from his Money, sometimes two or three years ..." (p. 15). That the same evil was
1) The Idler, No. 22. Sept. 16th 1758. Works 1825, vol. II, p. 449. Cited by McCulloch, op. cit., "Credit", and in Credit Pernieious. London 1823, p. 27.
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rampant in other countries as well, apppears from a little book l'An 2440, published anonymously in London in 1772, in which the French practices in granting credit are described (See Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, February 16th 1924). According to an anonymous pamphlet Credit Pernicious the evil had reached greater proportions than ever before in the period of the French wars, owing in no small degree to the fluctuations in the value of money or the price of commodities.
Johnson's observation shows that credit in private life had results which were equal to those of the notorious truck system adopted by many mill-owners in the early period of the manufacturing industry, against which Disraeli wrote in Sybil, and which was only put an end to by the passing of the Truck Act. Both "tick" and "tommy" tied the customer hand and foot to shopkeepers and other tradesmen; once in debt, they could only hope to obtain further credit at the same establishment if they faithfully continued to patronize it, just at their employers' stores. Complaints about bad artkles supplied were of course out of the question for them. Adulteration of foodstuffs and other necessaries of life assumed unheard-of proportions, as we may read in Ure, and as also appears from a passage in Bulwer's The Disowned,1 where we read of a breakfast with "tea made out of broomsticks, and cream out of chalk."
That prices often became extortionate2 under such circumstances, as Johnson observes, need not surprise us. Samuel Warren tells us of a gentleman who "was daily accumulating bills at the fashionable tradesmen's, whom he gave higher prices, to ensure larger credit." To do these tradesmen justice, we must not lose sight of the fact that they lost so much money through bad debts that they were compelled to raise their prices. In the Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Small Debts, which was instituted in 1823, we read: "Many tradesmen consider themselves as fortunate, if they recover from two thirds to three fourths of the sums standing in their books, at the distance of several years." Hatters, shoe-
1) The Disowned, p. 49.
2) An advance of 10 per cent. is mentioned in the Black Book of 1819. In Ihe Report of the Committee of Manufactures, Commerce and Shipping there is a witness who states that Stockport operatives buy their clothing from Scotch itinerant dealers who put on 50 per cent., while some of them even go to 100 per cent. (p. 626).
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makers, etc. in the Metropolis had often 4,000/. and upwards on their books in debts below ten pounds, while five sixths of their book debts were below that sum. A bootmaker who had "not a very large business," stated he had 300 debts in his books under 51.; a hatter "had 560 accounts on (his) books, and out of those (he found) there (were) 253 for sums under 5/.1
The result was that the better-minded people, those who meant to pay the debts they contracted, were obliged to a certain extent to pay likewise those of the numerous defaulters. How strongly this habit of contracting debts had grown with many people appears from the following passage in Jack Sheppard: „By your own showing you are in easy circumstances—for it is only natural to presume that a man who owes nothing must be in a position to pay liberally (p. 27).
Modern readers may wonder how it was that tradespeople were willing to commit themselves so deeply in those days. The explanation of it, partly at least, is that the law of the land was chiefly responsible for this facility of obtaining accommodation at shops. The law of arrest and imprisonment made it possible for anybody to seize the person of a debtor on a very simple proceeding, and to keep him in prison till his claim had been satisfied. Thus they came to rely upon this despotical power to assist them in exacting payment from their customers in case of need, and they granted credit in such an indiscriminate manner, that McCulloch observes that "there (was) hardly one so bankrupt in character and fortune as to be unable to find suppliers willing to sell him their articles on credit." 2
That such a system must have had bad moral consequences as well need not surprise us. It enabled the greatest rascals to buy anything they wanted, without payment, while it tempted even more considerate citizens to indulge in expenses far beyond their means, and thus led to great improvidence in all ranks of society. Literature affords many instances in which credit was literally thrust upon persons of whom tradesmen, eager to sell their wares, were led to believe that at some future time they would be able to pay their debts. Swift tells us in his story of Stella's life that she
1) Parliamentary Reports etc, 386 IV 183, pp. 14 and 18.
2) McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce, "Credit".
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had run into debt at the age of twenty-two, "when, by the advice of some friends, and the f right of paying large bills of tradesmen who enttced her Mo their debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly" and stopped this ruinous course.1 When Redmond Barry arrived at Dublin, where he was believed to be a rich youth, he tells us that he "raised some little money too, on a few trinkets which (he) had purchased of a jeweller who pressed his credit upon (him)." 2 Money-lenders were especially eager to catch rich young heirs in their nets in this manner, as we shall presently see.
The great passion for statistics and inquiries that marked the first decades of last century, when Utilitarianism and political economy were in the ascendant in England, has produced much statistical material, which is very valuable to the student of the social conditions of that time. It has also furnished us many figures showing the proportions assumed by the credit system in private life. In 1842 nearly 4,000 persons were committed for debt in the five debtors' prisons in London, of whom upwards of 2,300 for debts under twenty pounds. It was stated in Parliament* that in 1827 in London and the two adjoining counties more than 23,000 warrants for arrest were issued, leading to the imprisonment of about 12,000 persons, the rest being so-called "bailable processes." 4 When we remember that London then had about the size of Amsterdam in our days, such figures speak volumes.
Numerous notes of warning were sounded by economists and politicians. We have already cited Johnson's words on the subject. In 1823 the pamphlet Credit Pernicious appeared, serving the same purpose, while ten years later a petition was presented to Parliament by Glasgow business people, asking to abolish imprisonment for debts under 8/., and pointing out among other things that in the three preceding years there had been 253,419, and 437 arrests respectively for debts of that amount and under. The result of this action was the abolishment of imprisonment for such small debts in Scotland, while in England little or nothing
1) The Choice Works of Dean Swift, p. 675. London, 1897.
2) Barry Lyndon, vol. I, p. 59.
3) Hansard, Febr. 19th. 1827.
4) Confer Walpole, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 93, and McCulloch's Dictionary, "Credit." In the three years 1835, 1836, and 1837 these numbers had been reduced to 12348 and 1249 respectively, which shows a great diminution of the evil. Parliamentary Papers, XLIV, p. 309.
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was altered yet, though between 1804 and 1820 no fewer than 35 debates on the question are recorded in Hansard.
Though hitherto we have only spoken of credit granted by tradespeople, the evil of running into debt had more aspects than one. Agricultural districts seem to have suffered severely from the curse. Sir Gilbert Parker describes1 how farmers, heaviliy encumbered, tried to struggle along by running accounts with dealers in feeding stuffs and farm implements and others, accumulating debts they could not pay off, and thus getting into the dealers' power, after which they had to take the poor stuff the latter foisted off upon them, just as housewives had to put up with adulterated foodstuffs. In It is Never too Late to Mend we see farmer Fielding under the necessity of threshing new wheat for the rent, although the wet stuff will yield little money, while one of the principal characters in the same novel, the corn-factor, is represented to us, as we have already mentioned, as lending money on wheat ricks and charging twenty per cent. • It was not only the dealers in farm produce and farmers* requisites that were the credit-givers, but professional money-lenders like the Jew Isaac Levi were also but too willing to accommodate the small owner. Having substantial things to offer as security, farmers were favourite victims of this class of people.
From the deplorable condition of indebtedness into which according to McCulloch seven tenths of the community had drifted by constantly anticipating their incomes, it follows almost as a matter of course that the money-Iender was a conspicuous member of Early Victorian society, however discreetly he might usually carry on his profession.
Early Victorian novels contain several portraits of such gentlemen, of whom we mention Old Amos L.;2 Levison of the firm of Morris and Levison, whose brass plate informed the world that they were coal-merchants, and who were also owners of a spunging house;* Mr. Bond Sharpe;4 Samuel Levison;5 Mr. Immanuel;6 Arthur Gride and his friend Ralph Nickleby.
1) Sir Gilbert Parker, op. cit., p. 139.
2) Samuel Warren, The Diary of d Late Physician, vol. 1, p. 2.
3) Disraeli, Henrietta Tempte.
4) Ibid., p. 380.
5) Thackeray, Cox's Diary.
(9 Marryat, faphet in Search of a Father, Ch. XXXII.
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Though there are instances in novels where the victim is of a different class—e.g., in The Diary of a Late Physician, where a young doctor has to call in the "genérous assistance of the Jews" to set up in his profession—the usual sort of victims fixed upon by usurers are the prospective heirs to large estates or fortunes. How money-lenders sometimes literally thrust their loans upon such youths is described by Bulwer in The Disowned. The "broker" Mr. Brown, the same personage that we have already referred to in a previous chapter, decides to lose no time in finding out a certain gentleman, as soon as he hears that the latter is likely to come into considerable property. We hear him soliloquizing as follows: "Who knows but what Mr. Algernon (the gentleman in question) may be in great distress; and I am sure, as far as four hundred pounds, or even a thousand, or two thousand, go, I would not mind lending it him upon the post-obits of Squire Vavasour and his young hopeful (the present heir)." 1
Many of those young men were driven into narrow corners, either from the dissipated Kfe they were leading in London, or from their having frequented the gambling-rooms. Gambling appears to have been a very rampant evil in England in those days. There is hardly a novel of the period, but contains the portrait of a gamester, or at least some reference to gambling. Of the long list of such disreputable characters we mention Ralph Nickleby's two friends Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht; Mr. Mordaunt in The Disowned; Ferdinand Arm ine (Henrietta Tempte); Fakredeen (Tancred); Mr. Beauchamp (The Diary etc, vol. II, p. 197); Major Elliot (Md., p. 266); the old dowager at Mrs. Dudley'* drawing-room playing to eke out her niggardly jointure (ibid., vol. I, p. 411). Further there is the worthy French couple who came to play at Mrs. TurnbulI's house, in Perclval Keene, and Deuceace and Blewitt, wih their victim Dawkins, in The Yellowplush Papers. Ainsworth even wrote a whole novel on the theme, entitled The Spendthrift, and containing the story of one Gage Northerner, a rich young nobleman, and his set of friends, all bent upon "plucking the pigeon," as the technical term ran. We read there of 35,000 pounds being won in one sitting.
1) Bulwer, The Disowned, p. 306.
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That the ternis on which such young scapegraces were supplied with money were not very liberal as a rule, may well be supposed.1 There are instances in literature of as much as 15 per cent. being charged for the accommodation. Disraeli even mentions 500 pounds for the loan of 1000 pounds repayable after one year, and he knew something of the practices of money-lenders, having been in their books and in their rapacious grip up to time when he had already risen to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, while in his early years he sometimes dared not leave his house for fear of being "nabbed" by the Philistines.2
In the person of Mr. Bond Sharpe, "the first usurer in the world," Disraeli gives us a description of a financier of this class who would wish to avail himself of his power, and to establish himself as a recognized member of society, but has come to the conclusion that "this cannot be." "Yet," he says, "if all the usurers in this great metropolis could only pass in procession before you, how you would start. You might find Right Honourables among them; many a great functionary, many a grave magistrate ..."3 This passage written by a man who knew something of such things, proves how wklespread a practice usury was in those days.
Though practised thus widely, and often with fatal consequences which could not fail to attract public notice, it is curious to observe how economists and utilitarians advocated the abolition of the Usury Laws, as being contrary to their universal principle of noninterference by Government in the private dealings of the citizens. It must be admitted that the effect of existing legislation, as appearing from the events narrated by novelists, was practically nil. The law forbade a higher interest than 8 per cent., but, as we have seen, usurers took 50 per cent. without any scruple. As early as 1787 Bentham had written a book, entitled Defence of Usury, which had become one of the sacred books of orthodox
1) That reckless youths have from the earliest times been favourite victims of money-lenders appears from the fact that Henry the Third prohibited the Jews from taking more than twopence a week for every 20 shillings they lent to the scholars at Oxford. "That is after the rate of £ 43 6s. 8d. per cent. per annum," Gilbart observes, when citing' this case from Henry's 'History of England'. History, Principles and Practice of Banking, p. 19.
2) Monypenny, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 351, 352.
3) Henrietta Tempte, p. 383.
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economists, and had been translated into many languages. Its slowly pervading influence led at last in 1854 to the abolition of all existing legislation on the matter. It is a curious illustration of the "swing of the pendulum" in the trend of human thought to note that in 1900 Parliament passed a new Usury Act again to interfere with the evil.
In the same novel of Disraeli to which we referred above we learn some very interesting details about all kinds of practices combined with money-lending. When Ferdinand Armine applies for a loan of 1500 pounds to Mr. Levison, the latter offers him 700 pounds in cash, and the balance in ... coals! To his client's objection that he does not know what to do with eight hundred pounds' worth of coals, he replies "Lord, my dear captain, 800 /. worth of coals is a mere nothink. With your connection you will get rid of them in a morning." One of Armine's friends tells us, how he had once obtained a loan in the form of 500 dozen bottles of champagne, to be placed by him among his friends and acquaintances. In Bulwer's Night and Morning1 we hear Cautrey teil his friend Morton that his "grandfather sold walking-sticks and umbrellas in the little passage by Exeter 'Change; he was a man of genius and speculations. As soon as he had scraped together a little money, he lent it to some poor devil with a hard landlord, at twenty per cent., and made him take half the loan in umbrellas and bamboos."
IJ London, 1893, p. 170.
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10



