Morton Wiener

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850—1980

The early years of Victoria's reign were widely thought at the time to be bringing about the triumph of the middle classes. It was frequently claimed that the parliamentary reform in 1832 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 were pulling out the props from the political and economic supremacy of the landed aristocracy. Marx and Engels went so far as to assert in 1850 that 'the only remaining aristocracy is the bourgeoisie.' Was, in fact, the death knell tolling for the English aristocracy as a ruling class? In the long view, no doubt. Yet not before the aristocracy had succeeded in both prolonging its reign and educating its successors in its world view. Power was peacefully yielded in return for time and for the acceptance of many aristocratic values by the new members of the elite. Hostility on both sides began to wane. After 1846 the interests of landlords were no longer clearly opposed to those of industry or capital. The greater landlords drew an increasing proportion of their incomes from railways, canals, mines, and urban property, and the growing scale of business organization was producing a new class of big businessmen, wealthier than their predecessors yet less directly involved in management and enterprise. For men of these groups, the old class antagonisms meant less and less, and a process of mutual accommodation was soon under way. In 1850 the Economist had criticized capitalists who advertised in the newspapers their desire to purchase land in order to acquire status. By 1870 it had changed its tune, observing that:

Social consideration is a great and legitimate object of desire, and so great is the effect of this visibility of wealth upon social consideration that it would pay a millionaire in England to sink half his fortune in buying 10,000 acres of land to return a shilling percent, and live upon the remainder, rather than to live upon the whole without land. He would be a greater person in the eyes of more people.

English history's normal pattern of ready absorption of new into old wealth, broken in the late eighteenth century by the explosive growth of geographically and religously isolated industrial wealth, resumed with a vengeance. In such Establishment spheres of activity as 'society,' the military (particularly the Volunteers), the Church of England, and the public schools and universities, the process of accommodation and absorption accelerated in the second half of the century. As Harold Perkin has noted, 'the seeds of many of the aristocratic directorships of late Victorian England—in 1896 167 noblemen, a quarter of the peerage, were directors of companies—were no doubt sown on the playing fields of mid-Victorian public schools.'

The children of businessmen were admitted to full membership in the upper class, at the price of discarding the distinctive, production-oriented culture shaped during the century of relative isolation. 'The main point about landowners—in England at least—is that they did not acquire their land in order to develop it, but in order to enjoy it,' observed H.J. Habbakuk. The adoption of a culture of enjoyment by new landowners and aspiring landowners meant the dissipation of a set of values that had projected their fathers as a class to the economic heights, and the nation to world predominance. In its place, they took up a new ideal—that of the gentleman. This new ideal was in its essentials the older aristocratic ideal purged of its grosser elements by the nineteenth-century religious revival. Indeed, Bertrand Russell—himself a hereditary peer—was to suggest that 'the concept of the gentleman was invented by the aristocracy to keep the middle classes in order.'

And so, in a sense, it did. Through these mechanisms of social absorption, the zeal for work, inventiveness, material production, and money making gave way within the capitalist class to the more aristocratic interests of cultivated style, the pursuits of leisure, and political service. Similarly, the modern industrial town was abandoned, whenever the means existed, in favor of a rural, preferably historic, home. The sons of the enormously successful mill owner John Marshall, for instance, let the business slide and became country gentlemen in the Lake District. Fledgling gentry, F. M. L. Thompson observed, 'could be more aristocratic than the aristocrats in their anxiety to conform to the rules of country life.' The London merchant banker