CHAPTER XIV.
The Law of Arrest*
However smal 1 may have been the effectivenessof legislation against usury in the first half of the nineteenth century, that against def«Uiting debtors was all the more effective. Walpole expresses the cruelty of the law very forcibly in the following words: "The position ol the felon was not more pitiable than that of the debtor," and we shall see that it was no exaggeration to say so. Even Lord Eldon, who cannot be said to have been an over-zealous reformer, was forced to admit that the law of anesfled to greater oppression and inhumanity than slavery itself.1
English law made a distinction between two groups of defaulters, bankrupts and insolvents. The first were traders, the second nontraders. In case of default they were treated in quite different mannen. To traders the Bankruptcy Law was applied, which had gradually developed sinee Stuart times, and which was founded on the principle that the debtor's goods, not his person, were liable for his debts.2 The Insolvent Laws, on the Other hand, to which non-traders were submitted, provided no means for seizing the debtor's goods, so that when Mr. Pickwick refused to pay the damages awarded to Mrs. Bardell, he could not be made to pay them, but was put into the Fleet prison.
The distinction between the two classes of debtors was of course hard to draw in many cases, and this often led to curious decisions of the courts.
Bankruptcy proceedings are rarely described in Early Victorian
1) McCulloch, op cit., p. 469.
2) This exemption from imprisonment was a privilege deemed necessary for the trading classes, in view of the necessity entailed upon them by their caliing, of constantly contracting debts and of granting credits to others.
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fiction. Thackeray tells us a little about those taken against Samuel Titmarsh, as a shareholder of the West Diddlesex Association, while a more complete description of the procedure is given by Samuel Warren, who, being a lawyer himself, knew the technical details of it. Against Mr. Dudley "a commission of bankruptcy was sued out," and these commissioners appointed a solicitor to conduct the necessary legal procedings against the bankrupt, which of course consisted in selling out his property, and realizing all further assets, and which this solicitor performed in a very cruel manner.1 Such a functionary was then called an "Assignee," and a "Trustee" nowadays. Peacock's banker Touchandgo in Crotcket Castte, who has bolted to America after his bankruptcy, when sending his daugther some of his self-made bank-notes, informs her that his English creditors may compel her to hand over these notes to his assignee. Mr. T. was of course an undischarged bankrupt, and as such he could acquire no property.
When a dividend of five shillings in the pound had been paid to Mr. Dudley's creditors, they consented to his discharge, i.e., he was released from all further liability as regards his old debts. Here it is that the bankrupt was in a much more favourabje position than an insolvent; the latter could never be discharged, but remained liable for his debt for all future times. It is true that Mr. Tag-rag, the draper in Ten Thousand a Year, also failed to obtain his release, when he had gone bankrupt, but this was because his creditors were of opinion that he had not dealt honestly with them, while the dividend was only three farthings in the pound.2 The draper therefore found himself in the same unsatisfactory position as an insolvent: if he wished to carry on his business, it would have to be as trustee for and for the benefit of the creditors, which he did not wish to do.
Having explained the general method of dealing with bankrupts
1) Samuel Warren, The Diary of a Late Physician, vol. I, p. 434.
2) Samuel Warren, Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, p. 431. In 1842 the power of discharging a bankrupt was taken from the creditors—a single one might prevent the discharge for some private motive!—and vested in the Judge or Commissioners in Bankruptcy. Up to that time one might read announcements in the newspapers like that which wei noted from The Times Of Jan. 8th 1840, in which notice was given that a certificate was to be granted to a certain bankrupt, "unless cause be shown to the contrary on or before January 28th."
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in the early decades of last century,1 we shall now describe the fate awaiting non-traders finding themselves in the unfortunate position of being unable to meet their liabilities. The first step in insolvency, at any rate up to the year 1838, was the arrest of the debtor. Thackeray observes somewhere in Barry Lyndon that there was no need for him to go over the twenty thnes told story of an election, but the story of an arrest for debt was gone over at least a hundred times by the novelists of his day.
All these descriptions reveal the same details of the process, which was a so-caHed "mesne process," as lawyers called it. The best known of these stories as well as the most humorous is no doubt that which Dickens has left us in the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwtck Club. Sam Weller, whose master has been incarcerated in the Fleet prison for a debt he does not want to pay wishes to follow him there, in order to attend upon him. The only manner to enter the prison is, however, to become an arrested debtor too. Therefore he asks his father for the loan of twenty-five pounds, and throws out some hints about the latter not being cruel enough to think of arresting his own son. Mr. Weller at once enters into the spirit of the joke, and produces the desired sum from one of his boots, whereupon the couple go to one Salomon Peil, an attorney of the lower class attending the Insolvent Court, and transacting their business not in offices, but in prison yards and in the coffeehouses in the neighbourhood. Mr. Weller Senior informs the attorney of his intention to issue a writ for twenty-five pounds, and costs of process—which in this case are payable in advance, and amount to the tfifling sum of five pounds!—which writ is to be "executed without delay upon the body of one Samuel Weller."
In accordance with these instructions Peil leads Tony Weller down to the Tempte, where the latter swears the affidavit of debt that has been drawn up on the spot by the attorney's clerk, a boy who follows Peil all day with a blue bag. Though we do not follow the party on their further errands, we know that upon presenting this sworn deposition in court, they have obtained the desired writ
1) A more detailed exposition of bankruptcy proceedings, besides falling outside the scope of this book, would not be possible within its limits, in view of the fact that between 6 Geo. IV and the Consolidation Act of 1849 no fewer than eight enactments were passed by Parliament.
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in which the sheriff of London is ordered to have Sam Weller arrested by one of his officers. It has been agreed between creditor and debtor that this is to take place at four o'clock in the "Belle Savage." Thus Sam Weller easily effects his entry in the Fleet.
The writ of execution as described above was what lawyers call a ca. sa.1 As Samuel Warren explains to his readers in Ten Thousand a Year, the term represents the words "Capias A. B. (i.e., the defendant) ad satisfaciendum," which words were addressed to the Sheriff of the County. If it was the defendant's property, and not his person that the Sheriff was instructed to seize, the writ was called a fi. fa., as it commanded that functionary "ut fieri faciat"—that he should cause to be made, or realized, out of the defendant's goods, the amount due to the plaintiff.*
On such a ca. sa. being lodged at his office, the Sheriff handed a warrant to one of his officers, whose duty it was to arrest the debtor. Sheriffs' officers or bailiffs were not, as was to be expected, very popular persons, and this is clearly shown by the marnier in which novelists drew their portraits.
James, in Beauchamp or the Error, describes the office as "the step in society still lower than the hangman,"3 and the names bailiffs bear in novels are also very significant in this respect: Vice, Grab, Nabb, etc. As a rule the office seems to have been held by Jews. On the occasion of the abolition of imprisonment for debt on mesne process Punch spoke of "the wounds of a Nathan and a Levi," which the Duke of Wellington wished to dress at the expense of the State, by granting the sheriffs' officers an indemnification. In the same article a bailiff is denoted by the name of Aaron (Vol. II, p. 108). As they of ten had to use violence in entering houses,4 or in effecting arrests, they are mostly repre-
1) The term is used by Dickens for the writ issued against Mr. Pickwick himself, p. 234. In Entilia Wyndham by Mrs. Marsh there is a bailiff saying, "There's a ca. fa. out," but this is a mistake.
2) Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, p. 419. This novelist is very fond of illustrating the events narrated in his books by numerous notes containing much legal and other lore.
3) Howard in Rattlin the Reefer assigns this rank to schoolmasters, of whom he says: "They are in my estimation the most abject of all classes— gypsies and beggars not excepted. Vol. I, p. 202.
4. "In executing a writ, the Sheriff may enter the debtor's house, if he finds the door open. Every Man's Own Lawyer, p. 35.
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sented as burly fellows, carrying big ash sticks, and being accompanied by some gruff assistant of the same build and armed in the same manner. Samuel Warren denotes them as "big bum-bailiffs."1 That debtors did everything in their power to avoid a meeting with such gentlemen is but natural, and they possessed a great advantage over their pursuers in the fact that "the sheriffs writ breaks no lock," as a bailiff told a young lady, when he had entered her father's house to take possession of the furniture. Therefore he warns her to keep the back door locked, "which, bless you, stood as wide open for us as Temple Bar," and through which a second bailiff might come in as easily, to carry her father off to prison.2 The simplest stratagem therefore was to stay at home, or 'keep house', as the term was. Disraeli often found himself under this necessity." This method was of no avail to traders, however, such as the Earl of Dreddlington in Ten Thousand a Year, who, when he was denied to his creditors by the servants, committed an act of bankruptcy by so doing. The bailiffs often lay in wait for their victims, till they should make their appearance in the street, and then seized upon them. In one of Reade's novels we read that a sheriffs officer followed a debtor to another person's house, and finding the door open took him there, believing that "it would be more delicate to take him indoors than in the open street."* In the Mxmoirs of Mr. C. ]. Yellowplush Thackeray tells how two "bums," after an unsuccessful first attempt, catch their victim, Mr. Deuceace, when he is driving in his carriage in the streets of Paris. In The Three Cutters we meet with one Mr. Vaughan on board of the Arrow, who "is a little in debt, and yachting is convenient" for a man who is troubled by the bailiffs. In another of Marryaf s novels again5 there is a Mr. Flemming, who hides himself on board a Thames barge, pretending to do so, because he "has run up a great many debts, and the bailiffs are after him."
From the description of London life given by Ainsworth in jack Sheppard it appears that in former times there were certain quarters of the town where hard pressed debtors found a safe refuge from
1) Samuel Warren, Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, p. 391
2) J. P. R. James, op. cit, pp. 312—32a
3) Monnypenny, op. cit, vol. II, p. 347.
4) Charles Reade, It is Never too Late to Mend, p. 130.
5) Jacob Faithful.
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the bailiffs. In the reign of William of Orange there had been four such places "across the water," i.e., on the Surrey side of the river; but a statute of that time put an end to the privileges of those places. The Old Mint in Southwark resisted all reforms, however, till the reign of George I, when it was likewise suppressed, owing to the abuse of its liberties, such places naturally becoming the haunts of the scum of London, frequented by crimmals like Jack Sheppard and jonathan Wild.1
The readers of the Pickwkk Papers will remember that in the case of the hero of the story the proceedings were different from those by which Sam Weller was locked up in the Fleet. While the latter was at once put into that prison, his master was firrt imprisoned in a so-called spunging-house. As these establishments occupy a very prominent place in the numerous imprisonments for debt described in novels, we must say a few words about them.
When a creditor only wished to bring some pressure to bear upon a slow-pay debtor, he applied for a writ, and had him locked up by a sheriffs officer in the latter's own house.2 Here he had to be kept for twenty-four hours, in order to give hhn a reasonable opportunhy to come to a settlement with the creditor at whose suit the proceedings had been taken. The object of this pielimmary step was of course to induce the prisoner's friends to call, for the purpose of "stumping down," as the little waiter said to Captain Armine, the hero of Henrietta Tempte; or a any rate, if they did not stump down at once, to bail their unfortunate friend out, ïai, become surety to the Sheriffs officer for the amount of the <febt.
If from some cause or other these expectations were not realized, neither money, nor bail bond being produced, the victim was removed to a debtors' prison .Thus it is that we hear Mr. Picknick say, when he has been shut up in Mr. Namby's establishment, for refusing to pay the damages due to Mrs. Bardefl: "I see no advantage in staying here, so I shall go to prison to»night." 3
Spunging-houses are usually described as large, dingy, gloomy
1) Jack Sheppard, pp. 15, 186, 238. Similar privileges were possessed by the Dutch towns of Culemborg and Vianen in the times of the Republic.
2) Though as a rule spunging-houses belonged to sheriffs' officers, there seem to have been exceptions: in Henrietta Tempte Disraeli dearly hints that the lock-up into which Captain Armine is put belongs to the same Mr. Levison who had lent him the money he cannot repay (p. 417).
3) Page 234.
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buildings, with iron bars to the windows, and spiked walls round the court-yard at the back. They seem to have been located chiefly in or near Chancery Lane, while Leicester Square and Coleman Street are also mentioned by novelists.1 When a debtor had been "nabbed" by the bailiffs, he had the choice between staying in thè so-called coffee-room with the other prisoners, or taking a separate room for his private use. Various novelists have left us a description of such a coffee-room. That given by Disraeli in Henrietta Tempte has rightly been objected to as lacking in reality.2 All he tells us of it is that it is a long, low, unfurnished, sanded chamber with a table and benches. Thackeray describes one as "a filthy place." Samuel Warren shows his readers a large, low room lit by two or three candles, where some dozen persons are idling away their time by smoking, drinking, playing at cards and dice, and so forth, while in the end we see two men piek a quarrel, one of them flying a tumbler of brandy and water at the other's head and nearly killing him. The most graphic description of a coffee-room we find in the Sketches by Boz, where Dickens leads us into a small confined den, with its dirty floor, its completely blackened ceiling, and its intolerable smell of tobacco, where Ikey, the servant, spreads a cloth with numerous blotches of mustard on the table.
Spunging-houses owed their curious name to the fact that the owners charged their lodgers extortionate prices for food and lodging. Many instances may be quoted from literature in proof of this. Thus Dickens speaks of the separate rooms that debtors could take as places where "the rich could do the luxurious at the rate of a couple of guineas a day." Samuel Warren mentions two and a half guineas a day as the price charged for a private room, exclusive of board and attendance. Thackeray tells us in The Fatal Boots of an assistant in a spunging-house being dismissed for ch ar ging 7/6 for a glass of ale, instead of the regular 6/-. People who could not afford such luxuries could evidently have their food sent to them in the lock-up: Dickens shows us in the above-mentioned coffee-room a man eating some dinner his wife has brought him.
1) Barry Lyndon, p. 333; The Fatal Boots, p. 381; The Spendthrift, vol. I, p. 193; The Diary etc, vol. I, p. 215; Sketches by Boz, p. 190; etc. 2) Monypenny, op. cit., vol. I, p. 346.
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If the debtor succeeded in satisfying his creditor, or in putting in bail to the action, he was released by the bailiff, after the latter had first ascertained at the sheriffs office, if any further creditors had meanwhile come forward and applied to the court for a "detainer." This frequently happened, for as soon as one of the creditors had taken action against a debtor, all the other used to come down upon him likewise, as was done by Mr. Wharton in Beauchamp or the Error, who lost no time in putting in his claim "to take care of himself and his clients," as soon as he heard that another creditor had issued process.
If the proceedings against a debtor were at once pushed on till a judgment was obtained from the court, the victim lost the right to put in bail, and could only be set free again by payment of the debt. He had then become what was called a judgment debtor, like Captain Armine, who hears from the bailiff that he is "taken in execution," so that no bail can be taken. It seems to have been usual for a creditor to inform his debtor of his intention to obtain such a judgment of him, for one of Armine's friends asks him if they (i.e., the creditors) gave him no notice.
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CHAPTER XV.
Debtors' Prisons.
When nabbing failed to produce the desired effect, the debtor was removed to a debtors' prison, of which there were five in London, while in the large provincial towns there were similar establishments attached to the Courts of Requests (i.e., the small debts courts). Those in London were the King's (Queen's) Bench Prison, Mr. Micawber's residence, the Fleet Prison, the Marshalsea, the prison in Whitecross Street, and that in Horsemonger Lane, which was the county jail for Surrey.1 A hundred years before debtors had also been locked up in Newgate, together with the criminals imprisoned there, but in the nineteenth century they were kept separate. There was only one class of wrong-doers who were likewise shut up in the Marshalsea, viz., smugglers. Dickens tells us that there was a second prison there behind an iron-plated door, where offenders against the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise and customs were "supposed to be incarcerated," though in reality they mixed freely with the debtors.2
As soon as a debtor had been taken into custody, but not before, he could claim the benefits of the Insolvent Debtors Act. Within a fortnight after his capture he could inthnate to the warden of the prison his intention of going up before the Insolvent Debtors Court in Portugal Street,3 and thus try to obtain his release. Thus it « that we hear Mrs. Micawber teil little David that "her family had decided that Mr. Micawber should apply for his release under the Insolvent Debtors Act," which would set him free, she expected, in
1) H. Trumble, In Jail with Dickens, p. 108.
2) Little Dorrit, p. 59. London, 1917.
3) For a detailed description of the Court in Portugal Street the reader is referred to the Pickwick Papers, chapter XLII, where it is shown us as the common resort of all the destitute, shabby-genteel people in London, where in rainy weather "the vapours of the court are like a fungus pit", while the steam of beer and spirits, ascènding to the ceiling, and condensed by the heat, "rolled down the walls like rain."
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about six weeks. However, for this purpose the debtor had to hand over all his property to the "assignees," who were creditors acting as what would now be called trustees in bankruptcy. These assignees, after realizing the property in the same manner as in a bankruptcy, divided the proceeds, and when in the opinion of the magistrates in Portugal Street the debtor had behaved honourably all through his financial troubles, he was set free. But if, as in the case of Tittlebat Titmouse, the court pronounced that the debtor was not entitled to his discharge, he was remanded for a certain period by way of punishment. Titmouse had to remain imprisoned for eighteen calendar months, though his jewish creditors would have had him remanded "to the day of his death."
Incarceration for such a further period was called imprisonment "on final process," in contradistinction to that "on mesne process" described above. While the latter was a means to prevent the debtor's flight, the final process inflicted a punishment on the prisoner for "the crime of debt," as Walpole sarcastically observes.
When a debtor had gone through the Court in Portugal Street, he mostly found himself in the position of Thackeray's hero in The Fatal Boots, who tells us that he "came out a beggar." Though, as we have already observed, an insolvent continued liable for all his unpaid debts, even when discharged from prison by the Court, he enjoyed one privilege after his release, viz., that for a period of three years he could not be captured for fresh debts contracted.
If a debtor refused to give up his property to his creditors, he simply had to lie in prison, till he had changed his mind. We remember that this was the position in which Mr. Pickwick found himself in the Fleet, where he was to be detained till he should have paid Mrs. Bardell's damages. "And that," said Mr. Pickwick laughing, "wil! be a very long time." Walpole mentions a similar case which actually occurred, of "a wealthy debtor who (likewise) declined to disgorge his property." This was one Dr. Fisher, a fellow of Christ's, and a Senior Doctor at Doctors' Commons, where he often sat as judge, while imprisoned in the Cambridge County Gaol; his friends often went to drink wine with him in his well furnished apartment there.1
1) Walpole cites this case from The Life of Campbell, vol. I, p. 171.
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The conditions prevailing in debtors' prisons seem to have been as bad as those in other English prisons, and this was saying a good deal, when we remember the horrible details of prison life to be found in Cobbett's State Trials, continued later on by Howell. In vol. XVII we read the tragedy of "a fat, jolly young man" who after an attempt to escape feil ill in the Strong Room, where he died soon after in his irons, "twenty pounds to each leg," amid "rats and noisome stenches," lying in the dirt in his own excrements (pp. 310, 311).
The appalling conditions under which prisoners had to live in such establishments had led to a movement for prison reform as early as the end of the eighteenth century. This movement was initiated by the Sheriff of Bedfordshire, John Howard, the Prisoner's Friend, as he was called, who knew what prisons were, and who published two interesting books on the subject from which it appeared that English prisons were dens without water, fresh air, sewers or bedding; where the stench was appalling, and the fever had more victims than the gallows; where the moral conditions of the inmates were dreadful, men, women and children being all huddled together in small places, with hardly room enough to He down on the floor to sleep; where gaolers kept drinking taps, and gambling flourished; where prisoners had sometimes to be chained to the walls to prevent their escape from the dilapidated buildings.1 We have already pointed out a passage in Jack Sheppard, from which it appeared that debtors arfd felons were locked up in the same buildings in those days, the former being almost as numerous as the latter.2
The movement set on foot) by Howard was kept up by other philanthropists, such as Romilly and Wilberforce, while it gradually coincided with the general philanthropic movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, comprising the abolition of slavery, the introduction of factory legislation, the protection of animals, and other humane tendencies. In the second quarter of
1) See Traill and Mann, Social Engtand, vol. V, pp. 656 ff.
It is gratifying to read that in Howard'S opinion Dutch prisons; "were so neat and clean that it was difücult to believe that they were prisons."
2) Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 108: "Of the whole number of prisoners in England and Wales, in 1780 being about 4400, nearly 2100 were debtors, about 800 felons and about 700 petty offenders.
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the century the general conditions prevailing in prisons had already greatly improved, as Dickens admits in Little Dorrit: "Although in later years it (i.e., the Marshalsea prison) has been a very different place from the sink of filth and dirt it once was, even in its improved condition it holds out but little inducement to the extravagant, or consolation to the improvident." That the conditions were still far from sa'tisfactory, even after the improvements introduced, the readers of the Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit remember but too well, the first describing life in the Fleet, and the second that in the Marshalsea. With the latter the author was intimately acquainted, owing to his father having stayed there for some considerable time with his family in 1824.
In the Fleet there were "damp and gloomy stone vaults," "filthy staircases," "dirty and low stone-paved galleries," which made Mr. Pickwick feel quite low-spirited and uncomfortable, especially when he found himself "chummed upon," i.e., put into the same room with, some coarse and drunken fellows. There was, however, a great difference in the treatment of debtors "on the poor side," and those who could afford to procure some comforts. The lot of the former was anything but enviable. They were almost left to die of starvation and nakedness; the food they got was very scanty and of a bad quality. The Fleet prison was what might be called a proprietary concern run for profit by the Warden, "who (bought) the privilege of punishing others." 1 The prisoners were farmed out to him, in the same way as Government farmed out lunatics to the keepers of private asylums,2 and pauper children were handed by the parish authorities to the tender cares of "farmers" like Mrs. Mann, who took in Oliver Twist and the rest against a weekly payment of sevenpence halfpenny. From the statistical figures given by McCulloch" with reference to the sums spent for the maintenance of the inmates of Horsemonger Lane prison, it would appear that for their dietary just over 21/3d. was paid per diem by Town4 or
1) Store Trials, vol. XVH, p. 307.
2) James MiQ married the daughter of a widow who kept such a private asylum originally started by her husband. Leslie Stephen, The English. Utilitarians, vol. II, p. 5.
3) McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce, "Credit".
4) Where no municipal provisions existed for the support of debtors. they would literally have been doomed to starve, but for the chance charity of the public! Trumble, op. cit, p. 76.
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country. Even when allowing for the fact that one of the prisoners stationed behind a barred casement constantly begged passers-by to remember the poor debtors,1 while further a great many debtors provided for their own board, or at any rate supplemented it out of their own pockets, we may be sure that a few pence a day could provide but a very scanty board. Charitable people, Dickens tells us, often left trifling legacies in their wills, to provide food for the poor debtors, whose hopeless prospects are described by Alfred Jingle in the following pathetic manner: "Nothin'g soon— lie in bed—starve—die—inquest—poor prisoner—common necessaries—hush it snug—natural death—coroner's order—workhouse funeral—all over—drop the curtain."2 The Wardens of such establishments naturally wished to make their concern pay, and they often did so by cruel ill-freatment of the poor debtors, by extorting high prices for separate rooms and other conveniences from those who "were willing to come down handsome," * as Roker the turnkey of the Fleet expressed it, while they also tolerated all kinds of abuses such as drinking and gambling.4
1) There was a "wide-grated" window in the prison wall, behind which some poor prisoner all day repeated the cry cut in stone above his head: "Please remember the poor debtors having no allowance (Trumble, op. cit., p. 73). Samuel Johnson already mentions the same "rueful cry" in The ldler, No. 22.
2) Such a tragic fate actually befell a prisoner in the Marshalsea in 1811. See Parliamentary Debates, XIX, p. 109.
3) How far these conveniences often went appears from a passage in the State Trials (Howell, vol. XVII, p. 306), where we read of a debtor, "Mr. John Holder, a Spanish merchant, (who) was a prisoner in the Reet, and had a room which he filled up with his own furniture, and had with him all his books, accounts, and writings, and other effects, to the value of about £ 30,000."
In Early Victorian novels reference is frequently made to "the Rules" of a debtors' prison, which represented another convenience procurable by those who could pay large fees. Mr. Bray and his daughter Madeline lived in the rules of the Fleet (Nicholas Nickleby, vol. II, ch. XIV), and Dickens defines them as being "a certain Iiberty adjoining the prison, and comprising some dozen streets, in which debtors who can raise money to pay large fees... are permitted to reside." The practice only existed in the Fleet and in the Queen's Bench prison.
4) The Fleet was for a long time the Cretna Green of London: from 1686 to 1754, when Parliament put an end to it, over a ton of books were used to register all the Fleet marriage contracts closed by imprisoned clergymen there. Their touts walked about in the Rules, asking people, "Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married," or they conducted their business in taverns with signs like the following: "Marriages performed cheap here." Some parsons kept husbands on hire at 5 shillings each, for women in debt. Trumble, op., cit., pp. 100, 101.
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Besides the Fleet and the Marshalsea there were, as we have observed, three more debtors' prisons in London. There seems to have been some difference in rank between the five establishment^. Mr. Parker, Pickwick's solicitor, tells his cliënt that he cannot go to Whitecross Street, as "there are sixty beds in a ward, and the bolts on, sixteen hours out of the four-and-twenty," and he advises him to go the Fleet. In Little Dorrit we hear Mr. Rugg, an attorney, teil his cliënt Art hu r Clennam, that if he allows himself to be arrested on a little writ—i.e., for a small amount, "a mere Palace Court jurisdiction," as Mr. Ruggs puts it— he will be put into the Marshalsea. "Now you know what the Marshalsea is," he adds. "Very close. Excessively confined. Whereas in the King's Bench."—-Mr. Rugg waved his right hand freely, as expressing abundance of space." 1 That there was such a difference in the status of the various prisons is corroborated by the statistics about the number of prisoners locked up in each, and the amounts of the debts for which they were shut up. These statistics show us that while in 1842 in the Queen's Bench nearly 30 % of the insolvents owed debts above £ 100, there were in the Marshalsea no more than 2 % owing such high amounts.
We have already hinted at the great evils resulting from spunging-houses and debtors' prisons. The effect they were intended to produce was in the first place to act as a deterrent to contract debts, and next to compel insolvents to make a settlement after such debts had been incurred. Neither of the two objects was reached by the system, however. We have described what fearful proportions running into debt had reached in Early Victorian thnes, notwithstanding the hard treatment awaiting defaulters, while the moral effect imprisonment produced was likewise as bad as possibk.
As McCulloch observes, prisoners generally were of two sorts, the improvident and helpless, who in straitened circumstances easily feil into bad courses through the facilities shopkeepers offered them, and the rascals who availed themselves of those same f acilities to live for a time at the expense of the tradespeople. Sam Weller at
1) Trumble, op. cit., p. 150: "It was much more roomy and enduraWethan the Fleet... The court-yard was comparatively spacious..."
15»



once distinguishes the difference in character between the two categories, when he enters the Fleet. As he observes to his master, the drinking and roaring fellows, "they don't mind it; it's a regular holiday to them, all porter and skittles. It's the other vuns as gets done over: them down-hearted fellers as can't swig away at the beer, nor play at skittles neither; them as vould pay, if they could, and gets low by being boxed up." This demoralising effect on the honest debtor, whose struggles prove too much for him, is described at great length by Dickens in the person of Mr. Dorrit, who so completely loses all sense of self-respect and self-reliance (small though it had no doubt been before his misfortunes came down upon him), that he gladly lives on what brave Little Dorrifs labour produces, and on the shillings and half crowns bestowed on the Father of the Marshalsea by departing prisoners.
Besides leading to the moral debasement of thousands of persons who drifted into vice, idleness, and helpless dependence on others, there were other abuses for which the debtors' prison was responsible. Literature affords many examples of the numerous opportunities given by the law for practising the most atrocious cruelties. One of the greatest evils of the law was, as Johnson had already pointed out in The Idler (No. 20), that prisoners could be detained at the will and pleasure of their creditors, who were the interested parties, and were often actuated by anything but just motives. Charles Reade tells us how the rascally John Meadows, to whom reference has already been made in these pages, wanting a tooi to carry out his shady business undertakings, bought up all the debts of the attorney Peter Crawley, then sued him, got judgments out against him, and thus got him into his power, by "raising the axe of the law over Peter's head."
Further it was the prisoner in the Fleet or elsewhere who promised to an unscrupulous rascal the best chances to make a tooi of him. As Richard Crauford said when seeking to corrupt an impoverished gentleman of a noble character: "Your debtor's side of the Fleet is almost as good a pleader as an empty stomach."1
Dickens illustrates the cruelty of the law in The Old Man's Tale, in which he describes how a man uses a debtors' prison to revenge
1) The Disowned, p. 242.
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himself in a terribly inhuman tnanner on his father-in-law, by buying up the old man's proofs of indebtedness, and then telling him that he will "consign hkn to the living death to which (he) devoted (his daughter), a hopeless prison."
The practice of buying up debts was frequently adopted by the lowest class of attorneys, who used these bills to bring actions upon them, and enriched themselves by the extortionate amounts they made their victims pay for costs. How high such costs often were appears from various passages in Dickens's works, who must have known something of the doings in lawyers' offices, having been engaged in such places for a year and a half in his youth. We have already made mention of the case of Salomon Peil, who charged £ 5 for Tony Weller's claim on his son Sam, amounting to £ 25. In one of the Sketches there is a claim of £ 33.10.4, with costs amounting to £ 2.13.6. Sam Weller tells Mr. Pickwick of a case where a man was imprisoned for seventeen years, "for a debt of £ 9, multiplied by five for costs." These figures are corroborated by actual facts. In 1792 it was reported to the House of Commons that a woman had been imprisoned in one of the county gaols, forty-five years for a debt of nineteen pounds.1 The figures in the Parliamentary Accounts etc. prove that in 1839 there was one prisoner in Ireland who had been incarcerated for debt for twentyèight years; in England and Wales there were two who had been prisoners for twenty-seven years; in the Fleet there was one who had been imprisoned for twenty-five years; etc* According to the statistics for 1842,for Horsemonger LaneGaol.the aggregate amount of debts of the 1078 committed here was £ 2321.16.93/4, while the total costs amounted to no less than £ 681.12.11, which works out to nearly 30 %!* The Parliamentary Papers cited above give the following instances: Debt £ 6.6, costs £ 30; debt £ 12, costs £ 28, etc.4
Sometimes a creditor used his power over the person of a debtor for less cruel purposes, as in the case described in Frank Fairlegh, where a duel has been arranged between Harry Oaklands and Mr.
1) Credit Pemicious, p. 21, note.
2) Parliamentary Papers, XLIII, p. 417.
3) McCulloch, Dictionary, "Credit."
4) Parliamentary Papers, XLIV, p. 223.
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ïi



Wilford. Oakland's friends, fearing for his life, arrange to have his opponent taken into custody on a magistrate's warrant, just half an hour before the time appointed for the meeting. The creditor was all the more willing to accommodate Oakland's friends in this affair, as he had lent Wilford large sums "on his expectancies," and therefore wanted to do everything in his power to prevent accidents that would have reduced those expectancies to nothing.
The loud and general complaints about the law of insolvency, of which the Law Commissioners reported in 18301 that they were well founded, led to various attempts at improvement, and Dickens's chapters on the Fleet no doubt bore a share in arousing the indignation of the public which forced the Government into action. In 1838 Cottenham introduced a Bill purporting to abolish all imprisonment for debt, but the House of Lords only consented to abolish that on mesne process, under certain conditions. In 1842 the Fleet was abolished, and its inmates sent to the Queen's Prison. The building was demolished four years later, while the Marshalsea was abolished the year after that In 1844 more evils were remedied by legislation, and at length, in 1861, the difference between traders and non-traders was abolished.
1) Samuel Johnson had already suggested a simple solution in 1758. The Idler, No. 22.
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CHAPTER XVI.
Company Trading*
In one of the last chapters of his admirable book on the French Revoluhon Brown1 observes that English legislation had got so badly behind in the decades between Waterloo and the Reform of 1832, that the arrears had not yet been quite made up at the time he wrote his remark (1916).
Of these arrears no better illustration can be given than the state of legislation with regard to Company trading in the period discussed in these pages. In order to understand the real position of affairs, a brief historical survey of this form of business organisation will be indispensable, before we can turn to Early Victorian literature for illustrations of the anarchical conditions prevailing in this domain.
Of old there had existed in England two sorts of companies, Regulated and Joint Stock Companies. The first were those in which every member had a right to trade on his own stock or funds, and at his own risk, and was of course entitled to all the profits arising from his enterprises. Specimens of this kind of venture were the Russia Company, the Levant Company, and the Africa Company.2 The óbject of such organisations was to levy contributions from their members, to defray the expenses of maintaining ambassadors and consuls, to build factories or trading stations, to maintain cruisers for the protection of merchant vessels, in all cases where the Government was unable or unwilling to give protection in the trade with barbarous countries. In return for the expenses
1) Philip Anthony Brown, op. cit., ch. IX and X.
2) C. Wordsworth (Law of Joint Stock Companies. London, 1842) believes the first two to have been the only instances of Regulated Companies in England, but he is evidently mistaken. Cf. McCulloch, op. cit, "Companies."
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such a company incurred, it generally obtained a monopoly of the trade to such a country.
Joint Stock Companies were those associations in which the capital stock of the members—here called proprietors or shareholders1— was thrown together, each sharing in the profits made with this joint stock, in the proportion of the amount contributed, and being liable only for this amount. All these joint stock companies were established either by the Crown, by means of a Charter— e.g., the East India Company in 1600, and the Bank of England in 1694—in the same way as towns were constituted into boroughs, or by an Act of Parliament, e.g., the numerous railway companies founded in the Early Victorian period. The latter course was required in all cases where such exclusive privileges were sought by a company as did not fall within the prerogatives of the Crown.
Suoh Charters and Acts of Parliament were only obtainable for certain very special purposes, however, and not for general trading purposes.2 Acts of Parliament were so expensive, moreover, owing to the endiess formalities that had to be gone through that they would have been entirely out of the reach of an ordinary enterprise.8
If no charter was available for them, trading partnerships could never legally constitute themselves into incorporated companies. They were, in the words of Samuel Warren, the author of Ten thousand a Year, "simply a huge, unwieldy partnership consisting of all such persons as could be shown to have interested themselves." In such large partnerships with perhaps thousands of members,
1) The ternis 'members' and 'proprietors' were gradually superseded by the word 'shareholders'. In the case of the Bank of England and a few other old mstitutions the name of 'proprietors' still survives.
2) Van Nierop, De Vennootschap met Beperkte Aansprakelijkheid volgens het Engelsche Recht. Dissertatie. Amsterdam 1866: "Slechts in buitengewone gevallen, wanneer de kroon of het Parlement van oordeel was, dat een vennootschap het algemeen in hooge mate bevorderde, en zonder corporatierechten niet kon bestaan, werden haar deze rechten, en daarmee aan de leden beperkte aansprakelijkheid verleend."
3) The figures given for some railway companies are very instructive in this respect: It cost £ 70,000 to obtain Parliamentary permission to build the Liverpool-Manchester Iine (L. C. A. Knowles, The lndustrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain, p. 255. London, 1922). The thirtyfive railway bills passed in 1836 invoived an estimated expenditure of £ 17,500,000 (Edward Cleveland-Stevens, English Railways, p. 8. London, 1915. Dissertation).
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the same rules of management and liability obtained therefore as in small ones with perhaps only three or four partners. This position necessarily led to a great many incongruities, as well as to many inconveniences both for the members and for the public having dealings with the partnership.1
We need not be surprised to see such unincorporated companies or large common law partnerships frequently act as if they had obtained a Royal Charter. In a pamphlet in defence of unchartered companies, entitled Lawyers and Legislators, Disraeli wrote: "That an extensive but simple partnership, consisting of human beings possessing the passions of humanity, must have some rules, some regulations, some restrictions; that these must be contrived upon a more extended scale, and expressed in a more formal and official manner, than the rules for regulating the partnership of two or three individuals, of congenial sentiments and similar pursuits, our experience of human nature has surely taught us." 2 Unfortunately,
1) Van Nierop (op. cit.) points to some of these difficulties in the following passage: "Volgens Engeland's Common Law bezat een gewone vennootschap geen rechtspersoonlijkheid. Bij elke rechtsvordering tegen een vennootschap moesten alle de leden bij name gedagvaard worden. Tot hoevele moeilijkheden dit aanleiding gaf, zal men licht beseffen uit de omstandigheid, dat het Engelsche recht voor de openbaarmaking van de namen van de vennooten geen zorg had gedragen. Het instellen van een rechtsvordering tegen een vennootschap, uit vele leden bestaande, was daardoor bijna onmogelijk geworden. Licht was een der vennooten onbekend, en bijgevolg in de dagvaarding vergeten, hetgeen den overigen recht gaf tot een dilatoire exceptie, totdat allen waren opgeroepen. De excipient was echter alsdan verplicht, de naaien en woonplaatsen der niet opgeroepen vennooten op te geven, zoodat men hierna, dikwijls na veel tijdverlies, eindelijk in staat was, tot de behandeling van de zaak over te gaan.
Maar nu verrees somtijds een nieuw bezwaar. De vennooten konden zich zoowel gezamenlijk als ieder afzonderlijk verdedigen. Kozen zij het laatste hetgeen niemand hun beletten kon, dan moest de eischer wel van de instantie afstand doen, wilde hij niet zijn geheele vermogen aan proceskosten verspelen."
Another Dutch dissertation (L. A. C. Kolff, Eenige opmerkingen over Naamlooze Vennootschappen in Engeland. Leiden, 1891) cites an interesting instance of such a procedure (p. 8): "Eischer daagde daartoe—i.e., in order to obtain the dissolution of a company on the ground of misrepresentations made in a prospectus^-de directeuren en andere aandeelhouders voor den rechter. Veertien van de directeuren verschenen, en gaven ieder afzonderlijk antwoord... Het resultaat was, dat het feitelijk onmogelijk was, om zoo'n proces te beginnen, wegens de ontzaglijke kosten daaraan verbonden."
2) This pamphlet was written in 1825, on the occasion of the decision taken in the Real del Monte Company case. Lord Liverpool said in Parliament that he did not wish to see restrictive measures on speculation: "everybody has a right to employ his capital as he chooses," which laissez-faire principle Disraeli then greatly applauded (p. 32).
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however, the unchartered large partnerships did not always stop at this harmiess imitation of incorporated companies!
The first time these illegal practices were carried out on a large scale was in the second decade of the seventeenth century, when the South Sea Bubble induced the Government to take measures for the suppression of company speculations, which it embodied in the so-called Bubble Act of 1719. This Act provided that all unincorporated companies acting as if they possessed a charter1 were "for ever deemed to be illegal and void" (section XVIII), and were "to be deemed a public nuisance" (section XIX). Offenders therein were to be "liable to such fines" as "persons convicted for public nuisance" were liable at that time.2
After the passing of the Act the South Sea mania subsided and the new legislative measure was soon forgotten. At the end of the eighteenth century, when trade and industry expanded on an unprecedentedly large scale, as a result of the industrial revolution, many undertakings again assumed the form of large partnerships with numerous members or partners. These companies, though necessarily unincorporated, also acted again as if they were corporate bodies, i.e., they raised their capital by public subscription, issued transferable shares, and even frequently stated in their prospectuses that the liability of the members was to be restricted to the amount for which they took shares in the undertaking.
By the side of many bona fide trading companies with which nobody had any desire to interfere, there also sprang up again numerous swindle companies, and it was these "bubbles" or "moonshine," 3 which at length induced the courts to revive the strict provisions of the long forgotten Bubble Act. The first case in which the Act was enforced was that of Rex v. Dodd in 1808, and here it was urged by the counsel for the defendant that it was a great hardship to be prosecuted on a statute "which, except in
1) The indicia mentioned in the Act are: they raised their 'joint stock' or capital by opening books for public subscription; they pretended to make their shares in stocks transferable without any restriction; they acted in every way as if they were corporate bodies (section XV11I).
2) Eeuwigdurende gevangenschap en verbeurdverklaring van goederen (Van Nierop, op. cit., p. 24).
3) A term used by the Master of the Rolls in Stent v. Bailis. Wordworth, op. cit.
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the instance of Rex v. Cawood, does not appear in any case in print to have been acted upon."
After this case many others came before the courts, but the judges appear to have taken a lenient view with regard to the illegality of unincorporated companies, which is best illustrated by the judgment pronounced in Rex v. Webb, where it was stated by the court that a common name, a committee, general meetings and power to make bye-laws, were not inequivocal indicia of a corporation, and that all these things, together with the raising of capital by subscription, and the issue of transferable stock, were only considered an offence, in case they referred to dangerous and mischievous projects.
This lengthy and somewhat technkal explanation of the status of joint stock companies up to the period which forms the subject of this essay we have considered indispensable for a correct understanding of what Early Victorian novelists wrote about the matter. The conclusion that can be drawn from our sketch may briefly be formulated as follows: the necessities of the Industrial Revolution, and the consequent expansion of commerce and industry had called into existence numbers of unincorporated companies, which had assumed the form and usurped the privileges of incorporated ones, without being legally entitled to them, but the courts at first were only inclined to apply the strict provisions of the old Bubble Act to such companies, if they had dangerous and mischievous objects in view, more particularly, "if their capital was raised for purposes of transfer only, or in order to make such stock a subject of commercial speculation and venture." 1
This happened, when circumstances arose in the business world that bore a striking resemblance to those which had induced the Government a hundred years before to enact the drastic measures embodied in the Bubble Act. These circumstances were produced by the great economie crises which, as the investigations of Jevons have proved, had already made their appearance in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and whose consequences grew more serious, in proportion as the interdependence of individual prosperity became closer. This closer relation among the members of the business community was in its turn the outcome of the new economie
1) Wordsworth, op. cit., p. 27.
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structure of English society after the Industrial Revolution, with its increased facilities of communication, and its rapidly extending system of banking credit as the financial basis of commercial enterprise.
The above crises occurring, according to Jevons' calculations, at intervals of 10-4 years, were ascribed by this economist to the f luctuations in the trade between England and sub-tropical countries, depending in their turn on the heat of the sun. Thus he was led to suppose that the changing sun-spots coincided with the above phenomena in the commercial world.1 Other causes were no doubt more effectual in bringing about periodical fluctuations in national prosperity, such as the imperfect organisation of trade, the difficulty of obtainmg reliable and prompt information on the state of foreign markets and other marters of importance,2 the great accumulation of capital from the new industries, the indiscriminate granting of credit by banks, etc.
When to this increasing influence of commercial ups and downs we add the elated and over-confident frame of mind of the average Englishman in Early Victorian times as regards the wonders commerce, industry, and science could perform, we need not be surprised to see a recurrence at regular intervals of speculations that were quite as wild, and on a far larger scale than the notorious South Sea Bubble of a century before. The first great mania of this sort with which we are concerned was that culminating in the panic of 1827. It had sought its chief activities in mining shares, especially of Mexican mining companies, in which John Halifax refused to embark his capital in 1825, and in defence of which Disraeli wrote some pamphlets to one of which we have already referred before.3 Another feature of the crisis was the large number of foreign loans, chiefly of the new South American republics, that were issued in London, and that often proved to be mere swindles.4
The easy and light-hearted manner in which industrial booms
1) Jevons points to various earlier writers, like Dr. Clarke, Danson, and Wilson, who had studied the existence of a decennia] cycle. He himself traces the credit cycle back to 1701. Investigations in Currency and Financê, ch. VIII, Commercial crises and sun-spots. London, 1884.
2) Engels, op. cit., pp. 82, 83
3) Cónfer p. 165.
4) Confer p. 136.
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were brought about, only to terminate in a general economie crash, is satirized very effectively by Disraeli in Popanitla. He describes the phenomenon as follows. When Popanilla had revealed to the Vraiblusians (i.e., the English) the existence of a new market for their productions in his native Isle of Fantaisie, this "most commercial nation of the world" at once began to prepare itself "to diffuse the blessings of civilisation and competition throughout the new territory." This reads like a parody of McCulloch's words, who says. of commerce that it has "caused the blessings of civilisation to be universally diffused, and the treasures of knowledge and science to be conveyed to the remotest corners." A feverish activity prevailed throughout Vraiblusia to furnish the new market with everything required, "from steam-engines down to stockings," and every branch of trade rejoiced at the new opening for commercial enterprise.
In the end the Vraiblusian manufacturers and merchants had prepared their shipments for the new market, and five hundred ships with judiciously assorted cargoes sailed for the Isle of Fantaisie. Unfortunately, however, these vessels were utterly unable to find the strange island, or even to obtain the slightest intelligence of its situation, so that after a long, but fruitless cruise they had to return home again. This incident throws a vivid light on the manner in which commerce and industry were inclined to believe, even on the slenderest grounds, that a profitable business could be done in some foreign market. That there is really no exaggeration in Disraeli's satire may appear from the description Engels has left us of such booms and subsequent glutted markets. "Everything is done blindly," he says, "as guess work, more or less at the mercy of accident. Upon the slightest favourable report, each one exports what he can, and before long such a market is glutted, sales stop, capital remains inactive, prices f all, and the English manufacture has no further employment for its hands."
The result produced at home by the return of the fleet was that "dismay, despair, disorganisation prevailed in all directions," as the markets were now glutted with the unsaleable cargoes. "All the millionaires crashed." "The public funds sank ten per cent. daily." "Every tradesman failed." "The Government perceived that its issues of pink shells had been too unrestricted, and it had to sustain a run by the public."
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But, as Disraeli observes, "whenever the man is required, invariably the man will appear," and the Vraiblusians are assisted in their national distress by "a public instructor, Mr. Flummary Flum," in whose person we have to see one of the first satires in literature on the political economist and his rapidly increasing influence on public life in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Like Ricardo, Mr. Flum explains to the Vraiblusians the meaning pf wages, rent, and profits, so that they soon became the most "Flummary-Flummistical" nation in the world.
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CHAPTER XVII.
The History of Samuel Titmarsh.
As was to be expected, Company trading and more often Company swindling, flourished on an unprecedentedly large scale in the critical period outlined above. Wordsworth uses as motto for his book on joint stock companies a passage from Channing: "One of the most remarkable circumstances or features of our age is the energy with which the principle of combination, or of action by joint forces, is manifesting itself. It may be said, without exaggeration, that everything is now done by societies."
There is hardly any novel of the Early Victorian period but contains at least some reference to the "madness" of the time. Popanilla is one of the earliest books dwelling at some length on it. Disraeli describes how, as soon as the inhabitants of Vraiblusia have heard of the unknown Isle of Fantaisie, "public companies were formed for working the mines, colonising the waste lands, and cutting the coral rocks of the Indian Isle ..."
In his story of Samuel Titmarsh, treating likewise of the great crisis of 1825, Thackeray observes that "there was a great mania in the City of London for establishing companies of all sorts, by which many people made pretty fortunes." 1
Dickens also satirizes the great crash of 1827, which he vaguely denotes as "great Merdle enterprises" in Little Dorrit. He speaks of the phenomenon as the prevalent disease, and presents his readers the following diagnosis of it: "Bred at first, as many physical diseases are, in the wickedness of men, and then 'disseminated in their ignorance, these epidemics, after a period, get
1) The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, ch. I. Works, vol. XII. London, 1878.
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communicated to many sufferers who are neither ignorant nor wicked." 1
The Company epidemie, prevailing all through the Early Victorian period, and only interrupted at regular intervals by a great crash, followed by a spell of diminished virulence, continued to attract the attention of novelists till about the middle of the century. In 1848 Uncle Locke said to his nephew, when advising him to follow a clerical career: "There is always some new company in the wind now," while in Yeast it is to railway speculations that the hero's uncle, the banker Smith, owes his ruin.
Bulwer makes fun of the "disease" by picturing in The Caxtons the portrait of Uncle Jack, who "shaved his beard as close as if it was one of his grand national companies, while his watch chain "was garnished with a large number of seals, each seal representing the device of some defunct company, and they might be said to resemble the scalps of the slain, worn by the original Iroquois." So virulent was the disease in his case that "he would stand an hour at a cottage door, admiring the little girls who were straw-platting, and then walk into the nearest farm-houses, to suggest the feasibility of a "national straw-plat association."3
The high-sounding names company promoters devised for their enterprises, in order to ensnare the public—"the very name will get the shares up to a premium," as Mr. Bonney said to Ralph Nickleby—are frequently ridiculed by novelists. Grand and National appear to have been the usual epithets prefixed to those names, in actual life as well as in literature.4 Thus we read in The Caxtons of the Grand National Benevolent Clothing Company, the New Grand National Insurance Company, the Grand anti-Publisher Confederate Authors' Society, the Grand Provincial Agricultural Anti-innovating Society, and—last, but not least—the Grand National anti-Monopoly Coal Company instituted on behalf of the poor Householders of London, and against the Monster-Monopoly of the London Coal Wharfs. Dickens tells us in Nicholas Nickleby of the
1) Page 675.
2) The Knebworth Edition, p. 36.
3) In his Advice to Young Men, Cobbett boasts that hej has "introduced into England the manufacture of straw-plat." Introduction, p. II.
4) It is a curious sign of the general spirit of the times that even serious measures for social improvement were sometimes attempted by giving them the form of a share company. See p. 81.
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United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crurnpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company, while Thackeray mentions the Muf f and Tippet Company in Samuel Titmarsh.
Though on the whole Thackeray does not appear to have taken much interest in the economie and social problems of his time, it is the last mentioned story of Samuel Titmarsh, that we must discuss first in connection with the subject of the present chapter. From a literary point of view it is not worth much, being but a rambling and rather incoherently told story; for the purposes of this essay, however, it is of great value, as it gives us a very complete and instructive description of the manner in which companies often conducted their affairs previous to the repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825.1
The great company promoter and directer is John Brough, a Turkey merchant doing a flourishing business in the City with his partner Hoff. But this concern does not offer scope enough to the great business capacities of Mr. Brough, and he is besides "interested in five hundred companies in the City of London." His pet enterprise in this line appears to be the West Diddlesex Fire and Life Assurance Association, on whose behalf he exerts all his organizing talents and his great powers of persuasion.
These exertions are in the first place directed towards inducing as many persons as possible either to become shareholders in the Company, or to insure their lives and property with it. No man is too rich or too poor, too highly placed in society, or of too humble a rank to escape the great man's attention. As the hero of the story says to a friend: "You don't know the City of London, and the passion which our great men in the share market have for increasing their connection." At his house in Fulham he arranges brilliant parties where even the nobility appear, but he also induces old Oates, his poor lodge-keeper, to invest his small savings in the West Diddlesex, whose name is already a sufficiënt indication of its object of diddling people out of their money. Brough even uses his daughter Belinda as a bait to catch shareholders and annuitants: Mr. Tidd and Captain Fizgigg are the moths flying about that -candle. Solicitors like Aunt Hoggarty's and other agents are induced by high premiums to get their clients to invest in the Company;
1) The crash of the companies described in the story came "in the oeginning of 1824" (p. 24).
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each of the first clerks in Mr. Brough's office has the privilege of disposing of 5000 /. worth of shares at par, though, as he assures our hero Samuel Titmarsh, they are at a very great premium in the market. The relations of all the "young gents" wishing to enter into the employment of the splendid Company have to take a certain number of shares or an annuity beforehand.
How those shares had risen to "a very great premium" does not become very clear to the reader. It cannot have been owing to the dividends paid, for Samuel Titmarsh, who is one of the "young gents" referred to above, tells us that "the last dividend paid ... amounted to 6% %," while at the next annual meeting "Mr. Brough, in his magnificent speech, declare(d) a dividend of 6 per cent." As such moderate figures could never have forced the price of the shares up to a very great premium, we may well believe that this market price was not merely the result of supply and demand, but that Mr. Brough's manipulations also had something to do with it.
A glimpse of such manipulations we actually get "at our meeting in January 1823," at which a half-yearly dividend was declared "of 41. per cent., at the rate of 8/. per cent. per annum." At the office of the Company certain things had happened shortly before which made it advisable to pay an interim dividend this time. In the half year intervening between the last annual meeting and this extraordinary one Roundhand, the secretary and actuary, had quarrelled with Mr. Brough, taken his money out of the concern, and disposed of his shares "to a very good profit," whereupon he had gone away, speaking as much evil as he could of the Company and its Director. No doubt the half-yearly and increased dividend was meant by the latter as a counter-move, to prove '4iow unfounded were Mr. Roundhand's aspersions on the West Diddlesex."
That dividends were not always in those days what they really ought to be, namely payments out of actual profits earned, is evident from a number of other instances to be met with in literature. One of the most striking is that of Uncle Jack's Coal Company, which we have already mentioned,1 and which, though never earning a penny, had for three years paid twenty per cent. dividend to the delighted shareholders out of their own capital.
1) Page 172.
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The fact that Mr. Brough should deern it necessary to support the prestige of the West Diddlesex and the market price of its shares against the aspersions of the departed officer, need not surprise us, when we remember that Mr. Roundhand knew too much of the internal management of the Company's affairs. The reader is allowed a short glimpse at the manner in which these affairs are conducted in the following passage: "... it was the day you drew out £ 873.10.6—Thursday week," says I (to Mr. B.). "And oh, Roundhand!" continued our Governor, "draw a cheque for 700, will you. Come, don't stare, man, I'm not going to run away! That's right—seven hundred and ninety say, while you're about it! Our board meets on Saturday, and never fear, I'll account for it to them."
Evidently the Director did with the money of the Company just as he pleased, and considered it as his private property.1 In order to increase his influence, he says to Samuel Titmarsh: "I can't by the regulations of the Company have more than a certain number of votes, but if your aunt takes shares I expect—I don't mind owning it— that she will vote with me." We further seefiim dismissing and promoting his "young gents," without Consulting anybody in the matter. All these facts entirely agree with what Van Nierop remarks about the powers many company directors usurped: "De oprichters ... ontnamen in de acte van oprichting, die zij zelve opstelden, den vennooten zooveel mogelijk elk toezicht op de handelingen der directeuren." *
What use Mr. Brough had made of this lack of control came to light to its full extent, when in the beginning of 1824 the crash came. One of his companies, the Muff and Tippet Company, shut up shop, after swallowing, as some said, a capital of 300,000/., and "nothing to show for it except a treaty with the Indians, who had afterwards tomahawked the agent of the Company." There were some people, however, who said that there were no Indians
1) That such things could really happen, even in concerns that belonged to the most honourable in English history, appears from the description Macaulay has left us of the manner in which Sir Josuah Child, the great Governor of the East India Company, managed the finances of that gigantic enterprise towards the end of the seventeenth century, History of England, vol. III, p. 296.
2) Op. cit., p. 31.
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at all, nor agents to be tomahawked, but that the whole had been invented in a house in Crutched Friars!
We are not surprised, therefore, to read that, when next the affairs of the West Diddlesex came into the Bankruptcy Court, further revelations were made about the manner in which John Brough had conducted the affairs of his companies, even without the knowledge of his co-directors. One of the creditors produced documents in court signed by Brough and making himself and the Company liable for a large amount, while it further appeared that a considerable sum of money had already been paid to that same creditor, which Titmarsh believes Brough had borrowed from that gentleman, who was himself again one of the directors of the West Diddlesex!
The independence of the law to which according to Disraeli's pamphlets Companies were forced in those days.frequently rendered it impossible for a dupe of such swindles to obtain redress in a court of law, as we shall see in the next chapter. On the other hand this same lawlessness might also in some cases afford some sort of protection to the afflicted shareholders, by likewise incapacitating their directors from proceeding against them. Thus we read in Samuel Titmarsh that when the shares of the Patent Pump Company, another of Brough's "five hundred companies," stood at 65, and a fresh call was made by the Directors, all the shareholders simply refused to pay. Even if the Directors had dared to bring their affairs before the Court, they would have run the risk of being denied their claims, on the ground of both partjes being in pari delicto.
As is usual when snch kind of "business" goes wrong, the thieves feil out, when the crisis of 1824 brought about the downfall of many of Brough's companies, without in this case honest people coming by their own, however. When Roundhand's campaign against the West Diddlesex began to produce its effects, "stormy words" passed at the board meetings, which ended in the retirement of several members of the Board. Friends of Mr. Brough filled up the vacancies, but by their canting names Thackeray clearly shows us what sórt of people they were: Mr. Puppet, Mr. Straw, Mr. Query, and others.
The position of the great director himself had by thi» time also
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become rather "shaky," a word which, as Thackeray observes, was not to be found in Johnson's Dictionary,1 though it has become quite a current term since that time. How Brough's affairs had become so shaky, we hear him explain to Samuel Titmarsh: he had been involved in no fewer than fourteen actions "brought by creditors of that infernal Ginger Beer Company," which was one of his creations. This Company had shut up shop and its creditors, who had the right to come down for their claims upon any shareholder, had of course singled out John Brough, first on account of his "known wealth," but also no doubt because they feit sure that he had pocketed the bulk of the plunder. Van Nierop says with reference to this liability: "De leden waren niet alleen onbeperkt, maar ook solidair aansprakelijk. Hiervan was het gevolg, dat meestal slechts eenige weinige personen de dikwerf zeer aanzienlijke schulden der vennootschap moesten betalen. De rijkste vennooten werden het eerst aangesproken, en moesten bijgevolg de verbintenissen der vennootschap voldoen. Zij konden wel verhaal uitoefenen op de overige vennooten, doch deze waren onvermogend, of in verschillende ver verwijderde streken woonachtig, zoodat van hen moeilijk vergoeding te verkrijgen was."2 Thackeray makes a slight mistake by restricting this liability to the directors only: Samuel Titmarsh wants to make us believe that "the creditors could only come down upon the Directors." 3 Curiously enough there is another passage again in which the author explains that Titmarsh is not liable, as he is "not a shareholder at all."
When shortly after the crash of the Ginger Beer Company the West Diddlesex Association likewise came to grief, the disappointed creditors of that concern would no doubt have taken the same course of proceeding against "the wealthiest director," if Mr. Brough , had not forestalled them by discreetly crossing the Channel, which was the usual way gentlemen in his position took, as appears from numerous cases in literature, unless they preferred to bolt to America.4
1) On the reliability of this test we have already made an observation on page 113.
2) Op. cit., p. 52.
3) Samuel Titmarsh, p. 112.
4) Early Victorian literature contains many instances of this kind of American hospitality. In Rattlin the Reefer we read of Messrs. Isaiahsons and Co. becoming bankrupts and then going to live like princes in America
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The manner in which the fact of Titmarsh not being a shareholder is explained is not very accurate; we find very contradictory statements in the story. On page 62 he says his Aunt Hoggarty "had the sum invested in my name... At our annual meeting I attended in my capacity as a shareholder...;" on page 67, however, it is Mrs. Hoggarty herself who is called "our excellent shareholder" by Mr. Brough; on page 94 Titmarsh is arrested "as a shareholder of the Independent West Diddlesex Association;" on page 100 the same person says: "I knew I was not a shareholder (i.e., not any longer); that the shares were scrip shares, making the dividend payable to bearer; and my aunt had called back her shares and consequently I was free."
On all these conflicting statements the following observations may be made. Supposing the hero to have been really a shareholder at the outset—which seems to be Thackeray's idea—the mere fact that he gave his shares back to his aunt would in no way have exempted him from his liability on them, as appears for instance from the judgment passed in the case of Blundell v. Windsor, in which it was held that the partnership deed of a mining company was illegal, as it held out to the public, as an inducement to become partners, that they might continue as such as long as they pleased, and then get rid of all liability incurred by transferring their shares to some other person. We may therefore doubt whether our hero would have been so easy about the matter as he tells us, had he known more of the legal status of an unincorporated company in those days—and such the West Diddlesex Association must of course have been, as incorporated companies all enjoyed the privilege of Ihnited liability.
His observation that the shares were scrip making the dividend payable to bearer clashes with what he previously said about the money being invested in his name. Scrip, or Omnium, as it was
(vol. II, p. 173). In Crotchet Castte there is the banker Touchandgo, who acts likewise, and whose example is followed by young Crotchet, the loanmonger, whom he had expected there long before already. In Warren's Dtary there is Henry Dudley shooting a man in a duel, and flying to America (vol. I, p. 432). The rascal Cumberland in Frank Fairlegh goes to the States, believing that he can turn his talents as a gambter and a forger to account among the Yankees. At least three authors produced a book that offended the American cousins greatly, viz., Dickens, Mrs. Trollope, and. Marryat.
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also called at that early period, consisted in the unregistered subscription receipts issued to subscribers, and on which one or more payments had been made. It is to this provisional and unregistered form of securities that Thomas Mortimer in his booklet The Nefarious Practice of Stock-jobbing attributes the great increase in speculations. Formerly, he says, Stock Exchange transactions were confined to bona fide funds, which by law had to be registered in the books of the Bank of England, so that a full control of the sellers of the stock was in each case possrble, and sales by people who had no real property in the funds—which were contrary to Act of Parliament—could always be proved. "But," he complains, "by the frequency of loans there cohstantly remains floating in the market a fund denominated as "Omnium"; the scrip of which omnium consists not being registered in any public register, actual possession at the time of sale cannot be ascertained; consequentjy no check exists upon an unprincipled broker," i.e., whether he really held the scrip he was selling, or merely sold in blank as a speculation. Mortimer also points to the fact that the decision by which scrip was declared to be stock added alarming facilities to the operation of speculating jobbers.
The speculative facilities attending the issue of unregistered scrip in time led to the creation of unregistered or bearer shares as well. As Van Nierop observes,1 "door blanco aandeelen maakte de unincorporated company de onbeperkte aansprakelijkheid geheel illusoir," as the holders of such shares were often difficult to find in case of need, but in this instance Titmarsh has told us himself (page 62) that his aunt's money had been invested in his name, i.e., the shares were registered, and not bearer securities!
To the creditors of the Company there was now no other course left open but to try and recover their claims from the other directors. However, when they had at last succeeded in finding out the addresses of those gentlemen, there was not one amongst them who was able to meet the Company's liabilities, so that all the trouble taken to hunt them out was in vain.
The fact that Thackeray chose an insurance company to demonstrate all the swindles detailed above is probably not mere accident. In the first place the business of insuring had developed
1) Op. cit, p. 15.
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to a conéiderable extent in England at a much earlier date than on the Continent. This refers more particularly to fire and life insurance, marine insurance being a much olüer institution, to be met with among all sea-faring nations centuries before the time we are treating of. While regulations as to insurance were issued at Amsterdam in 1612, expressly forbidding life insurance, and in France in 1681, Queen Anne granted a charter to the Amicable Society as early as 1706, while The Royal Exchange Assurance Company and the London Assurance Company followed in 1720. In The Compleat Tradesman the author N. H. speaks already of "life assurance," which, as he explains, may be used for buying places and offices; "if you have not money enough to purchase it, you borrow four or five hundred pounds" from a friend. One of the causes of this early growth of life and fire insurance in England may have been the existence of a large public debt affording facilities to the companies for making investments.1
It is in the business of insurance that company promoters further found the most attractive field for their operations. No working capital, no factories or other buildings, no plant and machinery, no property of any kind was required. The only thing necessary for the starting of an insurance company was to open offices and ... to collect the premiums from the clients. The preference shown for this form of swindling we find reflected in literature; there are various instances in the novels of insurance companies founded by promoters. Uncle Jack in The Caxtons started the New Grand National Insurance Company, Mr. Tigg Montague in Martin Chuzzlewit founded the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company. As Samuel Titmarsh observes, such concerns did very well for the first few years, but as soon as clients began to die, and claims came in regularly, they experienced difficulties in meeting them.
This is what happened to John Brough's insurance company. When at the outset a large cotton mill was burned down, at a loss to the company of 80,000/., followed by a match factory with a claim for 14,000/., the West Diddlesex paid both claims promptly, and it was even said that it had had both establishments set on fire as an advertisement for its insurance business. But later on
1) McCulloch, op. cit., "Insurance."
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the tables were turned, and we hear nothing of the formation of a reserve, so that when three large claims had to be met in one week, the trouble began. From Thackeray's story it appears that the insured often possessed the same business morality as the companies themselves. When Mr. Meshach's sealing-wax factory was burned down, it contained 20,000 pounds' worth of the finest wax, which was all burned in a twinkling. The adjoining clothing-depot of Mr. Shadrach was burnt down on the same day, and that gentleman had just completed 40,000 suits of clothes for the cavalry of H.H. the Cacique of Poyais. The suggestion clearly is that the claims of those "jewish gents" were not bona fide. Indeed, when bringing their claims before the Bankruptcy Court, the mere threat of the Company's lawyer suffices to make them disappear altogether, and "no more was ever heard of their losses."
Cases like the above appear to have repeatedly come before the Courts in those days, if we may believe what McCulloch says with regard to this matter.1
Another factor placing even the most reliable of the new offices at a disadvantage compared with the older ones like the Sun and the Equitable, was that the latter had been able to accumulate much capital during the first fifty years of their existence, when premiums were high owing to the absence of competition,2 and companies also made much money by the curious circumstance that fully half the life insurances effected during the first quarter of a century were simply abandoned by the insured, after paying their premiums for a shorter or longer period, and without asking any compensation for these payments!8
1) McCulloch, op. cit, "Insurance."
2) Ibid. The author cites an instance of a premium falling from 81-/ to 53/-.
3) Ibid.
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CHAPTER XVIII.
Ten Thousand a Year*
Considering the circumstances described in the preceding chapter, we need not be surprised to see that many voices were raised against the gigantic scale on which bubble companies were used by swindlers as a favourite means of wheedling the public out of their money. On the other hand, there were numerous advocates of the principle of joint stock trading who only wished the new form of business to be left entirely free, to develop as was deemed most advisable by the commercial classes. It is somewhat curious to observe that among those advocates of the laissez-faire system Benjaman Disraeli was to be found, the future leadèr of the Tories. In the first of a series of three pamphlets that "Disraeli's pupil pen" wrote to oppose Lord Eldon's schemes of restrictive legislation, he vehemently denounced all attempts at control. In the second he continued his crusade against the Chancellor, who had recently threatened in a case before the Court to bring up against companypromoters not only all the stringent provisions of the Bubble Act, but to make a new Act as well.1 Disraeli approvingly cites Huskisson's attitude in support of his standpoint: "Huskisson strenuously opposed any attempts to restrain individuals from employing their capital as they chose. While some have raved about milk companies and monopolies, he has calmly observed that the evil will cure itself." 2 At the same time, however, Disraeli urges upon the Government the necessity of constructive legislation, for, as he pointedly remarks, the Legislature ought "to make joint stock companies amenable to the law of which under the present system they are forced to be independent."2 Here we find the whole
1) Lord Eldon was not only Lord Chancellor, but also a Cabinet Minister then.
2) Lawyers and Legislators, p. 95.
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position of public companies summed up in a nut-shell. It was precisely the fact of their being forced to be independent of the law that opened the door to the grossest abuses on the one hand, and to the greatest hardships in many judgments on the other hand.
Thesê hardships inflicted by the defective state of legislation are best illustrated by the following case cited by Wordsworth,1 in which it appeared that A. purchased shares in an unincorporated company, The British Ale Brewery, through a broker B., who charged and received from him 251. beyond the market price of such shares at the time. It was held that an action would not He to recover this sum, the Company being within the Bubble Act, and the parties in pari delicto!
Here was the case of a cliënt having admittedly been "done" by his stockbroker, and yet unable to find redress in Court!
In spite of Lord Eldon's threatening words referred to above, he did not act up to them: the commercial interests were powerful enough in Parliament to bring about a change in legislation in their own sense.2 In 1825 an Act was passed3 whereby the Bubble Act was repealed, as it was thought expediënt that in the future the undertakings mentioned in that Act should be "adjudged and dealt with in like manner as the same might have been dealt with and adjudged according to the common law" (Section I). At the same time a bit of constructive legislation was added in the second and last section, by which it was enacted that the Crown might henceforth grant charters of incorporation with unlimited liability to the members. The object of this provision was undoubtedly to enable such companies as could not, according to the prevalent opinion of those days, obtain Iimited liability, to enjoy at least the other privileges of corporations, e.g., the right to sue and be sued as a corporate body. Owing to the incompleteness and the many defects of the measure, it was never made much use of by the commercial world, however.
That the evils rampant before 1825 were not in any way diminished by the new Act is evident from Ten Thousand a Year,
1) Op. cit, p. 21; Buck v. Buck.
2) The first attempt was made by one Peter Moore, a director of many companies.
3) 6 Geo. IV, c. 91.
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which was published by Samuel Warren in 1841. Though the author mentions no other date in his book than 18—, there are many indications proving that the events narrated took place about the year 1832.1
Like other authors of those days, Samuel Warren begins his description of the joint stock swindles by observing that England was about that time "smitten wih a sort of mercantile madness which showed itself in the shape of a monstrous passion for joint stock companies." With a lawyer's delight in accurate facts and concrete statements2 he adds that this was but a second step on the road leading from individual to collective enterprise, the first being the adoption of private partnerships, which were then extended into public partnerships or joint stock companies. From the outset the business world followed a curious course, however, he says, by first deciding upon the establishment of a company, and only then. seeking an answer to the question upon what it was to be operated. However absurd such a course may seem to us, there was really no exaggeration in Warren's words, as appears from a case that came before the Courts, where "a Company had been formed for the purpose of making a railway and which, after continuing for rather more than a year, was dissolved, because no eligible line could be found." 8
Where such things were possible in the business world, it is really no exaggeration to speak of a mania. Indeed, the first decades of the 19th century were full of manias of every possible kind. This is a phenomenon that may be observed at all periods of great enterprise and success, but never did it perhaps manifest itself more clearly than at the time of the industrial revolution. The great and undreamt-of successes achieved by inventors and millowners in every department of technique and mechanics so stirred up the imagination of the people that soon everything seemed to lie within the bounds of possibility. Science was the great spring from which all those wonders had arisen, so to it people looked for the solution of all further problems. "Literary and scientific interests were all the rage," we read, "and society passed the
1) Vol. III, pp. 1, 17, 60, 65. Tauchnitz ed.
2) Warren was first a physician; later on he became) a lawyer.
3) Wordsworth, op. cit, p. 34.
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hours away in Iecture rooms,"1 where they listened to Carlyle, Thackeray, Faraday and others. It was especially the mathematicophysical branches of science that were in the ascendant during the first decades of the century, when private people like Ricardo,2 Midshipman Easy's uncle and the Martyr Philosopher in Warren's Diary fitted up laboratories in their own houses; but subjects of a more abstruse kind were also diligently studied, as appears from the numerous references in literature to mesmerism, crystal-seeing, clair-voyance, and especially craniology or phrenology, which seems to have been a particularly favourite branch of study.
In Yeast we read of the hero possessing "a particular mania for dried plants, fossils and butterflies," and of a young lady, Argemone, having "four new manias every year." Peacock's novel Headlong Hall is best denoted as "Every man in his mania," while in his Crotchet Castle there are likewise numerous passages in which he satirizes "the march of mind" of his time. In Popanilla the craze for 'science' and lectures is ridiculed in the person of Lady Spirituelle. In Traill and Mann a full list is given of all the fashionable manias of the period, among which we find fancy work, potochomania, electric experiments, animal magnetism, neuro-hypnotism, electro-biology, clair-audience, mesmerism, etc.8 Especially the last-named appears to have been very popular, and numerous books were written on the subject. Miss Martineau, who was once cured by a mesmerist, published a series of Letters on Mesmerism (1845). Punch frequently attacked in its first volumes one "Mons. Lafontaine," "the French Quack," who appears to have practised on a large scale in London.4
In no novel or story of the period are all the above manias, tendencies towards the supernatural, and belief in the possibility of everything impossible more clearly illustrated than in the short satires Dickens has left us of them in the proceedings of the Mudfog Association. They form a complete catalogue of all the vagaries of the human mind at that time, manifesting themselves
1) Traill and Mann, Sociat England, vol. VI, p. 134.
2) A Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 48, p. 94.
3) Traill and Mann, op. cit., pp. 507, 508.
4) On page 76 of vol. II Punch announced a new mania: collecting old penny stamps had become "the prevailing epidemie."
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in lectures on every conceivable subject. The interests of science cannot be sacrificed to those of a brute creature, say the vivisectionists; political economy wishes to direct the industries of fleas to useful and practical ends; the "facts and figures" of the statisticians—an echo of The Chimes, repeated once more later on in Hard Times—are ridiculed in the number of twenty-one millions nine hundred thousand skewers that are wasted annually in the Metropolis, and in the number of legs of the populatJon of Yorkshire towns, compared with the number of chair and stool legs there. The railway mania comes in for its share in the portable railway carried in the waistcoat pocket; joint stock company promoting is ridiculed in the forcing machine "for bringing out joint stock railway shares prematurely at a premium;" the inventive technical genius of the period is made fun of by the wonderful safety fire escape; craniology in the discussion by learned scholars of the 'skuU' shown by Professor John Ketch, a discussion which ends by that gentleman declaring that "it ain't no 'e'd at all; it's a coker-nut ..."
It is no wonder that, when company promoters cast about for spheres of action for their projected enterprises, they frequentJy turned to science or rather pseudo-science for help. This is nowhere brought out more clearly than in Ten Thousand a Year. When "Oily Gammon," a prominent lawyer in this novel, saw the profit to be made out of a company, he drew up prospectuses expounding among others a scheme for "carrying into effect a discovery by means of which ships of all kinds and sizes could be furnished with the means, by one and the same process,— and that remarkably simple, cheap, and convenient—of obtaining pure fresh water from the sea, and converting the salt or brine thrown off in the operation, instanter into gunpowder! The reality of this amazing discovery was decisively ascertained by three of the greatest chemists of England..." The old nobleman whom he tries to win for his scheme is enthusiastic about it, and calls out, "... to what a pitch is science advancing! When will human ingenuity end? Sir, I doubt not that one of these days everything will be found out!" This was indeed the general attitude of the time towards science and its discoveries. So many wonderful things had been achieved that everything was considered to have become possible.
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On several previous occasions the author of Ten Thousand a Year had already taken his fling at 'science' and 'scientists.' When Tittlebat Titmouse, the hero of the novel, was still in the possession of his large Yorkshire estate, a certain Doctor Gander had dedicated a book to him, entitled
Researches into Physical Science, with a view to the establishment of a New Principle—
LIGHTNESS by
Diabolus Gander Esquire,
L. L. D.; F. C. S.; Q. U. A. K.; G. O. S.; Secretary of the Empirical Society; Corresponding Member of the Leipzic Longitude Society; Vice-President of the Gastronomie Association; and Member of seventeen Philosophical and Literary Societies in Kamschatka, Madagascar, Tartary, and Little Britain; etc, etc, etc
This same Gander is described to us as knowing nothing of literature and mathematics, but with a great talent for rendering the most abstruse science "popular, i.e., utterly unintelligible to those who did understand science, and very exciting and entertaining to those who did not."
Though Gammon and Gander are both company promoters misusing science for their objects, there can be no doubt that in Warren's satires we have also to see an attack on liberal and radical efforts for the promotion of education and the spread of knowledge among the lower classes by men like Charles Knight. Samuel Warren, who in his novels and stories showed himself a staunch Tory and Churchman, did not see the use of educating the people and thereby spreading liberal and radical principles among them. He says of it: "Some people talk vehemently about the paramount necessity of educating the lower classes. It is indeed of incalculable importance that they should be educated; but is it not of still greater importance that the upper classes should be instructed "
Another point that is thrown much light on in Ten Thousand a Year is the constant practice of company promoters of engaging
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"Patrons" for their new enterprises, gentlemen whom they prevailed upon to lend their distinguished names and their social influence to the undertaking. Thus the Gunpowder and Fresh Water Company referred to above sent out prospectuses, and placed advertisements "which could boast of such commanding names as cast most of its sister companies into the shade—e.g., The Right Honourable the Earl of Dreddlington, G. C. B., F. C. S., F. P. S., etc, etc; The Most Noble the Duke of Tantallan, K. T., etc, etc; The Most Honourable the Marquess of Marmalade, etc, etc, etc" The object of this practice was to entrap the "monied people among all classes" to come forward with their subscriptions, "all making haste to be rich."
Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the above sort are of quite a different stamp of course from the type depicted in Samuel Titmarsh, and as different from Mr. Tigg Montague, whom we shall soon introducé to our readers. Mr. Brough was the Director puiling all the ropes of his big West Diddlesex Association, whose sole aim was to induce everybody and anybody to join his concern in one way or another. "Mr. Brough, Sir, would canvass and wheedle a chimney-sweep in the way of business." In short, he was a sharp business-man knowing the ins and outs of "the City." The Right Honourable the Earl of Dreddlington, G. C. B., F. C. S., F. P. S., on the other hand, in spite of the imposing length of his title, is a mere man of straw in the hands of his lawyer, Mr. Gammon. He and his other distinguished friends are described to us by Warren as "profoundly ignorant of business, in all its departments."
The motives of these Presidents and others in lending their names to such undertakings were in the first place a desire to figure before the public as the patrons of brilliant enterprises, while there was a further inducement of a more materialistic nature: in a very short time Lord Dreddlington, through the skilful manoeuvres of Gammon, realized a clear profit of 12,000 pounds by the new venture. "This seemed to the Earl rather the effect of magie than of an everyday mercantile adventure," the author adds, thus expressing the mental attitude of those company speculators: riches were to be had for the mere picking up, and the scramble for money became general among all classes of English society that
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possessed opportunities for joining in it. Novelists repeatedly denounce this "Mammon worship" as the great cause of all social evils and spiritual destruction.
A third aspect of company swindling that is thrown some light upon by Samuel Warren is the lack of responsibility of those setting such enterprises on foot. This was of course a source of much abuse. Prospectuses and advertisements might contain the grossest misrepresentations, and might be the merest "fantasies," holding out the most dazzling prospects of success and wealth, without the possibility of bringing any one to account for their contents. Not only Warren, but also Dickens lays stress on this source of evil, by giving the most fantastic specimens of such "decoy birds." Warren says of the prospectuses drawn up by the lawyer Gammon that they showed "a style which might have tempted the very devil himself (had he seen them) into venturing half his capital in the undertaking."
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CHAPTER XXIX.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
After an abortive attempt at improvement in 1834, the second stage in company legislation was reached by the Act of 1837.1 This Act stated that, though it was thought inexpedient to incorporate divers trading and other associations by Royal Charter, yet it would be expediënt to confer on them some of the privileges enjoyed by chartered companies. It was therefore enacted that companies could be granted so-called "letters patent," 2 which, although not giving them the status of bodies corporate, enabled them to do two things hitherto only possible for such bodies, viz.,
1. to sue or be sued in the name of one or two officers of the company (section III);
2. to promise limited liability to their members or not, "as the Crown deern advisable" (section IV).
These "quasi-corporation rights," as Wordsworth denotes them, removed some of the evils of company promoting: the management of the company's internal affairs was regulated and some publicity and control were ensured by registration at the Enrolment Offices. On the whole the success of the new Act was not great, however.
Thus The Times of Wednesday, April 18th 1840, contains an advertisement of the British Loan and Discount Institution by which shares are offered to the public, and in which it is stated that "a deposit of £ 2.10 is payable on each share, but no further call can be made without the consent of the shareholders." It may be doubted whether creditors of the Institution, in casu annuitants,
1) I Vict. c. 73. Section I stated that, as the provisions of the Act of 1834 were not found "effectual for the purposes they intended, they (were) repealed, and new provisions enacted in their stead."
2) Letters Patent are simply another form of Charters.
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would pay much regard to this promise of the manager, if they had to assert their claims on the concern.1
In literature the doings of company promoters under the new legislative measure were fully described by Dickens in 1844.2 In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit we are initiated into the affairs of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company, a swindle set on foot by one clever rascal, Montague Tigg, alias Tigg Montague.
As regards publicity and responsibility, Dickens shows us by a great many details that they are still entirely absent. When the "resident or managing director" asks Mr. Montague what the capital of the Company will be according to the next prospectus, the latter replies: "A figure of two, and as many noughts after it as the printer can get into the same line." We further hear from the two "gentlemen" that Mr. Montague's property in the Bengal has been made amenable to all claims upon the Company, though probably Mr. Montague did not even know in what part of the world Bengal lay, let alone that he had any property there.
We also assist at a board meeting of the Anglo-Bengalee. The scène in the splendidly furnished board-room is described as follows: "The chairman having taken the seat with- great solemnity, the secretary supported him on his right hand, and the porter stood bold upright behind him, forming a warm background of waistcoat This was the board: everything else being a light-hearted fiction." In a previous passage we had already been informed that there was an "imaginative List of Directors," so that we come to the conclusion that the whole Company with its splendid offices and costly furniture had been set on foot by one individual, who had "come into a few pounds," supported by another, who had "saved a few pounds."
Besides the practices shown up already in Samuel Titmarsh, to allure as many people as possible to close an insurance, for instance
1) Punch satirized the swindles of company promoters in 1840 in "a prospectus" which shows many points of resemblance to Dickens's AngloBengalee fiction (vol. I, p. 81).
2) Though Dickens does not mention any year to go by, there is a passage in the novel p roving that thej events narrated happened after 1837. When the author describes (ch. XXI, p. 174—176) the railway journey of the two emigrants Martin and Mark in America, we hear a stranger asking them how Queen Victoria does. It is worthy of note that in this chapter the first mention is made of railwavs in Dickens's novels.
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by "liberal allowaaces to solicitors," we read of a new method here: the medical officer of the Company, Mr. Jobling, acts as canvasser with his private clients. When he appears in the boardroom, the secretary addresses him thus: "Commission to you, doctor, on four new policies, and a loan this morning, eh?"
Another manner in which this "Company" works, by combining loan and insurance business, is illustrated by a confidential statement made by the "Chairman of the Board" to Jonas Chuzzlewit. "B wants a loan," that worthy says. "Say fifty or a hundred pounds; perhaps more; no matter. B is accepted. Two securities give a bond. B insures his own life for doublé the amount, and brings his two friends' lives also — just to patronise the office ... B pays the highest lawful interest ... Beskles charging B the regular interest, we get B's premiums, and B's friends' premiums, and we charge B for the bond, and, whether we accept him or not, we charge B for "inquiries" (we keep a man at a pound a week to make them), and we charge B a trifle for the secretary; and in short, my good fellow, we stick into B, up hill and down dale, and make a devilish comfortable little property out of him."
When Jonas Chuzzlewit, like Thackeray, objects that "it's all very well, when the office is young, but when the policies begin to die"—the chairman whispers a significant little word into his ear which "sounded like "Bolt." "
On this principle annuitants and persons wishing to take out a life policy could of course be granted very liberal terms, as the Company never intended to meet its liabilities towards its clients. On one occasion, when he was very hard up, as he tells Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mr. Montague was "left alone in the world with a grand piano. But, my dear fellow, we got over it. We granted a great many new policies that week (liberal allowances to solicitors, by the bye), and got over it in no time."
A point that strikes the modern reader, when 'hearing of all those gross swindles is that the public suffer themselves to be so easily taken in by them. He may be inclined to ask if there were people credulous enough to insure their lives or put their money into annuities1 with companies about whose real position they were
1) This was a comparatively new line of business then (Wordsworth, p. 149).
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utterly in the dark, nay, which did not even exist at all, except in the outward show of gorgeous offices and apparently wealthy directors. Mr. Tigg Montague evidently knew more of human nature. Let us risten to what he says on this head to his future co-director Jonas. "I can teil you," said Tigg in his ear, "how many o' them will buy annuities, effect insurances, bring us their money in a hundred shapes and ways, force h upon us, trust us, as if we were the mint; yet know no more about us than you do of that crossing-sweeper at the corner. Not so much. Ha, Ha!"
From the description of the mode of doing business of the Anglo-Bengalee it appears clearly that, whatever Government had attempted by improved legislation, such improvements had not produced the slightest effect. Companies could still be worked on the same lines as the West Diddlesex Association, without control, without publicity, and without any responsrbility. It must be equally clear to the reader that the only method of rooting out all abuses— the crisis of 1837 had produced an immense erop of swindle companies again—would have been to render the possession of a charter or letters patent compulsory for any company wishing to start business, but that by leaving H to the discretion of the promoters ehher to apply for such a document or not, the latter were left free to work openly and onder some sort of Government control, or to do their business in the dark manner we have found described in fiction. To a swindler the choke cannot have been difficult of course. It is true that without registration his company would remain amenable to the common law, according to the Act of 1825, but as his only object usually was to entrap as many fools as possible, and then to bolt with the plunder, he did not care a straw for the liabilities he incurred under that Act.
The defects of existmg legislation also became evident to the
English Government, and in 1841 it instituted a Parliamentary
Committee. This Committee recommended compulsory registration,
having at the same time the effect of incorporation, as we» as the
annual pubtication of a balance-sheet, which shifted the control
from the Government to the public itself, as was to be expected
at a period of non-interference, when the Benthamite serf-interest
principle was supposed to be a sufficiënt protection of the public.1
1) How far this principle went in the eyes of a ntiKtarian economist appears from the following passage in McCulloch (p. 1171): "The self-
f96



The promoters of a company were further to be responsible for any statements made in their prospectuses. All these points, whic1* formed the chief recommendations of the Committee, were embodied in the Act of 1844. In view of all the real improvements it brought it is no wonder that Samuel Warren, who as a lawyer must have seen the defects of company legislation more clearly than many other novelists, was so enthusiastic about the new measures that he called the Act a master-piece of legislation.1
For completeness' sake we will add a few words regarding the further development of company law, which reached its fifth stage in 1855. Great as the improvements of 1844 may have been, it soon became evident, however, that one all-important thing had been left unsolved, viz., that of the liability of the shareholders in a joint stock company. The Act of 1844 "under which 900 and odd companies were 'hatched' in eleven years' time," 2 had only aimed at giving all possible safeguards to the creditors of a company, but it left the members themselves in the same unprotected position they had always been in as those of a common law partnership. The Act expressly forbade limited liability, and writers of the authority of McCulloch vehemently denounced this principle, as only serving to rid a person of the hard necessity of being responsible for his own acts.» It was not until eleven years later, after some persons of high rank had, in the manner of the Earl of Dreddlington, unwittingly f allen vtetims to their unlimited liability,4 that Government introduced the principle of lhnited liability for every company desiring it,5 thereby solving a problem that had for many decades exercised the minds of all business-men, economists, and politJcians.
interest and the security of the owners and raasters of a ship may, perhaps, be supposed to afford the only real guarantee against the occurrence of accidents." Heyerman's play Op hoop van zegen teaches quite different things!
1) Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, p. 261, note.
2) Richard Russell, Company Frauds Abolition, London, 1899.
3) McCulloch constantly speaks of Limited Liability Companies as being identical with sociétés commanditaires. Balance sheets would be worse than useless in his opinion (pp. 388, 389).
4) Russell, op. cit, pp. 11, 12. .
5) Walpole, vol. IV, speaks of limited liability being introduced by Government in 1837 (pp. 19 and 316), but this is only true to a very limited extent, as we saw on page 190.
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Jeremy Bentham had suggested a solution as early as 1793. Disraeli started his career as a public writer with the same subject, as we saw. Morrison in 1850 suggested the use of the name of association for limited companies, in order to show outsiders the nature of the concern they were dealing with.1 Government fixed upon the device2 of prescribing the use of the word limited behind the name of every Company with limited liability of its shareholders."
The difficulty of the problem had of course lain in the fact that it presented the conflicting interests of the shareholders and of the creditors of a company. With unlhnited liability the latter were safeguarded more effectively, while in the opposite case those of the shareholders were safer. The existence of those two groups of conflicting interests is pointed out by Warren,* when he describes the proceedings of the Vulture Insurance Company, a life office, which, at the death of an insured person, resisted a claim on very specious grounds, so that there was not the least chance for the heirs to obtain their money for three or four years to come. Warren concludes this story by observing: "So much for insuring with a company which looks so sharply after the interests of its shareholders, in preference to the survivors of the dead insurers" (i.e., the creditors).
1) C. Morrison, Labour and Capital, p. 153. London, 1854.
2) This device was suggested by Lord Branwell (Ene. Brit.: Companies).
3) Unlimited joint stock companies also continued to exist after 1855, but only 57 new ones were registered during the first decade after the passing of the Act, over against 3600 limited companies. When in 1878 the City of Glasgow Bank collapsed with enormous liabilities, for which heavy calls were made on the shareholders, an Act was passed by which unlimited companies were allowed to register once more as limited ones. This was the last step in legislation as regards the liability of shareholders.
4) Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, p. 250.
195



CONCLUSION.
Having come to the end of our allotted task, we shall conclude by making a few retrospective remarks on the tracés the business world has left on Early Victorian fiction, and summarizing the genera! rmpression left on the studenf s mind after his investigations.
There can be no doubt that we were fully warranted in setting on foot our investigations. It has become evident that trade and industry, whose problems have long since passed into the realm of pure politics, were in those days spheres of life that obtruded themselves with so much force upon public attentjon,by reason of the great social misery they had brought in their train, that nobody could pass them by unheeded, and least of all the novelist who wished to draw pictures of actual everyday life.
We have had many opportunities to show that these pictures, faithful though they may have been as regards the opinions that were current about trade and industry, yet frequently showed a certain incompleteness and inaccuracy of detail. Deplorable though this fault may be for the student of commercial economy, who might have hoped to gather more details of actual business life from the novels, yet It seems to us that It is qufte excusable for various reasons.
In the first place the technical side of business, the so-called business technique, presents innumerable pitfalls to the uninitiated, even in our days, after more than a quarter of a century of extensrve commercial education has done so much for the spread of this knowledge. We need not be too much surprised, therefore, to see men of letters, whose vocations lay so far apart from business pursuits, fall into errors now and then.
Besides the great gulf separating the mercantile world from that of literature, there are other barrière that have long prevented
196



novelists from seeking their themes in the counting-house or on the Exchange. One of these obstacles is the circumstance that business people are, from the nature of things, averse to showing their exact doings to the outside world. Secrecy is often the essence of a merchant's position: sources of supply, outlets for his goods, manufacturing processes, facts of great interest known to the initiated only, all these form valuable items of his stock-in-trade. It is no wonder therefore, that he is loath to let outsiders pry into his daily pursuits.
Another extenuating circumstance for the defects referred to above is the fact that the methods of trade and industry, always varying and adapting themselves to al tere d conditions, never perhaps showed less stability than in the period discussed. Old Solomon Gills complained of the great changes business had been going through: 'Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an oldfashioned man in an old-fashioned shop ..."1 We have already had occasion to point out some further passages in literature in which the new-fangled business methods were commented upon.1
If Early Victorian novelists had possessed a greater knowledge of the ins and outs of business, there is no doubt that, new though the development of the novel in this and other realistic directions was, they would have been fully able to do justice to the subject.This is proved by novels like Ten Thousand a Year and Marryaf s novels of sea-faring life, where lawyers and sailors are depicted in elaborate and accurate milieux by a iawyer and a sailor respectively. But among Early Victorian novelists there is not a single man of business, and the practice of taking expert advice, as George Eliot did for her Iegal plot in Felix Holt, the Radical, was not yet thought of at that time, when literature had still to pass through the realistic period of neo-classicism.
The natural consequence of the more or less superficial knowledge men of letters generally possessed of business was that the arguments and theories used by them in setting forth their standpoint towards social and economie problems were frequentfy
1) Dombey and Son, p. 41. London, 1904. ^
2) See pp. 120, 122, 123.
197



less than worthless. We have shown how for instance Kingsley and Carlyle, in combating the hateful monster of free competition, recommended as an infallible remedy the same nefarious system in an altered form, so disguised that its advocates were not even aware of the false position taken up by them.
It is curious to observe in this connection that though many novelists devoted more or less attention to the newly arisen "social question," there was not a single one who pointed out the way along which the solution of the problem has hitherto been sought and perhaps partly found, namely by labour itself organizing its power, and assertJng its rights. However genuine the sympathy of Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and Dickens may have been for the working classes, yet they one and all ridiculed and despised their "leaders," the "gentleman from London," Moses Barraclough, Slackbridge, and the rest.
The great merits of Early Victorian fiction did not therefore lie in the value of the practical solutions suggested, and this was feit clearly by Carlyle, when he wrote that is was not an Editor's task "to say How." 1 The mission of literature, at that time as at all others, is of quite a different nature: it should bring the human side of any problem forcibly before the readers, and impress upon them the necessity of always keeping sympathy and humanity in view in doing the world's business. This mission the Early Victorian novelists, headed by Dickens and Kingsley, completely fulfilled. The humanitarian movement could not have found a more powerful ally than Charles Dickens.
So much for business life, as reflected in the novel. As regards the men of business themselves, their portraits suffer of course from the same causes set forth above, with the result that they only present the general features of human beings, not the particular characteristics of business people.
In making this statement we are quite aware of the fact that it is psychologically incorrect to speak of a business-man's character as something quite distinguished from that of a Iawyer, or a clergyman, or a labourer. It would indeed be too sweeping a statement to say that a merchant's Standard of morality differs from
1) Past and Present, p. 259.
198



that of a member of any other profession. Nevertheless, though the fundamental character of every class of citizens may be the same, there is no doubt that each is distinguished by some peculiar traits. Every pursuit, if only followed long enough, will inevitably tend to strengthen and develop a special group of tendencies in a man's character, namely those which are necessary for the successful carrying on of his daily work, or whose development is particularly favoured by the circumstances under which this work is done. Thus it is that a schoolmaster, speaking all day without much danger of ever being contradicted by his youthful audience, is apt to become a pedant; a shopkeeper behind his counter will grow a garrulous talker; a clergyman, compelled to give spiritual guidance every hour of the day, which few people are gifted enough to do, runs great risk of becoming a hypocrite. In a business-man the routine of his daily work may tend to develop other qualities again; they will give him promptness in taking action; broad views, widening in proportion as the trade becomes world trade; latitudinarian views in other domains of life; good faith in the people he is dealing with; but on the other hand a propensity to measure everything by the Standard current in his daily work, namely money; a practke of making self-interest the sole motive of all his acts; a peculiar view about what truthfulness means, more particularly with regard to the practice we have already pointed out of stating only part of the truth.1
Besides favouring the development of some moral and mental qualities in a merchant's character, a commercial career also tends to atrophy and stifle a great many others, by reason of their never being called into play in the transaction of business, or even being injurious to it. Of such features in the human character we may mention religious feelings; love of literature and the fine arts; politics, unless commercial interests are at stake; and various others such as the reader may remember to have seen enumerated in the obituary notices in the press at the death of the German merchant prince Hugo Stinnes.
As we have seen in the course of our investigations, Early Victorian fiction has paid little attention to the above facts. Almost
1) See p. 132.
199



toe only feature that attracted its notice was the materialism and lust of gain of the trading community, and this was vehemently attacked by many novelists, e.g., Warren, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens, and not less vehemently denounced by Carlyle in Past and Present. However, none of all these writers treated this feature in the mercantile character as a psychological problem in the form in which we have stated it here, but merely as a social phenomenon affecting the whole commercial community, and identified in literature with Benthamism and orthodox economy.
Biased as the writers of fiction were against the trading classes, we need not be surprised to see that they never attempted to show their readers the great social function of this class of citizens, their "glorious functkwi," as their apologist Ure wrote, nor did they show the heroism that bes in their daily struggles in the pursuit of therr business. What a German critic wrote of the shortcomings of Dickens in this respect, equally holds good for all his contemporaries in English fiction: "Von der Atmosphare des Wagemutes, des Machtshungers im Geschaftsleben, der Freude am Entwickeln, der Hast des Lebens, die alle innerlichen Seiten des Charakters zo schadigen droht, hat Dickens uns gar nichts gezeigt." 1
The hurry and excitement of business life was only just hinted at by Disraeli,3 but no novelist made it a theme for his work. None of them wrote about it in the stram of the anonymous author of Business Life, who described the spirit of the modern trader as follows: "It has been for many years a kind of fatality with me that I must be in a constant state of excitement, anxiety, and speculation. My mind is so constituted that no common, ordinary business could possibly content me. My inventive faculties are ever on the rack for something new, and the more mental activity and worry it occasions, the better it seems to suit me ... To buy and sell 'simple articles, such as tea, sugar, or indeed almost any retail business, I could not possibly endure. To scheme, plan, and contrive, is my peculiar forte; tact I possess to a considerable ex tent; and any employment of the mental power where ingenuity is called for, although it may only be coliateral, is my happiness." *
1) W. Dibelius, Charles Dickens, p. 239.
2) See p. 102.
3) Business Life, p. 100. London, 1861.
200



We have cited this author at some length, because his words prove in the first place that by the middle of last century people had already learned to distinguish in the business world the peculiar features Dibelius has vainly sought reflected in Dickens, while they also show that the hurry and excitement of life that is generally taken to be the special disease of our time, is a thing that has long been with us. As early as 1835 Ure spoke of "the bloodless but still formidable strife of trade," and of "the new belligerent system, in the pursuance of which every nerve or sinew of the people are put upon the strain." Charles Lever is the only novelist that has openly expressed the same view: "The spirit of the gambler is, in fact, the spirit of commercial enterprise, and the "odds" are as carefully calculated in the counting-house as in the betting ring"4 Unfortunately, however, Lever has not availed himself of the opportunities presented either.
In spite of the failure of Early Victorian novelists to work up all the elements in the mercantile life described above as a psychological groundwork for their novels, we may nevertheless state that these novels contain much valuable material for the student of commercial economy. This material, however much it may lie scattered about in hundreds of stories, yet forms a rather faithful picture of commerce and industry, when once it has been carefully collected and pieced together under the guidance of some previously acquired knowledge of the period, like some antique mosaic reconstructed from its scattered fragments with the aid of some picture or description that has come down to us.
1) The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly, vol. I, p. 242.
THE END.
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206



STELLINGEN.



I.
De meening, dat de politieke overtuigingen van Dickens zich tusschen 1846 en 1855 gewijzigd zouden hebben, berust op zeer zwakke gronden.
II.
Dickens' succes als hervormer van maatschappelijke toestanden wordt dikwijls overdreven.
III.
De praktische toepassing, door Carlyle in Past and Present geschetst van de beginselen neergelegd in zijn werken Sartor Resartus en Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, mist elke bewijskracht.
IV.
De hervorming der maatschappij, door Carlyle bepleit in Past and Present, zou leiden tot de grootst mogelijke willekeur en tirannie.
V.
Geen van de romanschrijvers uit het z.g. vroeg-Victoriaansche tijdperk verwachtte veel heil van de pogingen der arbeidersklasse, om zelf haar lot te verbeteren.
VI.
Als politieke en sociale roman beteekent Felix Holt, the Radical van George Eliot niet veel.
VIL
Het verwijt, dat Dickens den spoorweg in zijn romans pas beschrijft achttien jaar naar zijn ontstaan, is onverdiend.



VIII.
De beteekenis van de letter c. in den term c.i.f. wordt dikwijls Verkeerd uitgelegd.
IX.
De stelling, dat de Engelsche handelstaal een eigen, afzonderlijke spraakkunst bezit, is zeer overdreven.
X.
Manly's veronderstelling, dat in het vijfde tooneel van het vijfde bedrijf van Robert Oreene's James the Fourth de regels 31 tot en met 44 gelezen behooren te worden na regels 45 tot en met 77, is veel minder aannemelijk dan de opvatting, dat wij hier te doen hebben met twee passages, waarvan de tweede bedoeld is ter vervanging van de eerste.
XI.
Schrijvers van romans met een strekking dienen zich er zooveel mogelijk van te onthouden, om opzettelijk didactisch te zijn in hun werk.
XII.
Het woord „railroad" is niet een Amerikanisme, zooals dikwijls wordt aangenomen, doch een woord van zuiver Engelschen oorsprong.
XIII.
Litterair en verder algemeen ontwikkelend onderwijs zonder utiliteitsdoeleinden is onontbeerlijk aan Hoogere Handelsscholen, als noodzakelijk tegenwicht tegen het materialistischpraktische karakter van het overige onderwijs.


















SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS LIFE
H. JANSONIUS


















SOME
ASPECTS OF BUSINESS LIFE IN
EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION






SOME
ASPECTS OF BUSINESS LIFE
IN
EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION.
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT TER VERKRIJGING VAN DEN GRAAD VAN DOCTOR IN DE LETTEREN EN WIJSBEGEERTE AAN DE UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM, OP GEZAG VAN DEN RECTOR MAGNIFICUS DR. P. RUITINGA, HOOGLEERAAR IN DE FACULTEIT DER GENEESKUNDE, IN HET OPENBAAR TE VERDEDIGEN IN DE AULA DER UNIVERSITEIT OP DONDERDAG 25 MAART 1926 DES NAMIDDAGS TE 4 UUR
DOOR
HERMAN JANSONIUS
GEBOREN TE LEERMENS.
J. MUUSSES
PURMEREND — MCMXXVI






TO MY WIFE.






Het schrijven van deze dissertatie is voor mij een hoogst aangename taak geweest.
Vooreerst heeft het mij de gelegenheid geschonken, om aan te toonen, dat ook bij de studie der handelstaal en -techniek de letterkunde een niet onbelangrijke rol kan, en zelfs dient te spelen.
In de tweede plaats is het voor mij, die reeds tal van jaren bezig geweest ben met min of meer dorre lexicologische werkzaamheden, als het ware een verfrisschend geestelijk bad geweest, om een periode in de rijke Engelsche litteratuur weer eens grondig te bestudeeren.
Doch wel de aangenaamste zijde van mijn werk lag in het feit, dat het mij een ongedachte gelegenheid heeft geschonken, Hooggeachte Professor Swaen, om de betrekkingen met U, tijdens Uwe Groningsche periode aangeknoopt, maar sindsdien reeds lang afgebroken, nogmaals weer te hervatten.
Ik ben U zéér dankbaar voor den steun, mij bij mijn werk geschonken met dezelfde vriendelijke hulpvaardigheid, die ik reeds vroeger zoozeer in U mocht leeren waardeeren.






CONTENTS*
Page
PREFACE xin
INTRODUCTION
I. MOVEMENTS OF ENGLISH THOUGHT 1
II. THE RISING MIDDLE CLASSES AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE 5
III. SOCIAL MISERY AND HUMANITARIANISM .... 16
IV. CHARACTER OF THE EARLY VICTORIAN NOVEL 26
SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS LIFE
I. THE BENTHAMITE TYPE OF BUSINESS-MAN . . 28
II. ATTACKS ON UTILITARIANISM AND POLITICAL
ECONOMY 38
III. HARD TIMES 48
IV. LAISSEZ-FAIRE 55
V. THE NEW RICH . 68
VI. LANDED PROPERTY AND CAPITAL 76
VII. RELIGION OF THE TRADING CLASSES .... 85
VIII. THE TECHNICAL SIDE OF BUSINESS LIFE ... 92
IX. MERCANTILE CLERKS AND OFFICES 100
X. PECULIAR FEATURES OF BUSINESS IN EARLY
VICTORIAN TIMES 107
XI. BANKING • . . . 113
XII. THE NATIONAL DEBT AND THE STOCK EXCHANGE 127
XIII. CREDIT IN PRIVATE LIFE 138
XIV. THE LAW OF ARREST 146
XV. DEBTORS' PRISONS 154
XVI. COMPANY TRADING 163
XVII. COMPANY TRADING — THE HISTORY OF
SAMUEL TITMARSH 171
XVIII. COMPANY TRADING — TEN THOUSAND A YEAR 182
XIX. COMPANY TRADING — MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT . . 190
CONCLUSION J; . 196
BIBLIOGRAPHY , ... 202



■



PREFACE.
Having for many years paid special attention to the commercial and economie stratum of the English language, which offers a wide and as yet only partly investigated object of study, we were naturally led in the direction of commercial economy, when seeking a subject for a literary thesis.
Literature and commercial economy are two domains of human thought that lie as far apart as possible, and if is no doubt chiefly due to this circumstance that literary work has been so seldom investigated up to the present time by commercial economists. Authors on commercial subjects, like Hartley Withers, illustrating their statements by quotations from literature, are very scarce indeed.
Another cause of the scarcity of work of this nature may be due to the fact that works of fiction have, generally speaking, little to teach to the student of economics. Men of letters, like all other artists, will as a rule feel little drawn towards commercial and industrial life and its materialistic problems, which to them must always be more or less uncongenial. The result is that their knowledge of the doings of those classes of society commonly denoted as the business community, is frequently of a superficial and Iimited, not to say defective nature.
Nevertheless, we hope to show in the following pages that works of fiction offer a surprisingly large number of details that gain immensely in importance and significance, when looked at from what may be called the commercio-economic point of view.
A reader with some knowledge of economics and business life will be able to fully understand the exact or deeper sense of many a passage in novels of older writers, that must necessarily escape
XIII



the notice of the general run of readers, owing to the fact that such passages refer to conditions in society that have entirely disappeared and been forgotten. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that books like The Christmas Carol and Hard Times can never be fully understood and appreciated by readers who have not previously acquired some knowledge of the social and economie conditions of England about the middle of last century.
But if the reader of novels may profit by the study of commercial economy, students of this science may in their turn derive some benefit from literature. Every novelist has to work out his conception of the particular work of art that he wishes to produce, by using large masses of details from every-day life, and amidst all these traits and incidents, forming together the milieu of his novel, there will often be a large number of facts and observafions throwing an unexpected light upon the problems and conditions with which the commercial economist has been rendered famihar by the study of his subject. The exact influence of these on the average contemporary member of society, however, may be more strikingly brought home to him in a fictitious story than in his more serious and truthful text-books. Thus it is that the student of commerce and industry may profit by the study of literature in the same manner as an historian who will often gain a clearer and more intimate conception of some special period or person by the reading of historical novels written by competent authors, however inaccurately actual facts may in both cases sometimes be represented in such works of fiction.
It thus becomes clear that both the student of literature and the commercial economist may to some extent benefit each by taking cognizance of the work done in the other's field.
That the two domains of human thought, however far they may lie apart, are at present feit to be more or less closely alhed in some respects is also proved by the new branch of secondary education the Government of this country has recently introduced in the shape of the so-called "litterair-economische scholen."
For the purposes of the present thesis we have restricted our investigations to what is commonly called the Early Victonan period and to which we have assigned the same limits as some other writers have fixed before, namely the third and fourth decades
XIV



of the nineteenth century.1 In the choice of this particular period we have been led by the following considerations.
In the first place the two decades mentioned may be called the period of the birth of modern England, not only economically, but also to a smaller degree, politically. Those twenty years, which witnessed the final change from an agrarian to an industrial state, and from a more or less feudal form of government and administration to a modern democratie form, present one of the most interesting fields for the study of economists. Moreover, there is probably no other period in English history in which the sayings and doings of the business classes were so forcibly thrust upon the notice of the general public. This was due first to the struggle of the rising trading classes for political power and freedom in the rapidly industrialized state, which aroused a good deal of political controversy and passion, while in the second place it was brought about by the slavery and social misery attendant upon the newly established factory system.
No less important is the second quarter of the nineteenth century from a literary point of view, for it witnessed not only the birth of modern industrial England but also that of the modern novel. Fiction had rarely before been represented in English literature by great names like those of Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Dickens and Thackeray. At the end of the period it had risen to the rank of serious literature, for which apologies were no longer needed.2
We have not extended our investigations to the drama, which at that time had not yet become a means of propagating social doctrines. Though it became a form of popular amusement again, as in Elizabethan times, its aims were restricted to mere entertainment, by either inspiring terror, or giving amusement both in highflown and sentimental language. It did not treat in a serious manner of the great social and economie problems of the times.
Neither have we paid attention to the aspects of business life shown by Early Victorian poetry. Though in many instances poets were stirred by the practica] affairs of life — Dean Winstay advised the tailor-poet Alton Locke to choose only practical subjects for
1) L. Cazamian, Le Roman Social en Aneleterre, Introduction. Paris. 1904.
2) Though not needed, they were nevertheless still made occasionally, for instance by Mrs. Marsh in the Preface to Emilia Wyndham.
XV



his work, if he wished to be successful — yet their work usually dealt with political rather than social and economie problems, and was at any rate too little concerned with practical details of business life to deserve much consideration from our standpoint.
Even In the department of fiction we have not aimed at exhausting all the literature produced by the more than thirty Early Victorian novelists, some of whom wrote more than thirty novels, which, as Oliver Elton observes, will no doubt never have been gone through by anybody. Our choice among this overwhelming number of books has been led chiefly by the consideration whether any given novel at first sight promised to yield useful materials for this essay or not.
We finally wish to draw attention to the fact that, as the title of this thesis indicates, we have only treated a few aspects of Early Victorian business life, namely those which appeared to be most prominent in literature, and of these even several had to be left out, in order not to swell the present volume unduly.
xvi



INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER t
Movcmcnts of English Thought.
Before starting upon the subject of this thesis, we shall give a brief sketch of the general conditions of England in the period covered by it, namely 1830 till 1850. We Consider this indispensabtó, m order to come to a just appreciation of the manner in which business life is reflected in fiction, for, as a modern critic observes, "it is life which makes literature, and the type of fiction of any age is determined by the state of thought and civilization therein ... The things of contemporary interest principally occupy men's mmds." 1 Now there is certainly no period in English history, in which business and business people occupied such a prominent positron m English thought, and exercised such a predominating mfluence on the general spirit of their time as they did during the decades selected for discussion in this essay. Accordingly we shall briefly review the state of the country and its people in its different aspects, viz., the political, social, religious, and literary character of the period.
In tracing the changes and movements of these various aspects of life, we cannot do better than proceed upon the well-known pnnciple of the pendulum, which is admirably worked out by Cazamian in his L'Evolution psychologique et la Liüérature anglaise, and further by keeping in view the fact that a man's hfe — and a nation's too, for the matter of that — is regulated m the main by two controlling forces, sense and sensibility, brain and heart, reason and emotion. These two contrasting forces are constantly struggling for the mastery, not only in each man's
1) D. G. Thompson, The PMlosophy of Fiction, ch. X. London, 1890.
1
1



individual life, but also in the broader sphere of that of a whole nation, as will appear from the following short historical survey.
After the great lyric and dramatic period of the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the subsequent emotional outburst of Puritanism, covering together the time limited by Marlowe and Milton, a reaction set in, manifesting itself in materialistic politics, a rational religion, and a didactic and critical literature.
This period of intellectualism, which may be said to have predominated English life from 1688 till 1760, finds its best representative in literature in Pope. But long before the latter's death the pendulum had already started on its opposite course. We briefly mention as most salient points of this counter-movement: Wesleyanism (1740), followed about the end of the century by Evangelicalism, and culminating in the Oxford movement of 1834; the poetry of Young, Thomson, Gray and Burns, leading us to the great Romantic outburst of 1800; the sentimentalism of Richardson's time, with' the philanthropic movements against slavery, prison abuses, and other cruelties; the philosophic reaction chiefly represented by Coleridge and Southey, preferring in their works sentiment to the cold intellectualism of their predecessors Locke and Hume, the philosophers of the Classic period.
But this progressing emotional ascendancy in English thought received a serious check after the French wars, notably in the years between 1815 and 1830. Individualism, rationalism, utilitarianism, and all other aspects of the eighteenth century Aufklarung, though they had been pushed into the background by the Romantic triumph, no doubt greatly assisted therein by the ugly light the French Revolution had thrown on the consequences the Aufklarung might lead to, had not nearly breathed their last, when the Thirty Years' Peace began. There were especially two domains in which, favoured by the peculiar conditions of England at that time, they only waited to show themselves with undiminished vigour, viz., politics and economics. For many years the liberal revival had complete mastery again over the English mind, more complete perhaps than it ever had possessed in the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm was dead in people's minds, so much so that, as the above-mentioned French writer observes, one might have expected at this time a repetition of Shaftesbury's Apology of Enthusiasm
2



(1708). A kind of emotional lethargy had come over the whole nation in most domains of life.
In religion this absence of emotional enthusiasm is strikingly brought home to the reader of Harriet Martineau's autobiography. This utilitarian author, of whom more will have to be said later on, was born in 1802. In telling us of her youth, she says that rehgion attracted her as an intellectual problem, and that her faith was of a reasoning, systematic nature; at the age of eighteen she read the Bible to find arguments in it for religious discussions!
In politics the period of somnolent, reactionary Toryism of men of the stamp of Lord Eldon1 and the Duke of Wellington had set in, which is satirized by Peacock in The Misjortunes of Elphin, where Seythenym, the drunkard in his old Saxon castle, is the representative of this "besotted Toryism", as the author calls it2 As Brown points out," the French Revolution had caused a savage temper among the ruling classes of England, a true spirit of "hanging them all." He illustrates this mental attitude by the fact that, whereas humanitarian reforms like those we mentioned above had been advocated with good will by men belonging to all parties at the end of the eighteenth century, Samuel Romilly and the early leaders of the factory agitation did their work amidst great detraction. It hkewise showed itself in the appearance of papers and periodicals like The Anti-Jacobin and The Anti-Jacobin Review of the Giffords,' while John Halifax contains many passages and facts manifesting the same hatred and distrust of everything coming from France. The kind-hearted Mrs. Halifax behaves most unreasonably towards poor "Miss Silver", when it appears that the latter is the daughter of a notorious Jacobin. Her presence in the household
iJ? The Black Book showed that Lord Eldon, the son of a coal merrhant had every reason to be satisfied with the existinc■ JE* £ '
salary as Lord Chancellor amounted to f lsSftd* tSpeakïrf the aï oVc aV°nradf t0 £ 3'°°°' ^hile further he held an "mn^nsTlega school
2) Works, vol. II, p. 109 ch3IXPL3o£nih9°6y Br°Wn' FrenCH ReWlUti0n in En^sh History,
of 4r, °- !?e elder °iff0,;d Cobbett said that "he became the servile editor of Canning-s newspaper." Advice to Young Men, p 58 London! 18OT
3



further causes a violent family quarrel, when Guy and Edwin both fall in love with her. After leaving his home and country, Guy is led astray at Paris, while further all the bad characters in the novel either go to live in France or come from that country, e.g., Lord Luxmore, Gerard Vermilye and Lady Caroline.
In the domain of philosophy the representatives of the hümanitarian school of thought, Coleridge and Southey, had no influence whatever in their country in the post-revolutionary period. It was the time of the rapidly increasing ascendancy of Benthamite Utilitarianism, which was forming the powerful group of Philosophical Radicals, and thereby preparing the way for its final victory, Government reform in the utilitarian sense.
Thus we see everywhere the true eighteenth century spirit of enlightenment come to life again in the post-revolutionary period, after its temporary eclipse at the time of the Revolution. As with every action, however, this clear and well-regulated intellectualism also produced a reaction. From the moment circumstances favoured a revival of rationalism, emotionalism also proved that it had not entirely died out with the romantic revolutionary period. It was as the Scotch Radical wrote that is cited by Brown: "A spark was kindled at the French Revolution, which enemies of freedom think they have extinguished, but is still burning." Though these words were meant by the Scotchman to apply to political opinions only, they were no doubt of equal force with regard to other spheres of life. Indeed, the two currents of thought may be said to have existed side by side in England at that time. The higher the power of utilitarian and freethinking rationalists rose in that country, the stronger the spark of emotional and religious idealism grew, till at length this idealism was able to put a check upon unbridled liberal freedom, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. It must be admitted, however, that in the years between 1815 and 1830 the spark was but burning very feebly.
4



CHAPTER II.
The Rising Middlc Classes and Laissez-faire*
After the above brief historical sketch of the movements of English thought, which has led us up to the year 1832, we shall draw in outline the general conditions of the country during the Early Victorian period. When studying these conditions, we find that all aspects of life present a great similarity in their general tendencies, which leads us to the conclusion that English minds were still divided into two great camps, confronting and opposing each other in every possible direction. The best method to adopt, when treating this matter, will therefore be to follow the idea of two contrasting tendencies again, by first discussing all the phenomena connected with the rationalist and utilitarian doctrines, and then surveying the movement of the idealistic reaction. The former of these movements found its main support in the political interests of the country, while the latter chiefly manifested itself in religion and in literature.
It is most important to observe the singular coincidence between these two movements of thought on the one hand, and two parallel economie phenomena on the other hand. One of these economie phenomena was the industrial evolution and consequent commercial expansion of the period, while the other, the outcome of the first, was the appearance of the "conditionof-England" question, developing later on into what is now commonly called the social question. We shall first shortly describe the industrial evolution and its effects on the political conditions of the country, while next we shall point out how these political changes were equally due to and further developed by the predominance of Utilitarianism.
The first half of the nineteenth century is separated from former
5



periods of history by changes so great that they have often been described as a revolution instead of an evolution. This does not imply, however, that the changes took place suddenly: several stages of growth had to be passed through, before English industry reached its full development and organization in the middle of last century. The fairest estimate is that this process took exactly one hundred years.
The last thirty years of the eighteenth century were remarkable from a long series of most important inventions, chiefly relating to the textile industry, but also comprising many others of equal importance, of which we will only recall the following, though the list might easily be trebled: Kay's flying shuttle (1733); Watt's steam-engine (1763); Hargreave's spinning jenny (1764); Arkwright's water frame (1769); Compton's mule (1779); Cartwrighfs powerloom (1789). In the coal and iron industry, chemical sciences, earthenware and china manufacture and other branches of industry equally large strides were made. The transport by means of pack horses along worthless roads was revolutionized at last by Brindley, who conceived the idea of water transport along a network of canals that he wished to construct. The Bridgewater Canal from Manchester to Worsley was the first of this network, and in a short time the whole commercial world went "canal-mad", just as it had gone "steam-mad" twenty years before, as Boulton wrote to his friend Watt, and just as it was to go "railroad-mad" some thirty years after. Between 1790 and 1794 no fewer than 89 Canal Acts were passed by Parliament. How such a canal system was buüt up in connection with a particular industrial or mining district which it was intended to serve, is clearly set out in Felix Holt, the Radical.1
The consequence of all these changes and innovations was a gradual renovation of the whole system of industry, which was removed from the homes of the workers to some common workshop. It must be remembered, however, that this change had already set in before the inventions were made; factory life had gradually grown up by the side of the domestic system.2 A good, though somewhat belated picture of this early sort of factories — Worts
1) London, 1916, pp. 41, 118.
2) D. H. Macgregor, The Evolution of Industry, p. 39. London, 1922.
6



calls them domestic factories, while Marshall speaks of small businesses controlled by the workers themselves1—is to be found in Sybil, where we are introduced into the workshop of the monstrous "Bishop" of Wodgate, who, on the rickety second floor of a dilapidated house, exercises the calling of a locksmith, surrounded by his numerous "apprentices." Such factories were common in the early days, not only in the towns, but also in country districts, and historie remains still exist of some to them.2 Often they were established in an old barn or some other disused building, which was fitted up for the new purpose.
When handtools were replaced by machinery in consequence of the inventions described, the second phase in the development of industry was reached. This also brought in its train a great geographical change, as in view of the water required to drive the new machinery factories had to be built along the rivers now. Industry was therefore shifted, chiefly to the hilly parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and thus a sensational growth was witnessed far from towns. This stage in the industrial development is fully described in John Halifax, where the hero's activities centre round his water-driven factory in Enderly Valley.
But in their turn these mills were likewise doomed to disappear after a few decades. Industry reached its third and final stage, when a mighty rival of water power, the steam-driven engine, was brought to comparative perfection, chiefly through the untiring efforts of James Watt and his friend Boulton. The steam-engine brought again a change in the location of factory buildings: it demanded coal fuel, so that gradually—John Halifax, although introducing steam power, stayed at Enderly!—the banks of the rivers and rivulets among the northern hills were abandoned for places where coal and iron were to be found.
It was in the great towns of the coal and iron districts that industry found its final resting place. Up to the time of the introduction of steam the North of England had been poor and neglected, held in contempt by the inhabitants of the southern counties with their more advanced civilization, as is still clearly perceptible from Margaret Hale's attitude in the opening chapters of North and South.
1) A. Marshall, Principles of Economy, p. 747. London, 1920.
2) F. R. Worts, Modern Industrial History, p. 40. London, 1919.
7



But now all this was rapidly changed. The North advanced with gigantic strides in every direction. Its population grew apace: from 1801 to 1830 the population of England and Wales increased by nearly two thirds, and the greatest increase took place in the North, where Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester grew inmensely (about 75 %). There was a great shifting of the population too, a flow from the agricultural districts in the South to the manufacturing counties in the North. The miü-owners there became rich, and fortunes grew rapidly, like that of John Halifax, and many others in the beginning of the Thirty Years' Peace, who "from petty manufacturers rose to be merchant princes and cotton lords".1
The great activity and the strenuous efforts resulting in the transformation of England from an agricultural into an industrial state strangely contrast with the political inert ia of the country during the three opening decades of the nineteenth century. As we have observed already, this was the period of Eldonian Toryism of the Carlton Club. Lord Eldon in the twenty-four years of his administration did little if any legislative work, and what little he did, was chiefly done in a spirit of savage reaction. Abuses were tolerated easily, corruption was rampant in every department of government; useless survivals and absurd fictions abounded in the laws and customs of the country, and they were one of the principal incentives of Bentham's zeal for legal reform. In literature we find some allusions to these fictions.
In Disraeli's story of Captain Popanilla there is a judge who explains to a prisoner he is going to try for high treason, that he will have to be introduced by fiction of law as a stealer of Camelopards. He tells the man that the Court before which he is appearing, was originally instituted solely for the prosecution of persons molesting or injuring Camelopards, and though there are no such animals any more in the country, the old-established Court has been maintained. Offenders of all kinds are first brought in praesenti regio, by charging them with Camelopard stealing, and are thereupon tried for this fictitious offence. This satire, levelled at the many non-natural interpretations of old legal formulae, non-
1) John Halifax, Gentleman, vol. II, p. 117. Leipzig, 1857.
8



senstcal though it may seem to modern readers, was even less nonsensical than actual fact, of which Dicey says that it was "strange as the most fanciful dreams of Alice in Wonderland." Thus every plaintiff in action was supposed to be a debtor to the King, who was unable to pay his debt owing to the injury or damage done to hrm by the defendant, and thus he was afforded a ground for his action. If an English sailor attacked another in say Minorca, an action could be" brought for an assault that had taken place "at Minorca, at London, in the Parish of St. Mary le Bow, in the ward of Cheap." 1
In his novel Ten Thousand a Year Samuel Warren mentions another legal fiction, namely that of "John Doe" and "Richard Roe", two much used fictitious persons in legal actions.2
At last the incongruity between the laws of the land and its rapidly changing social conditions became so enormous that a change was bound to come. It was chiefly with respect to the parliamentary franchise that the altered circumstances irresistibly tended to reforms. The abuses that had in the course of centuries cropped up in the legislative institution were almost incredible. Many populous counties in the North sent but two members to Parliament, while large towns like Manchester and Liverpool were not represented there at all. On the other hand there were numerous small places without any political or commercial hnportance, belonging entirely to some landed proprietor, and with perhaps no more than a dozen or two of voters,3 that returned their one or even two members. These were the so-called "rotten boroughs", of which Sir Courtenay Gilbert gives some interesting specimens.
"At Droitwich the qualification of an elector was being "seised in fee of a small quantity of salt water arising out of a pit." It was proved before a parliamentary committee that the pit had been dried up for more than forty years. But there were title deeds which could be produced by the voter at the poll. At Downton, in
1) A. V. Dicey, The Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century, p. 92. London, 1914.
2) Ten Thousand a Year, vol. I, p. 256. Tauchnitz ed.
3) In Peacock's Melincourt there is a story of Rottenburgh, who has purchased "one half of the elective franchise vested in the body of Mr. Christopher Corporate, the free, fat, independent burgess of the ancient and honourable borough of Onevote, who returns two members to Parliament." Works, vol. I, p. 106.
9



Wiltshire, one of the burgage tenements was in the middle of a water course. At Old Sarum, where ploughed fields gave seven votes which returned two members, there was no building, and a tent had to be erected for the returning officer. Title deeds to qualifying property of this kind passed easily and rapidly from hand to hand, as occasion required. Hence the class of "snatchpaper voters." A woman could not vote herself, but she could pass on her qualification temporarily to any man. At Westbury a widow's qualifying tenement was worth a hundred pounds to her in 1747." 1
About one half of the seats were obtained by election, the others merely by nomination of estate owners, or by purchase. How elections used to be held under the old régime is fully described in John Halifax, where we also read of the attempted practices of what Itbert calls the "snatchpaper voters," in the borough of Kingswell.2
As appears from the example of the lucky Westbury widow, however, these practices were not new: indeed they had been carried on for centuries. As early as the Commonwealth members had already been nominated by borough owners, while seats had long been dealt in as an article of commerce, the King himself being at times a great purchaser!
The reason that such things now began to be feit as intolerable abuses is the above-mentioned shifting of the population and the central seats of wealth and power to the North. Moreover a new class of men had sprung into existence there, the wealthy leaders of the industrial movement. They formed what is commonly called the new middle class, la nouvelle bourgeoisie, and knew what they were worth. "The middle, not the upper class, are the part of the nation," a pamphleteer wrote, "which is entitled to command respect, and enabled to win esteem, or challenge admiration. They read, they reflect, they reason, they think for themselves;...They are the nation, the people, in every rational or correct sense of the word. By them, through them, for them, the fabric of government is reared, continued, designed. How long are they likely to suffer
1) Sir Courtenay Ilbert, Parliament, p. 39. London, 1922.
2) Vol. II, ch. II.
10



a few persons of overgrown wealth, laughable folly, and considerable profligacy, to usurp, and exclusively to hold, all consideration, all importance?" 1 Many, if not the greater part of them, had risen from the ranks, as the novels of the period show us: Obadiah Newbroom, Carson, Hillary, Dudley, Thornton, Trafford, Halifax, Moore, Bounderby,—all of them had started life at the bottom of the ladder, and fought their way upwards. Cazamian characterizes the new race as follows:
"La race des puissants du jour sort des usines et des ateliers, oü, modestes patrons, leurs pères mettaient encore la main au travail; oü des fortunes s'édifient en quelques années, oü les "lords du coton" grandissent hors des cadres surannés de la vieille aristocracie; de la Mersey et de la Tamise, oü les docks se gorgent d'infinies richesses; de la Cité, du Stock-Exchange, oü 1'agiotage fait danser aux millions leur ronde fantastique. Identiques dans leurs goüts et leurs idéés, portant également 1'empreinte des conditions économiques qui les ont produits, ces éléments divers s'agrègent et se fusionnent pour former une classe homogène, avide d'activité et de puissance." 2
It is no wonder then that, when these powerful and energetic men of business set their shoulders to the wheel, Reform was not to be put off any longer. This happened in 1830.
Having described how the industrial revolution was the great cause of the Reform of 1832, we will now turn our attention to the parallel movement of intellectualism, which manifested itself in its various aspects of Benthamism, rationalism, individualism, and Philosophical Radicalism, and which, as we observed already, now showed itself with greater vigour than ever before.
The leader of this school of thought was a lawyer, Jeremy Bentham, who was not so much a utilitarian moralist but a legal philosopher. He was a representative of the eighteenth century Aufklarung. His principles of law reform are currently summarized as follows3: 1. Legislation is a science. 2. Its object is the greatest
1) Thoughts upon the Aristocracy of England, by Isaac Tomkins, llth edition. London, 1835.
2) L. Cazamian, op. cit, p. 25.
3) Dicey, op. cit., p. 134.
1
11



happiness of the greatest nutnber1. 3. Everybody is best able to decide for himself what will be happiness for him. The greatest happiness principle which became the fundamental doctrine of Benthamism, has been traced back to the seventeenth century, but was at first used only by theologians, while Bentham applied it first as a criterion for good and bad laws. The third tenet contains the germs of the famous maxim of "laissez-faire" of the orthodox economists, which had been defended by them since the days of Adam Smith.2 Its object was to remove all restrictions on the free action of individuals, if they were not necessary in order to secure the same freedom to his neighbours. This principle actuated the Benthamites in their attacks on any restraint not justifiable by reasons of utility.
• The group of thinkers Bentham collected round him are called the Philosophical Radicals, which name points to the fact that they were not all men of the study, like Austin, James Mill and his son John Stuart, but also active politicians propagating his ideas in Parliament, such as Hume, Roebuck, Grote, Molesworth, and others.
Closely allied to the school of Bentham, and indeed frequently indentified with it, there was another intellectual movement originating in the work of Adam Smith, which also became a great force after the Revolution, namely the Economie school, whose chief representatives were Malthus, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Up
1) This is an application of the "principle of utility", which in Bentham's acceptation mainly distinguished itself by the manner in which he applied it as criterion between right and wrong, to legislation first, and to morals afterwards, thus, as John Mill triumphantly expresses it in his Autobiography, "passing judgment on the common modes of reasoning deduced from phrases like law of nature, right reason, the moral sense, natural rectitude and the like."
2) This is the famous '"self-interesf' principle that has aroused so much indignation among the opponents of the school (Carlyle in the Edinborough Revtew in 1829), and which is traced back in Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (vol. iii, p. 374. London, 1908) to Munn's Treasure by Foreign Trade (1664), and to a statement of Defoe's in the Mercator. Adam Smith has fully worked it out in a passage in The Wealth of Nations (vol. II, book IV, p. 35, London, 1772) where he shows that every individual, in promoting "domestick" industry, only intends his own gain, "and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand, to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it."
12



to the second decade of the century political economy had been a science which was scarcely known and studied except by philosophers, but since the appearance of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817 the new science rapidly asserted itself, as appears from the following dates: in 1818 appeared Jane Marcet's Conversattons on Political Economy, a book for the popularization of the useful science; in 1819 Ricardo took his seat in Parliament, and McCulloch takes a delight in telling us that, "being known tobe a masterof economical science, his opinion, from the moment he entered the House of Commons, was referred to on all important occasions." 1 In 1820 the Merchants of London addressed their famous Petition to Government, in which they demanded the introduction in legislation of the principles of commercial freedom, and expressed their conviction of the impolicy and injustice of the restrictive system, and the desirability of the abolition of all protective duties.2 In 1821 an Economie Club was founded in London. In 1825 followed the appointment at Oxford of a professor of Political Economy, the first in England.
The theories of these Orthodox Economists, as they are frequently called from their efforts to preserve the true principles of the founder of the science, were based on the same utilitarian grounds as Benthamfsm, and from 1830 the two schools may be said to have practically merged into one.
After this brief outline of the character of the two contemporary schools of thought, we need not be surprised to see that they rapidly rose to great influence in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, when we remember that in those same years the new middle class was making a determined effort at obtaining the place in politics which was due to it by virtue of its wealth and social power. The manufacturing classes and the utilitarian economists soon feit how well they suited each other, and how great the support would be which each could give the other. The economist was pleased to see the conclusions of his science confirmed by the approval of the men of practical life, while
1) Treatises and Essays, J. R. McCulloch, p. 557. London, 1859. It may be regretted that the science has lost so much of its parliamentary influence since that time!
2) Reprinted in McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, A New Edition, p. 384.
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the doctrine which made individual selfishness the sole governing factor in the progress of humanity was eagerly seized upon by the middle classes as the best meansi for the advancement of their class interests. As a German writer says, "Das Ideal der Freiheif in Form des freien Wettbewerbs kam dem Interesse des Unternehmers entgegen. Es gestattete ihm, ohne alle Beschrankung durch staatliohe Gewalten nach eigenem Ermessen seine Arbeitszeiten zu veriangern, seine Löhne zu drucken ..." 1 In the sphere of politics their interests were equally served by the Benthamite doctrines: their desire for reform found a ready-made programme in Bentham's legal science on utilitarian principles. No wonder therefore that the Manchester party readily identified its aims with the small group of Philosophical Radicals. Bentham met James Mill in 1808, and the Westminster Review, the organ of the new party, was founded in 1823. It took the lead in the attacks upon the Government and in the Reform movement, and since 1830 the two schools of thought may be said to have completely coalesced.
As long as Benthamism was propagated by the leaders themselves, its only object was to diminish the misery in the world: the Mills, Romilly, Grote and the others were all, like the great master himself, actuated by no other motive but philanthropy and compassion. Cazamian says of them that they possessed "une passion sincère du bien public." When the doctrine that every citizen best served the interests of the community by following his own interests, became popularized, however, in the hands of political economists like Whately, the second professor of the science at Oxford, it took the form of statements like the following, which is to be found in a text book for school use published by this author2: "It is curious to observe how through the wise and beneficent arrangement of Providence men thus do the greatest service to the public when they are thinking of nothing but their own gain." Of course such teachings were bound to degenerate into the grossest forms of social selfishness, when they were put in practice by an uncultured, coarsegrained factory owner.
After the Reform of 1832 it was again the Benthamite Radicals
1) W. Dibelius, Charles Dickens, p. 45. Leipzig und Berlin, 1916.
2) Easy Letters on Money Matters, cited by Wallas, The Great Society, p. 112. New York, 1920.
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who set to work to carry out legal reforms in accordance with their utilitarian principles, for their allies in the struggle, the Whigs and Liberals, had become more and more frightened at their own work, as it progressed, and they soon dropped back in the movement, till in 1837 Lord Russell pronounced his famous "statement of finality," which procured him the nickname of "Finality Jack," and by which he openly declared that the Reform Act was considered by his party to be the final step.
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CHAPTER III.
Social Misery and Humanitarianism.
So far we have only looked at the brighter side of the condition of England in Early Victorian times. We have witnessed the triumph of factory industry, with its corollary, the great expansion of trade, and the rise of a wealthy and powerful class of citizens, and their successful struggle for a place in the sun, thereby aided materially by the strong spirit of enlightenment that sweptj away all remnants and abuses of former centuries, just as the Revolution had swept away these things in France.
This triumphal march of industrialism and individualism was attended, however, with evils tnat were of much larger proportions still, and we have now come to the point where it will be necessary to show the reverse of the tnedal. Here again the observer is struck by the fact that there are two closely allied phenomena which together offer a striking parallel to the combination of industrialism and individualism, namely the social question and collectivism. The first being the cause of the second, we shall again take the social condition of England first.
The pictures which are drawn by philanthropists, humanitarians, and novelists are appalling by their dark misery, and the descriptions that have been left us would almost be incredible, were it not that they are indisputably proved to be true by a mass of contemporary evidence laid down in parliamentary reports and blue books, and by the works of truthful historians and biographers like Spencer Walpole and the Hammonds.
In accordance with the new Benthamite doctrines the Government ceased to interfere in everything connected with trade and industry, to supervise the conditions of labour, to regulate hours, and to insist on the payment of fair wages. It became the accepted fact now that
16



both masters and rnen had complete freedom in regard to their mutual relations, whereas under the old guild system endless regulations protected the weak against the strong. Paternal governmental supervision, which had mainly been exercised by the Justices of the Peace, was abandoned as being wholly unsuitable to the new factory industry, in some places with the common consent of masters and men, in others again in the face of the opposition of the latter. Thus we read of a strike of Scottish weavers in 1812, who appealed to a Statute of Queen Elizabeth of 1563, according to which their wages should be regulated by the magistrates. This legal question being decided in their favour, the masters refused to comply with the decision and had the leaders prosecuted under the Combination Act, in consequence of which action the Statute was repealed. The next year the apprenticeship clauses, which had also to a great extent become a dead letter1, were likewise repealed, so that it is not too much to speak with Carlyle of a complete anarchy in the labour market, which was only partly remedied by the new Combination Act of 1825, by which workmen were allowed to combine again, for the purpose of stipulating wages and other conditions of labour.
This state of legal anarchy could not have come at a more inopportune moment to the labouring classes, however. It coincided with the most complete triumph of the laissez-faire principle that had ever been witnessed in any country before. Uncultured business-men of the Bounderby type fully availed themselves of the opportunity presented to them to abuse their new social power, and this led to the grossest evils. The conditions prevailing in England could only be considered as a process of demolition of the old feudal forms of society, but the renovation that had to follow was not to be expected of the orthodox economists with their free competition.2
An enormous influx of labour continually poured into the new industrial areas, partly because labour was wanted there, partly because agricultural labourers, attracted by the prospect of better wages than the nine shillings a week farmers paid them3 eagerly
1) "Not one in ten of the workmen employed in the woollen manufactory has served a regular apprenticeship; many have not been apprenticed at all ..." W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, p. 568, note. Cambridge, 1907.
2) J. K. Ingram, A History of Political Economy, p. 11, London 1920.
3) Sybil, Book III, Ch. XIII.
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left their old trade, which, as we shall see later on, was in a deplorable condition. Mrs. Gaskell shows us this immigration into the industrial towns in Mary Barton:
"Tom, that's Will's father, had come to Manchester, and sent word what terrible lots of work was to be had, both for lads and lasses. So father sent George first, and then work was scarce out toward Burton, where we lived, and father said I maun try and get a place. And George wrote as how wages were far higher in Manchester than Milnthorpe or Lancaster." 1
The effect of this movement was an ever increasing free labour market, which means a supply of labour waiting employment.2 Under the old system, when the "vertical" division of society still existed* in the manner in whioh we find it described in John Halifax in Enderley Valley, every workman had found employment in the mill near which he lived and wages had been the subject of individual local bargaining, but with the growing "horizontal" structure of society, and its line of general division running between capital and labour4, the men had lost all connection with special masters and workshops. The latter maintained that free markets were necessary to enable them to compete with foreign rivals, but the men, bereft of all protection, feil victims to this freedom. Besides the violent ups and downs in industry, the great financial and commercial crises by which especially the "hungry forties" were characterized5, produced much unemployment; "rucks of money" varied with great poverty.
The condition of affairs in these newly settled areas and "mushroom towns" was far from satisfactory, and strongly reminds of the conditions prevailing in Klondyke or some other district after the first discovery of gold: law, order, government were almost absent at first; the streets were unpaved, unlighted; no water supply existed, as most rivers were soon polluted by industrial processes.
1) Mary Barton, p. 33. London 1906. ; .
2) F. Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844.
London, ^^.^ mg Entwicklung der sozialen Fragen bis zum Weltkriege,
p. 44. Bertin, 1919. .
4) The term 'capital and labour" had already become a very current one in Early Victorian times. _ . , ... .
5) See for this H. Hyndham, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century. London, 1892.
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Dickens describes the river on which Coketown lies as running purple with ill-smelling dyes, while there was also a black canal in the town.1
As regards further details of all the social misery, and the inhuman conditions of labour in many mills and mines, we may refer the reader to works like those of Engels, the Hammonds, and Walpole.2 We pref er to follow Charlotte Brontë's example, when she says: "Child-torturers, slave masters and drivers, I consign to the hands of jailers; the novelist may be excused from sullying his pages with the records of his (sic!) deeds." 8
It is small wonder that the conditions described above had a great influence upon the political history of the period. The Reform of 1832 had stirred up great popular enthusiasm, at which the reformers themselves had become greatly frightened. Trade Unionism, rendered possible by the Combination Act of 1825, entered upon its revolutionary period, when the Reform Act, after exciting foolish hopes of social betterment in the breasts of the working classes— Samuel Warren calls it "an Act for giving Everybody Everything" 4 —did not realize any of their expectations, but turned out to be a purely middle class measure in which the masses were left out in the cold, and none of their grievances redressed.
This led to a continuation of the popular movement, chiefly aiming as a first step at the enfranchisement of the people. In 1838 the Working Men's Association in London drew up a famous program of popular wishes, which was called the Charter, and which claimed various political reforms. This Chartist movement, of which we find a full description in Mary Barton, and a still fuller one in Alton Locke, continued all through the hungry forties, often leading to violences, as Disraeli shows us in Sybil, and at last died out in 1848, when the labouring classes had gradually learned to see that Trade-Unionism and co-operative efforts would be productive of more beneficial results than political agitation.
Having given a short survey of the many evils produced by the
1) Hard Times, p. 26. London 1902.
2) J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury. London, 1923 Sir Spencer Walpole, A History of England etc, vol. IV. London 1890.
3) Shirley, p. 65. London, 1914.
4) Ten Thousand a Year, vol. III, Ch. I.
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industrial evolution, we shall now tracé the progress of the philanthropic movement which was the immediate outcome of the misery of the masses. Properly speaking the term philanthropism only denotes one of the phases of a new tendency of the English mind, which was an emotional reaction against the cold, selfish, and rational individualism that was ruling uppermost. The social repentance or interventionism of which Cazamian speaks was the most characteristic and most active form that the movement took at the outset. Idealism, humanitarian and religious emotion, moral principles, enthusiasm, pity, altruism, all these factors go to make up the new mental attitude which rises spontaneously against harren materialism, selfishness, and a mistaken sense of liberty.
Selfish individualism henceforth found itself confronted by altruistic collectivism in almost every department of social life. The new spirit of social combination and co-operation, and of mutual support for common social ends manifested itself in Trade Unionism, Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, and Federations of Unions. The same tendency of collectivist effort is manifested in joint stock trading and trusts, but it is of a quite different nature from the collectivism in the sense of social brotherhood which we are speaking of. Such phenomena are indeed the very opposite of socialistic in their tendencies, whatever their ultimate development may be. Curious though such a coincidence may be, it is perhaps best to simply consider it as such.1
The best manner to show the difference between the two hostile bodies of thought now confronting each other is perhaps to quote a representative passage from a leading writer of each school. Individualism we shall illustrate by a specimen of the opinions held by W. R. Greg, a utilitarian critic of great reputation.
"They (i. e. certain classes of the poor) have made for themselves the hard bed they lie on. They have sinned, against the plainest laws of nature, and must be left to the corrective which nature has in that case made and provided;—a corrective which is certain to operate in the end, if only we do not step in to counteract it by regulations dictated by plausible and pardonable, but shallow and short-sighted humanity ... Nor can it be said that, in contending
1) D. H. Macgregor, op. cit, p. 46. See also Dicey, op. cit, on this phenomenon.
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that improvidence, idleness, dissipation, and early marriages should be allowed to encounter their natural fruit and salutary punishment among the poor, we are guilty of any partiality or special harshness. We demand no more from them than from all other classes. Privation and wretchedness are the allotted consequences and correctives of these vices in all other ranks,—why should the lowest be exempted from the common law." 1
We add the following passage also representing a voice from the same camp:
"It appears to me that those educational philanthropists who disdain to study the science of human nature, as it is expounded in the Gospel, have been running at fault spending their substance for a shadow. The first and great lesson ... is that man must expect his chief happiness, not in the present, but in a future state of existence. He alone who acts on this principle will possess his mind in peace under every sublunary vicissitude, and will not care to scramble with feverish envy or angry contention for the idle
phantoms which the dupes of pleasure and ambition pursue
Where then shall mankind find this transforming power?—in the cross of Christ. It is the sacrifice which removes the guilt of sin; it is the motive which removes the love of sin; it mortifies sin by showing its turpitude to be indelible except by such an awful expiation; it atones for disobedience; it excites to obedience; it purchases strength for obedience; it makes obedience practicable; it makes it acceptable; it makes it in a manner unavoidable, for it constrains it; it is finally, not only the motive to obedience, but the pattern." 2
After hearing the voice of this preacher of obedience,—obedience to which the poor have to be educated according to his views—we shall listen to another preacher, not to, but for the poor:
"But gentlemen, gentlemen, dealing with other men like me, begin at the right end. Give us, in mercy, better homes, when we're a-lying in our cradles; give us better food, when we're a-working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back, when we're a-going wrong; and don't set Jail, Jail, Jail, afore us, everywhere we turn.
1) R. W. Greg, Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Artizan Class, pp. 102, 103. London, 1876.
2) A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 423. London, 1835.
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There an't a condescension you can show the labourer that he won't take, as ready and as grateful as a man can be; for he has a patiënt, peaceful, willing heart. But you must put his rightful spirit in him first; for whether he's a wreek and ruin such as me, or is like one of them that stand here now, his spirit is divided from you at this time. Bring it back, gentlefolks, bring it back! Bring it back before the day comes when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes—in Jail: "Whither thou goest, I can Not go; where thou lodgest, I do Not lodge; thy people are Not my people, nor thy God my God!" 1
Finally we will add a passage from Carlyle, which gives a significant reply to Ure's gospel of obedience:
4'Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellowmen to believe in God, that so Chartism might abate, and the Manchester operatives be got to spin peaceably! The idea is more distracted than any placard pole seen hitherto in a public thoroughfare of men. My friend, if ever thou do come to believe in God, thou wilt find all Chartism, Manchester riot, Parliamentary incompetence, Ministries of Windbag, and the wildest Social Dissolutions, and the burning up of this entire Planet, a most small matter in comparison." 2
The new spirit manifested itself in almost every dotnain of human thought. As we have said, one of the clearest manifestations is to be found in the so-called philanthropic movement. The harshness of the new social doctrines, and the misery attending the industrialization of England aroused in the breasts of emotional natures a slowly rising wave of pity for the poor and unprotected sufferers. People became alarmed at the growing degradation and anarchy in industrial centres. They began to ask themselves whether it was indeed true what the orthodox economists taught about all this misery lying in the nature of things; whether absolute free competition was the only solution for economie problems; whether man was not really "his brother's keeper".
As early as 1802 the Health and Morals Act was passed, a first attempt at factory legislation. In 1806 the slave trade was prohibited. In 1811 the Philanthropist was founded, a periodical published by
1) Charles Dickens, The Chimes.
2) Past and Present, p. 218. London. 1919.
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a group of religious persons, but among whose contributors James Mill was found, as well as Jeremy Bentham himself. In 1816 another Factory Act was passed, while in 1825 slavery was abolished. In 1833, 1844, and 1850 further Factory Acts followed, chiefly through the unwearying efforts of Lord Ashley, a great and typical leader of the "factory movement", who devoted his whole life (1801-1885) to the cause of the poor, a man who one night presided over a meeting of four hundred thieves in the darkest part of London, to study their condition and desires.1
This noble Tory belonged to the Evangelical party, which may be said to have had the greatest influence on the factory movement and on the emotional revival in general. The Evangelists were originally those members of the Established Church who, though fully sympathizing with Wesley, had not followed the latter, when he left that Church in 1739. A second movement of a similar nature has been dated at 1797,2 and this "second Evangelical Revival" became of great importance, owing to the fact that it made so many converts among the higher classes. Though at first this process had been a slow one, in the Waterloo generation "county families capitulated wholesale." 3 These Evangelists were all unwearying in their advocacy of humane reforms. No wonder, therefore, that these Tory philanthropists, when turning their attention to industrial towns, opened a crusade against the conditions prevailing there, under the leadership of Ashley, therein assisted by other humanitarian Tories, like Southey, Sadler, Ostler, and Seely.
It was not only in politics and religion, but also in philosophy that the new spirit showed itself, and here it is the name of Coleridge that is most prominent, upon whom the epithet of a great seminal mind was bestowed by no less a person than John Mill. His views were chiefly propagated through the medium of The Friend (1809—10), his Lay Sermons (1816), and his Constitution of State and Church (1830).
His views about the last-named institutions were directly opposed to those of the liberal individualists. The contrast between the two standpoints, which might be denoted as positive and negative,
1) J. L. and Barbara Hammond, op. cit., p. 254.
2) P. A. Brown, op. cit., ch. IX.
3) Ibid.
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is beautifully illustrated by the following passage from one of the Critical Essays of Macaulay, a Whig of rising importance, who is characterized by an eminent critic of literature as "the very incarnation of the prevailing character of Englishmen between Waterloo and the Mutiny." 1
Macaulay then tells his readers of Sou they that "he conceives that the business of the Magistrate is not merely to see that the persons and the property of the people are secure from attack, but that he ought to be a Jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer, schoolmaster, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish, a Paul Piy in every house, spying, eaves-dropping, relieving, admonishing, spending our money for us, and choosing our opinions for us, ..." 2
The interventionist idea, which Macaulay wishes to ridicule here, and of which Coleridge was the first propagator, aimed of course at much higher ideals than to be a Lady Bountiful or Paul Pry. The Coleridgeans wished to make the State into a living organism again; not merely a negative principle of non-in te rference, but an active force for the moral and material well-being of its subjects, and for the poor in the first place. The clergy and the landed aristocracy were to be the powerful allies in the fulfilment of these duties. In this respect Coleridge may be considered as the direct precursor of Young Englandism, which likewise aimed at the restoration of the powers of Nobility and Church with the same object.
Even the creed of the individualist camp, the "dismal science" of the orthodox economists, underwent the all pervading influence of emotional collectivism. The change was first introduced in this domain from abroad. Comte, the father of the historical school of economics, propagated in his French work La Philosophie positive the idea of an ordered change, and of historical comparison as a means to find the laws of evolution governing the changes in society. Thus he completed the science and to the combined social statics and social dynamics he gave the name of sociology.8 Comte's second great merit is that he infused the barren materialism of the orthodox
1) Saintsbury, op. cit., p. 713.
2) T. B. Macaulay. Southey's Colloquies on Society. Critical and Historical Essays, p. 170. London, 1870.
3) R. Eisler, Sociologie, p. VIII. Amsterdam, 1911.
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followers of Adam Smith with moral notions, opposing social duties to individual rights.
Other causes that aided to effect a change in political economy were in the first place the growing influence of socialist doctrines, which was openly recognized by no less a person than John Stuart Mill, and next the general trend science took in the Early Victorian period. The great ascendancy of the mathematico-physical branches during the first decades of the century, which is still clearly perceptible in many novels of the second quarter1, gradually gave way to a pronounced tendency for biological studies teaching that scientific laws are as much subject to evolution and change as the subject matter of science itself. The great representative of this new principle of evolution is Charles Darwin. It influenced political economy, as well as a great many other spheres of human thought, e.g., that of politics, where its effect is illustrated by the appearance of books like Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which the principles of Darwinism are applied to the problem of political changes.
1) See below, Chapter XVIII.
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CHAPTER IV.
The Novel about 1830.
Having briefly outlined the various schools of thought predominating in Early Victorian England, we shall now wind up our introductory remarks by some observations on the general features characterizing the English novel about the year 1830.
After the glorious outburst of Romanticism, which had been slowly preparing its final triumph in the teeth of eighteenth century liberal enlightenment, a period of exhaustion became apparent in literature, which is by most critics considered to coincide with the fourth decade of the century, though they do not all agree as to the exact limits to be assigned to the period of depression.1
In accordance with the principle of evolution exposed in his book L'Evolutbn psychologique et la Littérature anglaise, Cazamian attributes the waning of the romantic fervour to the common psychological phenomenon described by him as "une oscillation du rhythme psychologique." The romantic excesses had provoked a reaction, a desire for refreshment and novel sensations, a longing for a change.
This impulse from within was aided by various other factors, chief of which were: the social conditions of England; intellectualism, which increased in strength with the rise of industry; a kind of feeble reaction against the novelists of the "silver fork" school; the creation of a large class of novel readers among the new middle classes; new forms adopted by the book trade, by the issue of novels in serial form, coinciding with the appearance of numerous reviews and other periodicals which superseded the older and more expensive "three-deckers".
1) See Traill and Mann, Social England, p. 64. London, 1896. Saintsbury, op. cit., p. 740.
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All these factors did two things: they stimulated the appearance of the social novel, and they determined its literary character. This last statement requires some elucidation. Two distinct features characterize the novel of this time: its romanticism and its realism. The first is a direct continuation of the preceding romantic movement, while the second is, as we have just seen, a reaction against this movement, so that the circumstances naturally favoured the appearance of what has been called the "novel-romance". Romanticism received a fresh impulse, after its apparent -exhaustion during the ebb-tide period, from the great problems that were stirring the English minds at that time, such as the condition-ofEngland question, and from the wave of humanitarianism and Evangelicalism that was sweeping over the country. In the course of the Victorian period it gradually disappeared from the novel, however, owing to the growing power of realism, favoured by the scientific spirit of the age.
The combined influence of the two tendencies, the adventurous and the rational spirit of enquiry into every phenomenon of daily life, produced together what Cazamian has styled "le romantisme social," in contradistinction to the pure romanticism of the opening years of the century. Of this social romanticism the social novel has been the direct outcome, and though not exclusively concerned with this form of fiction, yet it will appear that it forms the main source of this essay, while further it should be borne in mind that many Early Victorian novels, though not purely social, contain a certain admixture of the social element, which has likewise made them valuable objects of study for our purpose.
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SOME ASPECTS OF EARLY VICTORIAN BUSINESS LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
The Benthamite Type of Business~man.
When investigating the attitude of Early Victorian literature towards the world of trade and industry, we must constantly keep in view the existence of the two hostile bodies of thought whose origin and ideals we have sketched in the preceding chapters of this book: one favoured by and in turn favouring the unshackled freedom of industrial development, usually denoted as the industrial revolution, and the other, being a reaction against the first, called forth by the social misery this had produced, but which, at the time of which we are writing, had not yet been formulated into so complete a system as its opponent.
The trading interests were of course all to be found in the camp that propagated teachings which cannot be denoted by a more suitable name than the gospel of the rising middle classes, a mixture of Utilitarianism and Orthodox Economy. Carlyle in his pithy language speaks of "all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-andDemand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the Hindmost." The close relation between the middle classes and the utilitarian economists is commented upon by the German socialist Engels in the following words: "Political Economy, the Science of Wealth, is the favourite study of these bartering Jews (i.e., the middle classes). Every one of them is a Political Economist." Novelists held the same view of the matter. Mrs. Gaskell confesses in her preface to Mary Barton that she "knows nothing of Political Economy or the theories of trade." Charles Kingsley speaks in Alton Locke of a member of Parliament, who "was reputed a philosopher, and a political economist, and a liberal," thereby showing that the rising
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on, merely in order to furnish herself with arguments. She believes that "a little more of the cheerful tenderness which was in those days thought bad for children, would have saved (her) from (her) worst faults and from a world of suffering." Her religion "took the character of (her) mind, and it was harsh, severe, and mournful accordingly." 1
James Mill, the real leader of the Utilitarians, is described to us by his son as follows: "Temperance was with him the central point of educational precept. He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by ... He rated intellectual enjoyment above all others. For passionate emotions of all sorts he professed the greatest contempt, regarding them as a form of madness ... The great stress laid upon feeling was an abberration of modern times." As Stephen observes,2 he seemed to regard life as a series of arguments, in which people were to be constrained by logic, not persuaded by sympathy. The Spartan manner in which this Scotchman educated his son John Stuart8 is the exact counterpart in actual life of the domestic relations Mrs. Gaskell describes in the Thornton household, "where a stranger might have gOne away, and thought that he had never seen such frigid indifference of demeanour between such near relations." *
Mrs. Gaskell's friend Charlotte Brontë has likewise given us a full-length portrait of the Benthamite type of business-man in the person of the mill-owner Robert Moore, of whom we are told that he possessed "a hard spirit, a determined cast of mind, scorn of low enemies", and further that he "refused to truckle to the mob, and was of an inflexible nature, proud to his workmen, believing that he fulfilled his whole duty to them only be treating them justly." "Forward" was the device stamped upon his soul, and he pushed his interests to the exclusion of philanthropic consideration for general interests.
The third great female novelist of the Victorian era, George Elliot, has likewise tried her hand at this type of mercantile character in the person of Harold Transome in Felix Holt. Of this Smyrna merchant and banker we read that he possesses rapidity, decision, indifference
1) Autobiography, pp. 11, 95, 103. Biographical Sketches, London, 1876.
2) Op. cit, vol. II, p. 39.
3) Autobiography by John Stuart Mill, pp. 4, 34, 52, 53. London, 1873.
4) North and South, p. 207.
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the same opinion as Bulwer about the dangers of his doctrines, a fact which is said to have puzzled the philosopher very much.1 This seems to be a little naive, when we remember that the great teacher himself never succeeded in forming a clear conception of the way in which the interests of the community could be served by individuals seeking to serve their own interests.*
There is another passage in The Disowned, where a person advocates a similar mistaken or rather morally distorted utilitarianism. A great rascal, Crauford by name, and a merchant by trade, tries to corrupt one Olendover, a high^minded person finding himself on the brink of starvation, by telling him some fictitious story of a poor devil of a clerk who had defrauded his employer. Crauford defends the man's conduct as follows: "Public law is instituted for public happiness. Now if mine and my children's happiness is infinitely more served by this comparatively petty fraud, than my employer's is advanced by my abstaining from it, why the origin of law itself allows me to do it." The subtle seducer winds up by saying: "What say you to that, Glendover? It is something in your Utilitarian, or as you term it, Epicurean principle, is it not?" * In a subsequent conversation with his victim Crauford argues that in spite of religion, morality and wisdom, "there is in all creation but one evident law—self-preservation." He then proceeds to apply this Benthamite principle to his own rascally schemes again. By quoting such specious, quasiBenthamite arguments, Bulwer clearly proves that, whatever may have been his own inclinations towards Bentham's teachings, he did not suffer his moral views to be distorted into self-interest principles, but repeatedly drew his readers' attention to the dangerous use ambitious men of the world or unscrupulous Mammonists might make of them.
The hatred of political economy, which is so often betrayed by writers of the Early Victorian period, is also strongly evident in
1) Oraham Wallas, op. cit, p. 108. Leslie Stephen, The Engttsh Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 188.
2) Lesli Stephen,' op. cit., p. 313.
3) The Disowned, p. 240. Leipzig, 1842. The Epicurean Standard of morals resembled that of the Utilitarians, in that it also took the tendency of human action to produce either pain of pleasure as the exdusive test of right or wrong (J- S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 48).
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CHAPTER III.
Hard Times»
The most violent and sustained attack made by Dickens upon the rationalist spirit in the hostile camp is to be found in Hard Times, where Gradgrind is the embodiment of the Benthamite type as he fancied he saw it leading England to spiritual destruction, while Gradgrind's friend Bounderby is a satire on the hard-hearted mill-owner who, though in his ignorance he has probably never heard of Bentham's principle of self-interest, nevertheless carries it into execution in the most complete manner.
The whole novel is permeated, and in the opinion of most readers and critics spoiled, by the author's hostile attitude towards the spirit of industrialized England. How violent Dickens's attack on industrialism and individualism is, is best measured by the reply the novel provoked from Miss Martineau, who spoke of "the work of busy and shallow minds," though she herself had considerably altered her views on the social problem since the early days of her career, when she published her Illustrations of Political Economy, while books like Mary Barton and North and South, though the solutions suggested there are not in the spirit of classical economists either, did not draw her out of her tent.1
The fact is that Hard Times attacked, not so much the practical state of affairs in England, but rather the spirit of which those conditions were the material reflection. Dickens's aim was to hold
1) The Factory Controversy; a warning against meddling legislation, by Harriet Martineau. Manchester, 1855. Her attacks are directed against Horner, the factory inspector, and "Mr. Dickens, the Editor (of Household Words)," the latter for what he attempted in Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and especially in his articles on the question of Factory Legislation in Household Words in 1855.
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up to public scorn and contempt the secret moral springs which brought the world to moral and material ruin. These springs were of course the barren, dead, and deadening feelings of rationalism and materialism accompanying the industrial revolution, which feelings Dickens saw embodied in the teachings of political economists. The latter on the other hand considered their teachings as "merely benevolence under the guidance of science," as Greg expressed it.
It may be doubted whether Dickens had studied the "dismal science" himself to any great extent. The allusions he makes to its tenets in Hard Times are vague and chiefly limited to the "facts and figures" with which it prided itself to support those tenets. These facts and figures, varied here to "averages and figures", are a mere repetition of those of Mr. Filer, and there is not the slightest advance or change traceable in Dickens's attitude, though eleven years had elapsed since he created that embodiment of statistics; The changes that were coming over political economy, as appearing for instance from the condensed translation of the works of Comte, the father of the historical school of economy, by Harriet Martineau, at one time one of the greatest supporters of the orthodox school; and from the works of John Stuart Mill, which gradually drifted away from the old "greatest happiness" principle, and showed the growing influence of the collectivist idea,1—all these changes had as it seemed, escaped the novelist's notice.2 To Dickens political economy was still the same rationalist science based on utilitarian happiness, and deriving its lessons from cold facts and figures only, to the exclusion of any other factors like fancy, feelings, art,—even though represented only by the horse-riders, or by the figures of horses in a floor-carpet, or by a sunbeam falling on Sissy Jupe's hair, or by the cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog, etc.
1) Oliver Elton describes Mill's book on Utilitarianism as a failure which was bound to be one, as it was impossible to find what the author proposed to find, namely an inducement, on Benthamite principles, for practising the altruism preached by Comte. Op cit., vol. I, p. 60.
2) The time was drawing near of which Jevons wrote that "it (was) evident then that a spirit of very active criticism (was) spreading, which (could) hardly fail to overcome in the end the prestige of the old false doctrines," and though he confesses that he does not yet see what is to be put in place of them, he expects "the rise of a science of the development of economie forms and relations." Preface to the second edition (1879) of The Theory of Political Economy by W. Stanley Jevons. London, 1911.
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Another objection that might be made to this attack upon utilitarian! economy is that it was somewhat belated in view of the altered social conditions in England in 1855. The hungry forties had been left behind; since the middle of the century the country had entered upon a new period in its social and political affairs. Chartism and political labour agitation were dead; the working classes had begun to turn their attention to peaceful unionism, and other practical schemes for the obtainment of greater social welfare, such as cooperation, friendly societies, clubs, etc.
Besides a defective knowledge of the progress made by political economy, there may have been the well-known psychological truth that a man's beliefs and opinions are chiefly formed before his thirtieth year, which made Dickens persist in his "facts and figures" theory; it is this same quality of the human mind which, as Disraeli observes, causes predominant opinions to be generally those of the generation that is vanishing.1 Thus is was predicted of Adam Smith that he would persuade the then living generation, and would govern the next, while Benthamism flourished in English politics from the Reform year 1832, which was also that of the leader's death.
Dickens appears to have been especially subject to this tenacity of his youthful impressions and opinions, which gave a kind of conservative character to the choice of his subjects. He knew only one town intimately, London with its lower and lower middle classes, as he had learned to know and to love it in the days of the stage coaches and their never-to-be-forgotten drivers, and postboys, and passengere, both inside and out. But when, as in Hard Times, he ventured into an industrial town of the North, with its widely different problems, and the new habits of thought and character of its inhabitants, the reader soon perceives that it was wellnigh a closed book to him, as it must be to anybody that has not, like Mrs. Gaskell, lived and worked in such a manufacturing centre for a considerable time, in periods» of ups as well as of downs. Dickens must have feit this, when he resolved to go and see a strike that was on just then at Preston. How sadly the author failed to penetrate below the surface is evident, not only from the letter he wrote to a friend while there,2 but also from the fact that he went to see
1) Sybil, or the Two Nations, p. 359.
2) John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. II, p. 86. London.
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Hamlet at the theatre in the evening, instead of collecting materials for his novel by mixing with the crowds reading the placards at the street corners, listening to their conversation, or talking to them in order to draw them out and ascertain their views about the strike.1
The mere fact that Dickens waited so many years before treating the social question in his novels is in itself already a proof that he feit a little shy about it. He must have feit that the subject lay somewhat outside the range of his great powers. Else it will be difficult to account for) the fact that the novelist who perhaps possessed the strongest social sympathies for his fellow-men of all English authors, and who attacked every social abuse of his time -—Crotch divides them into no fewer than seven classes!2—hesitated ten years after the appearance of Coningsby, before he tackled the greatest of all those abuses.
The success achieved in Hard Times falls, as was to be expected, far below the great powers he showed on other occasions. The manufacturing and mercantile classes are represented by two fine specimens of humanity, Gradgrind and Bounderby. Neither of them, however, is shown to us in his proper sphere of action, working in his mill or warehouse, absorbed in money-making pursuits, or struggling against obstacles, material as well as human. Gradgrind has already retired from his hardware business, before we make his acquaintance, and as for Bounderby, there is hardly a single passage in the book showing him in his relation to his employees. The best description, and the most complete too, is that which refers to his domestic life, and especially his behaviour towards Mrs. Sparsitt, of whom the blustering bully is secretly afraid, probably on account of her being "highly connected."
But this human caricature, beautiful as it may be from a literary point of view, tells us very little about trade and industry. Bounderby is rich, and we are told that like so many business-men of the period,
1) There is doubtless much truth in Harriet Martineau's words in her pamphlet on the Factory Controversy (p. 36): ("An) effectual security against its doing any mischief is that the Tale, in its characters, conversations, and incidents, is so unlike life—so unlike Lancashire or English Me,—that it is deprived of its influence. Master and man are as unlike life in England, at present, as Ogre and Tom Thumb: and the result of the choice of subject is simply that the charm of an ideal creation is foregone whüe nothing is gained in its stead."
2) W. Walter Crotch, Charles Dickens, Social Reformen London, 1913
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because they are for ever changing and uncertain. God has also made some weak; not in any one way, but in all. One is weak in body, another in mind, another in steadiness of purpose, a fourth can't teil right from wrong, and so on The fault of the orthodox economists starting their reasonings from a homo oeconomicus who was supposed invariably to adopt the same course of action under the same circumstances, could not have been more clearly pointed out than by this old spinner. It was the same objection all humanitarian writers made against the science. Ruskin expressed it as follows in his Unto this Last: "(Man being) an engine whose motive power is a Soul, the force of this very peculiar agent, as an unknown quantity, enters into all the political economist's equations, without his knowledge, and falsifies every one of their results." 1
Though Charles Kingsley is also vehement in denouncing political economists, who can only prove that social misery is as inevitable as all other laws of nature,2 it is yet curknis to observe that, when he is forgetting for a moment that they are the greatest obstacles to his socialist reforms he speaks of them in a surprisingly laudatory manner, as being expert advisers in the execution of a plan for a co-operative farm,3 while in another passage in the same book he writes that his readers have no doubt read more wisdom than they have practised yet, "seeing that they have their Bible and—perhaps too, Mill's Political Economy!" This proves in the first place that Kingsley often knew better than what he wrote in his "yeasty" frame of mind, while further it shows that John Stuart Mill had, as we observed in a previous chapter, already drifted far away from the orthodox principles instilled into him by his father.
1) Unto this Last, p. 7. London, 1907.
2) Alton Locke, p. 110. London, 1923.
3) Md., p. 228.
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Scotch preacher takes up this standpoint: if England finds that her national existence, as is constantly re-iterated by the mill-owner and the merchant of his day, really depends on the question of selling her manufactured cotton a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people, he thinks it would be much better to submit to the inevitable, and discontinue the business, rather than suffer her inhabitants "to fill (their) lungs with cotton-fuzz, (their) hearts with copperasfumes, with rage and mutiny."
This is the humanitarian view of a man who conskiers the conditions of life and the happiness of the people to be of infinitely greater importance than the material greatness and power of the state and the interests of its industries. The "condition-of-England" —the phrase, like so many others current in those days, flowed from his pen—had proved to him that instead of being linked up inseparably, the interests of the State and those of Society may lie in diametrically opposite directJons, which he expresses by stating that notwithstanding the fact that "cotton-cloth is already twopence a yard or lower, ... bare backs were never more numerous among us." This happy observation throws a vivid light on the fact that social interests were entirely sacrificed to national in his days.
On the page where we find the above observation, Carlyle refers to England's foreign competitors as follows: "The Continental people, it would seem, are "importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that"." This growing competition of foreigners appears to have filled the minds of many business peoplé with uneasiness as to England's industrial supremacy. Other nations were gradually beginning to imitate her in her manufactures, by importing machinery bought from her, and inducing skilied labour to come with those machines.
Engels, prognosticating upon "the chances of the English bourgeois" in 1844, said: "German manufacture is now making great efforts, and that of America has developed with great strides." He further gives it as his opinion that in twenty years' time English manufactures will be vanquished, instancing as a proof of what is bound to come the fact of a daring American speculator who sent a shipment of cotton goods to England, where they were sold for re-exportation. McCulloch, on the other hand,—"the favourite
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economist of the bourgeois", as Engels calls him—re-assured the manufacturing interests of his country, by telling them that it would be ludicrous to suppose that the Americans could hope to be able to compete with an old manufacturing country like England, and that in his opinion she would easily be able to keep the start she had already gained.1
Wherever the truth may have lain between the two extreme opinions of the socialist and the orthodox economist, the fact that the question was discussed by many people2 is in itself a sufficiënt proof that the minds of business-men were not easy upon the matter. This is also clearly reflected in some of the novels of the time, especially in Mrs. Gaskell's social novels, and in Kingsley's Alton Locke and Yeast. It appears that the manufacturers constantly used the bugbear of foreign competition as a convenient weapon tö resist the demands of their workmen for higher wages.
The labour troubles in Mary Barton—the masters have offered their unemployed men to take them on again at reduced wages, which the latter refuse to accept—arise from the fact that a duplicate order had been sent to one of the Continental manufacturing towns, where there were no restrictions on food3, no taxes on buildings or machinery; in consequence of this Manchester manufacturers have only been able to secure the big foreign order at greatly reduced quotations, and they maintain that their weavers must share in this reduction.
In Mrs. Gaskell's North and South it is this same foreign competition again that causes all the troubles experienced by the millowner John Thornton. This master declares that "what with home and foreign competition, (they) are none of (them) likely to make
1) J. R. McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce, p. 463.
2) In the Report of the Committee of Manufactures, Commerce and Shipping of 1833 there are numberless statements about the increasing competition of foreigners, from which it would appear that it had begun, as soon as the French wars were over; that it was most severely feit by the shipping trade; that in industry it was chiefly due to the fact that during the war too much capital had been attracted for a profitable employment in peace time—Thistoire se répète a hundred years after!—; that it was "decidedly growing*' year by year; that, though it had greatly reduced the profits, the latter could still be maintained by greater economy in production and greater exercise of skill and industry; etc.
3) One of the very few allusions in Early Victorian fiction to the burning question of the Corn Laws.
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above a fair share, and may be thankful if (they) can get that. in an average number of years." It is the Americans again who, as he complains, are getting their yarns so into the general market that their only chance in England is producing them at a lower rate. Evklently the manufacturers themselves were already beginning to f eel the pinch of their own much vaunted competition at that time. Thornton also refers to the early cotton-lords, who could dictate their own terms to their customers, while nowadays, he says, the masters have to stand hat in hand to serve them.
It appears from the words used by Higgins, one of the strike leaders—he calls the master's argument about the state of the trade a piece of their humbug—that the operatives do not believe in the truth of his argument, but simply consider it as a pretext to keep down their wages. It would of course be easy for the mill-owners to show the necessity of their policy by opening their books, but, as Mrs. Qaskell repeatedly points out, their strongly developed sense of individualism, their dour obstinacy—Higgins calls Thornton "the oud bulldog"—their impatience of all restraint, resulting from their economie faith in the laissez-faire system, all these qualities prevent them from taking this simple course. When the heroine of the novel asks Thornton why he offers no explanation of the real state of affairs to the strikers, to convince them of their wrong, he only replies: "Do you give your servants reasons for your expenditure or your economy in the use of your own money? We, the owners of capital, have a right to choose what we will do with it." 1 From what we read nowadays about the new struggle of the labouring classes to obtain control over the management of private concerns, we are, however, forced to the conclusion that there may be weightier reasons for the owner of a business to refuse to open his books than the rather puerile pig-headedness of the Thorntons and Carsons of a hundred years ago.
Having shown by some instances what the attitude of novelists was towards competition among business people, we shall now speak of another kind of competition, not among the masters, but among the workmen themselves.
1) North and South, p. 114.
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Political economists claimed unfettered freedom of action, not only for the merchant and the manufacturer, but also for the mill operative, who, having a "commodity" to sell, ought equally to be left free to sell it in the dearest market. According to the humanitarian point of view, which was no doubt to a great extent correct, this freedom was a very doubtful asset for the labouring classes. Engels said of it: "Fine freedom, where the proletarian, has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offer him, or of starving, or of freezing to death, or sleeping naked among the beasts of the forest."
This competition among the workers themselves had even more distressing consequences in the Early Victorian period than that in trade and industry, which, whatever may have been the apprehensions of far-seeing men, had by no means yet reached the keenness of the present time. In a previous chapter1 we have already briefly described the altered structure of English society, broken up by the industrial revolution from local units governed by the squire and the parson, into masses of disconnected individuals, floating about like loose atoms, people who were free to come and go to any place in the country. As we also pointed out there, the free labour market was indispensable for the industrial interests, and necessitated the final demolition of the Elizabethan system of codified labour, by which hours, wages, and everything else concerning the relation between master and servant had been regulated by laws.
Many of such statutory enactments had already fallen into desuetude long before their repeal, so that justices of the peace had for instance entirely abandoned the practice of meddling with the wages to be paid in their district. On the other hand, the practice of "prenticing a boy to a trade" still continued to be frequently followed long after the repeal of the Statute, as many passages in literature show us. The reader will remember how little Oliver Twist was led before the magistrates for the signature of his indenture, by Bumble and Gamp the chimney-sweep. Jacob Faithful and various other young heroes in Captain Marryat's novels are apprenticed either to a river barge, a waterman on the Thames, or a sea-going vessel, before they can serve as sailors in the mercantile marine.
1) Introduction, Chapter II.
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The Settlement Act of 1662, another relic of the older and more rigkl system of economy, was also doomed to disappear with the advent of the laissez-faire system. One of its chief objects had been to authorize parish authorities to send any strangers settling in the parish home again by force within a period of forty days. If they omitted to do so, the new settlers became chargeable to the new parish, in case they should at any future time be unable to maintain themselves. In agricultural districts these powers were regulariy made use of by the parish authorities to prevent strangers from getting what was called "a settlement" in their parish. Landlords and farmers did not wish to increase their parochial poor rates. Many of them, not content to prevent the building of new cottages, went so far as to pull down existing ones, especially when owing to the old Poor Law the pauperization of the rural population caused those rates to rise exorbitantly. Thus we read in Sybil that the town of Marney had become a metropolis of agricultural labour, the proprietors in the neighbourhood having pulled down the cottages on their estates for the last half century.1 The result of this heartless policy was that in rural districts housing conditions became as dreadful as in the great mushroom towns of the North. Walpole cites as an instance of this overcrowding the case of a parish in Dorsetshire, where thirty persons dwelt on an average in each house.2
The question whether a pauper was chargeable to one parish or to another often gave rise to much friction in rural districts, and sometimes even led to litigation. Thus we read in Oliver Twist, how Mr. Bumble is sent up to London one day in connection with "a legal action (which) is a-coming on, about a settlement," to see, if two dying paupers cannot be thrown upon another parish at the Clerkenwell Sessions, as "it would come two pound cheaper to move 'em than to bury 'em." 3
In the rising industrial towns people who could not find a place to live in at home experienced little or no difficulty in finding a settlement, as these towns were constantly in want of fresh labour,
1) Sybil, p. 70.
2) Spencer Walpole, op. cit, vol. IV, pp. 25—30.
3) Oliver Twist, ch. XVIII. According to Leslie Stephen (op. cit) the short clause in the short Act occasioned an average expense of from 300,000 to 350,000/. a year on this kind of litigation.
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somewhere in Europe, Africa, Asia, or America, doubt it not, you will find cartage; go and seek cartage, and good go with you!" 1
This passage has been closely imitated—like so many others— by Carlyle's great admirer Charles Kingsley.2 Kingsley puts the question of the free labour market thus: "The fellow (i.e. Crawy, a worthless poacher) might have got work, if he had chosen, in Kamschatka or the Cannibal Islands; for the political economists have proved beyond a doubt, that there is work somewhere or other for every one Who chooses to work. But unfortunately, society has neglected to inform him of the Cannibal Island labour market, or to pay his passage thither, when informed thereof
The fact that Kingsley adopted a very hostile attitude towards the notion of a free labour market is very natural, when we remember that the Christian Socialists, to whose leaders he belonged at the time he wrote Yeast, based their practical attempts at social improvement solely on the assumption that it was precisely this "alldevouring competition" which lay at the root of all the misery. It is in Alton Locke, which is a long tract rather than a novel, that Kingsley revealed to the English public the horrors of competitive industrialism, as it floui ished unchecked particularly in the tailoring trade.3 As Crossthwaite the Chartist tailor says to his friends, when they have all been dismissed: "Combination among ourselves is the only chance." Curiously enough, however, the author does not pursue his propaganda, by making the dismissed tailors found a Tailors' Association, but contents himself to describe how they feil into the hands of Jemmy Downes and other sweaters.
Under the influence chiefly of Ludlow, another of the leaders of the movement, who had been educated in France, and had had many opportunities of studying the Working Men's Associations there,4 the practical experiments of the English Christian Socialists took the form of societies for co-operative production, whose object was of course to render the workers independent of the capitalist masters,
1) Chartism. Collected Works, vol. IX, p. 21.
2) In the first eight chapters of Yeast alone there are at least eleven passages that are a distinct echo of some saying of the "favourite prophet", viz., on pp. 12, 47, 55, 76, 78, 81, 85, 104, 112. London, Everyman's Library.
3) Kingsley had been induced to treat the same subject before in his pamphlet Cheap Clothes and Nasty", after the publication of two letters in the Morning Chronicle on the sweating system, written by Mayhew.
4) C. E. Raven, Christian Socialism, p. 146. London, 1920.
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she was At Home ever so many nights in a season, she could not am.'ounce more widely and unmistakably than Mr. Merdle did that he was never at home." The poor man is instantly finished as soon as he catches sight of his butler, a splendid retainer, who feels a deep contempt for such a master, who is not a gentleman. At dinners Mr. Merdle sits stupidly pushing a spoon up his sleeve, or clumsily hiding his hands in the coat cuffs, or again staring stupidly down at the pattern of the floor carpet, while after dinner he wanders lumpishly about his own drawing-rooms.
The same features in a rising businessman's character are emphasized by Mrs. Gaskell, when she draws the picture of John Thornton, the hero of North and South. She describes him to us as "a great rough fellow, with not a grace or refinement about him," who "feels more awkward and self-conscious in every limb than ever before," when he first meets Miss Hale, the heroine of the story. There is, however, a considerable improvement in Mrs. Gaskell's picture of this representative of the new middle classes: he wishes to educate himself, and for this purpose he takes lessons with Miss Hale's father in classical literature, though his mother does not see the use of it, "the classics being very desirable for people who have leisure, but Milton (i.e. Manchester) men ought to have their powers and thoughts absorbed in the work of to-day." Hers is the general opinion prevalent in Milton, which is expressed by Mrs. Gaskell as follows: "According to the prevalent and apparently well-founded notion of Milton, to make a lad a good tradesman, he must be caught young, and acclimated to the life of the mill, or office, or warehouse ... So most of the manufacturers placed their sons in sucking situations at fourteen or fifteen years of age, unsparingly cutting away all off-shoots' in the direction of literature or high mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigour of the plant into commerce."1 It is this same sentiment which is expressed by Ure, the great champion of the much abused manufacturing industry in Early Victorian times, in the opening chapter of his well-known Philosophy of English Manufactures. Only "Grandees," he says, "as the spoiled children of the state, ... may be allowed freely to waste their early years in the pastime of scanning Greek and Roman metres
1) North and South, p. 64. j.
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A similar attitude towards science and arts in trading circles is manifested by the advice young Cobden, later on the presiding genius of the Anti-Corn Law League, received from his uncle on entering the latter's warehouse: this uncle warned the lad that his passion for study would likely prove a great obstacle for success in commercial life.1
1) Encyclopaedia Britannica; Cobden.
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CHAPTER VI.
Landed Property and Capital*
In the preceding chapter we mentioned the fact that carriages were considered an indispensable appendage of the aristrocracy in Early Victorian times. There was, however, something of still greater significance in this respect, viz., the possession of landed property. Such property must naturally always be a great source of political and social power in an agricultural country such as England had been up to the end of the eighteenth century. This power had still been considerably enlarged in England owing to the absence of a central administrative form of government. The administration of the country had been entirely left in the hands of the country gentry. As a nineteenth century writer observes, "the English parish, with its squire, its parson, its lawyer, and its labouring population, was a miniature of the British constitution in general,"1 and that this state of affairs continued far down into the nineteenth century, long after the Reformed Parliament had been elected, is evident from the great number of Early Victorian novels in which at least the squire and the parson, surrounded by tenants and labourers, play the first róle.
The result of this state of affairs was that the landowners considered themselves to a certain extent as the only people having a right to live in the country, and only suffered other classes to do so as an act of kindness. Thus we read in Popanilta that the "Aboriginal Inhabitant", as the landed proprietor is called there, "insisted that it was the common law of the land that all the islanders should purchase their corn only of him ... and that if they did not approve of the arrangement, they and their fathers should not have settled upon his island."2 This sounds like Defoe's theory
1) Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 30.
2) Benjamin Disraeli, Novels and Tales, vol. IV, p. 410.
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as put forward in his book The Original Power of the People of England, which was that the freeholders might give notice to quit to the rest of the population.1
The ownership of land was therefore the securest way to give new families a firm footing among the country gentry and nobility. The more English trade expanded in the eighteenth century, the greater the scramble for land became among the wealthy business people. This appears clearly from a passage in Sybil, where Disraeli mentions various groups of these eighteenth century merchants that had successively grown rich before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and observes how all these "creators of wealth", each in turn aspiring to be "large-acred", were gradually absorbed by the landed interests. As such successive creators of wealth he mentions first the Turkey merchant2—still surviving in Early Victorian literature in the grand personage of John Brough in Thackeray's story of Samuel Titmarsh—; followed by the West Indian planter, who is still much in evidence in Marryat's novels; then by the Indian Nabob—a favourite character in some of Thackeray's works,3 whose preference for this species is probably due to his own Indian origin—; and finally by the loan-monger in the time of the American war, who was succeeded by a new class of loan-mongers that sprang into existence during the reconstruction of Europe after Waterloo and Vienna, and of which we find various representatives in literature.4
1) Cited by Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 55. The author refers in this connection to the famous words spoken by the Duke of Newcastle, when the Reform Bill was under discussion in the House of Lords: "May I not do what I like with my own?" The question is even echoed in literature by Kingsley (Yeast, p. 112).
Defoe wrote: "The Freeholders are the proper Owners of the country: It is their own, and the other inhabitants are but sojourners, like Lodgers in a house, and ought to be subject to such laws as the Freeholders impose upon them, or else they must remove; because the Freeholders having a Right to the Land, the other have no Right to live there but upon sufferance." The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted by Daniël Defoe. London.
2) No doubt Disraeli might have gone further back with his enumeration. Sir Josuah Child spoke of merchants who would not find it "so easie to make (their sons) Country-Gentlemen, as now it is, when Land sells at thirty of fourty years Purchase," if the rate of interest on their capital were reduced. A new Discourse of Trade, p. 24. London, 1693.
3) We mention Tuggeridge in Cox's Diary, and Rigby in Barry Lyndon, who made his fortune under Clive.
4) See p. 136.
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Though not perhaps quite falling wtthin the scope of this book, we wish to say a few words here about the state of English agriculture after the French wars, in the first place because it was deeply affected by the land hunger of the new rich, and further because Early Victorian novelists like Disraeli, Dickens, and Kingsley repeatedly treat the subject in their works.
The deplorable condition into which English agriculture had gradually tallen, and which had almost reduced every agricultural labourer to a pauper, was due to a variety of causes. Foremost among these stands the revival of the Elizabethan practice of passing socalled Enclosure Acts, for the purpose of substituting for the "open field" system, or common ownership of the ground that of privatelyowned farms.1 This passing of Enclosure Acts had continued all through the second half of the eighteenth century. Between 1760 -and 1797 no fewer than 1539 had been placed on the Statute book, dealing with nearly three million acres of land. The object of these enactments was to increase the production of foodstuffs, which had gradually become utterly inadequate for the rapidly increasing population, so that instead of a wheat-exporting country, as England had been up till the year 1766, it became a corn-importing country.2 This change was entirely due to the unprecedentedly rapid increase in the population, which continued at such a rate that in spite of numerous improvements in methods, and the consequent increase of production, agriculture utterly failed to meet the vast demand for cereals. This state of affairs, which had caused much uneasiness to British economists and statesmen, also partly explains the great interest excited by the Corn Laws during the Early Victqrian period, an interest which is, however, as we have observed, scarcely reflected in literature, if we except the poetry of Ebenezer Elliot.
The consequence of the Enclosure Acts that concerns us most is the fact they had led to the all but complete extinction of the small holders, many of whom could not pay the considerable legal and other expenses—fencing in their allotments, etc.—attendant upon enclosing the common fields. They consequently had to sell their
1) H. O. Meredith, Outlines of the Economie History of England, p. 254. London, Pitman.
2) McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce, p. 414.
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properties to large Iandowners, especially when after the French wars there came a time of great depression, simiiar to that agriculture is passing through now, and rendering it difficult for the small man to keep his head above water1.
This precarious state of affairs brought a class of men into the field who particularly in those times were constantly on the look-out for people in straitened circumstances who could offer some substan tial security; we mean the money-lenders or usurers, who are ubiquitous in Early Victorian fiction, and of whom we shall have to say a great deal more in another chapter. They found a wide scope for their activities in rural districts with a rapidly sinking class of free farmers. When the high corn prices of Napoleonic times—-readers of \ohn Halifax remember the bread riots of 1812— began to fall after the peace of 1815, the resulting depression completed the work of destruction of the small holders begun by the Enekwures.
How money-lenders swooped down upon their prey is described by Charles Reade in It is never too late to mend, where John Meadows, a rich corn factor8 and land surveyor, steps into the village public-house one morning, "to see what farmers wanted to borrow a little money, under the rose, and would pawn their wheat ricks and pay twenty per cent., for that overrated merchandise (Le. money)." He quarrels with his rival Isaac Levi, who also lends money, "when the security is good." Reade describes the struggles of farmer Fielding, who borrows money at ten per cent., on a two months' acceptance, making a rate of sixty per cent. per annum. That this percentage charged for a loan is not so wide off the mark is proved by facts like those mentioned by Sir Gilbert Parker, who tells. of an Irish farmer borrowing a small sum at a bank, and having to pay ia all a rate of about forty per cent.8
A third factor tending to the disappearance of Yeomen and small freeholders was the circumstance that they were mostly too ignorant
1) Peacock tells us in Crotchet Castte of a hard-hearted landed proprietor, Sir Simon Steeltrap, who had "enclosed commons and woodlands" (p. 125).
2) Corn factors, were people who. generally enjoyed a bad reputation— ■ McCulloch, op. cit., p. 412—which is evident from literature as well: Abel Fletcher's mill is attacked by the mob believing that he causes the price of bread to rise by his policy. (John Halifax, vol. I, ch. VII)
3) Sir Gilbert Parker, The Land, the People, and the State, p. 138. London, 1910.
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to keep abreast of the scientific progress agriculture was then making, manifesting itself in erop rotation, hnproved implements and machinery, land drainage, and other changes. It is also evident that, even if the small holder was aware of the importance of all science could teach him, he lacked the necessary capital to introducé the new principles on his small farm, and therefore must needs plod on along the old ruts, till bankruptcy or a tempting offer from some rich neighbour put an end to his existence as an independent Yeoman. He found himself in the same position as the shopkeeper Solomon Gill in Dombey and Son: times had changed and the old class could not keep abreast of them, with the result that they were swallowed up by the current of modern progress.
All thèse circumstances, extinguishing the small holders, brought in their place the nineteenth century large tenant farmers, who held their land on a long lease from "large-acred" landowners, like Lord Minchampstead, who had half a dozen estates in as many counties, and had "added house to house, and field to field," thus rounding off his estates in all directions.1 Sometimes the small farmer tenaciously held out against the attempts of his neighbour to drive him off his plot of ground, and fought to the last with great desperation, as in the case of old farmer Ayliff in Warren's novel Now and Then.
The difference between the methods of the new landlords and the old manner of farming is best illustrated in literature by Charles Kingsley, who is perhaps the novelist of the period who knew the conditions of agricultural districts most inthnately, from having lived and worked so long in the rural parish of Eversley. In Yeast he compares the methods of an old-fashioned Whig, the "ignorant and do-nothing" Squire Lavington, with the manner in which the newmade Lord Minohampstead manages his property. On Squire Lavington's estate there are miles of heather and snipe-bog and moors, only producing game and timber. Lord Minchampstead on the other hand exterminated every hare and pheasant on his estate; broke up all the commons,—this is another reference in Early Victorian fiction to the above-mentioned Enclosure Acts;—used steam-engines on his farms; in short, ran his estate on commercial
1) Yeast, p. 85
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time when a London pamphleteer wrote that "they (were) not so numerous as the Protestants in France, and yet the French King effectually clear'd the Nation of them at once, and we don't find he misses them at home." 1
Charles Kingsley, who as a Churchman must have observed these things with envious eyes, explains the great róle played by Dissent in commerce and industry in the following spiteful manner.2 After stating that frantic Mammon-hunting has been for the last fifty years the peculiar pursuit of Quakers, Dissenters, and religious Churchmen, he goes on to say: "I don't complain of them, though; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art, all excitement, all amusement— except money-making. It is their dernier ressort, poor souls!" That money^naking i.e., a commercial career, was their dernier, or rather their only ressort, is quite true, as we shall see, but in quite a different respect from that stated by Kingsley in his strong dislike of the Puritans.
The truth was that Dissenting families were compelled by social circumstances to devote their energies to trade and industry, as both the Church and the üniversities were closed to them, while the landed proprietary governed the country, so that public offices were equally unattainable for them. The natural course of things was therefore that with the rising industrial importance of the country there arose at the same time a powerful and rich Dissenting middle class of merchants and manufacturers. Dibelius expressly states that this new class "gehört im allgemeinen nicht zur Staatskirche," and he points in this connection to the significant fact that of the six partners who originally owned the famous New Lanark Mills in Scotland, three were Quakers.3
This Dissent, however, which George Eliot describes as being of a quiescent,well-to-do kind, was greatly altered in its character by the advent of coalpits and factories, which infused into the chapels and conventicles large quantities of new blood coming from the lower and lowest ranks of life, and which was chiefly responsible for the above-named rapid growth in Early Victorian times.
When to the above facts of actual life we add the traditional
1) The Shortest Way with the Dissenters etc. London, 1702. 2) Yeast, p. 71.
3} W. Dibelius, Charles Dickens, p. 2.
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impopularity of Dissent in fiction, down to at least the middle of last century,1 we are not surprised to find that novelists wishing to draw an unfavourable portrait of a business-man, never forgot to add the stock feature of Dissent to the other unpleasant traits of his picture. This use or perhaps we had better say abuse made of Dissent, is nowhere better illustrated than in the linen-draper Tag-rag,whom we have already mentioned in this chapter. Samuel Warren, to whose true blue political opinions we have likewise referred, was not content to show us Mr. Tag-rag's religious opinions, contrasting them with his mean conduct in private life as well as in his business dealings, but he also made him a "Churchrate martyr," which afforded him an opportunity to attack a Dissenting movement against the payment of Church rates for the upkeep of the buildings of the Anglican Church. Mr. Tag-rag determined to refuse to pay the sum of twopence halfpenny due in respect of this rate, and when he was consequently taken into custody, hjs languishing business suddenly revived owing to its owner's popularity.
Samuel Warren betrays the same hostile spirit towards Dissent in representing the mean and caddish hero of his novel Ten Thousand a Year, who has never shown any religious tendencies Or sympathies in his life, as making petitions in Parliament "about Dissenters and the 39 articles of the Established Church, etc." 2 Further there are in the same story the hateful portraits of two Dissenting ministers, the 'Reverend' Dismal Horror, and the 'Reverend' Smirk Mudflkit
We have said just now that the hostile attitude of literature towards Dissent and its ministers was persisted in till about the middle of the century. In Samuel Titmarsh Thackeray draws a portrait of the unsympathetic Grimes Wapshot; Dickens has left us the inhnitable 'shepherd', Mr. Stivvings, and Mr. Chadband; Charles Kingsley treats them rather ungenerously in his pictures of Mr. Bowyer, Mr. Wigginton, and Mr. Blaraway, in Alton Locke and Yeast. In Shirley Charlotte Brontë drew the hateful picture of Moses Barraclough, while in the same novel we read of a leader of the Non-Conformists that on being pushed into a ditch, "he drank more
1) Dicey, op. cit, p. 328.
2) Vol. III, p. 66.
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water in that afternoon, than he harj swallowed for a twelvemonth before." 1 Mrs. Gaskell, whose husband was a Unitarian minister himself, shows a better appreciation of Dissent in the person of Mr. Hale, who leaves the Church on account of his religious scruples, while finally George Eliot drew a sympathetic portrait of a Dissenting preacher in the person of Mr. Rufus Lyon, in whom the usual unctuous, oily hypocrisy of the old literary type is replaced by verbose, argumentative speeohifying of a very harmiess kind, coupled with a brave and noble heart. But Mr. Lyon did not make his appearance in English literature until 1866, thereby affording another proof of the long life literary types often have, and of the great length of time it takes to eradicate prejudices in literature.
We have just now referred to the curious fact about the composition of the firm owning the New Lanark Mills commented upon by Dibelius. There is another equally siginificant fact to be observed in the manner in which this firm was reconstructed in the year 1813. The three partners in the business then were the socialist Robert Owen, the Quaker William Allen, and Jeremy Bentham, the incarnation of Utilitarian rationalism.2 The combination of these three men illustrates the fact that the domain of trade and industry was largely shared in those days by two classes of people whose religious opinions differed so widely as to be entirely irreconcilable: the majority of the new bourgeoisie were liberals, not only in politics, but also in religion, whioh means that as a general body they were anti-ecclesiastical. Bentham aimed at laicizing education;» Greg, a late disciple of his school, regrets that the spread of sound education among the working classes "has been retarded by our miserable sectarian animosities (and that so) little has been done to teach them (the) elementary economie laws." James Mill, though licensed as a preacher in the Scottish Church, never followed the profession, "having satisfied himself that he could never believe the doctrines of that, or any other Church," as his son tells us,4
1) Shirley, p. 333. London, 1914.
2) Encyclopaedia Britannica: Robert Owen.
3) In his book Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined (London 1817) he tried to prove that with the Church Catechism "at the very first dawn of the reasoning faculty" young England is taught bad grammar, bad logic, marters depravating his intellectual faculties, and marters degrading his morals. Preface, pp. XXIX—XXXIII.
4) Autobiography by J. S. Mill, p. 3.
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while this son himself boasts that he was "one of the very few examples in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it."1 John Owen, the founder of Owen's College at Manchester, stipulated that no religious test should ever be applied, neither for the students, nor for the teachers. Lord Marney, the utilitarian landowner in Disraeli's Sybil, shows a decidedly hostile attitude towards religion: he wants an easy-going clergyman of the type of Mr. Slimsey on his estate, who does not care much for his pastoral duties, and the author calls Marney anti-ecclesiastic.
On a novelist like Kingsley this anti-religious character of a large section of the business community cannot have failed to have had some influence at least in determining his attitude towards merchants, manufacturers and economists. That the minister of the Established Church was not above such influences is evident from the malicious pictures of Dissenters and Missionaries he drew in Alton Locke, as well as from his prejudiced portraits of Irishmen, and from his hostile attitude towards the Jews, "Messrs. Aaron Levi and the rest of that class," as he contemptuously denotes them.2
This mention of the Jews reminds us of the fact that here we have to do with business-men who were also generally looked upon with a prejudiced eye by Early Victorian novelists. This prejudice was due to racial rather than religious causes. Though Jewish business people abound in the literature of that time, it is hardly possible to cite one instance of a portrait drawn in a fair spirit. The principal line of business Jews are represented to pursue is money-lending, a pursuit which had tradition of many centuries' standing, dating back to the Middle Ages, as readers of Ivanhoe remember. We note the names of Mordecai Gripe, Mephibosheth, Maharshalab Hash-Baz and Israël Fang (Ten Thousand a Year); Levison (Henrietta Tempte); Moses Brown (The Disowned). Another favourite Jewish profession that was deemed still more disreputable was that of Sheriffs officer and keeper of a spunging house. Of this class literature shows us specimens in the persons of Nabb (The Fatal Boots), Solomon Jacobs (Sketches by Boz); Bendigo (Barry Lyndon) and Aminadab (Samuel Titmarsh).
1) J. S. Mill, op. cit, p. 43.
2) Alton Locke, p. 108.
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must have been given very injudiciously for it to exceed to such an extent the present market value of the property, or, if this had dropped so much in value after being mortgaged, a foreclosure should have been effected long before, and at any rate it should not be put off any longer on the clerlr/s plea about the great loss to be sustained. We might further point to the fact that a foreclosure, like most legal proceedings, takes some considerable time, and would therefore not be a suitable method to secure cash "within a few days."
Another expediënt decided upon by Mr. Dudley to get ready money is to sell all his shares in a certain Company, to which course his clerk objects that if he sells out now he will lose heavily on them, whereas, if he waits but six weeks, they will be worth twenty times the purchase price. Though in those times news did not spread so fast, and secrets did not leak out so easily as they do now on the Stock Exchange, yet it is hard to believe that the impending change that is to bring about suoh a tremendous improvement in the position of the Company is not known to other people besides those at Mr. Dudley's office. It may further be asked how it is that Mr. Dudley, instead of selling such a vafuable holding outright, did not use it to obtain a loan on it from his banker. No doubt the disclosure to the banker of the coming boom in the shares would have made him perfectly willing to approve of them as a collateral for such an advance.
The rest of the description of the events leading up to the merchant's ruin shows the same degree of impröbability, and suggests many more questions of the same nature as the above.
In North and South, by Mrs. Gaskell, we find the same theme of financial embarrassments treated at some length. Here it is the mill-owner Thornton who is involved in them owing to a strike at his works, and a great fall in the prices of raw materials. When combining all the facts stated by the novelist, we find, however, that they ill fit together, which again proves that, as Emerson observes, it requires great courage in a man of letters to handle practical problems, owing to their infinite entanglements.1
1) Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present. Introduction, p. 9.
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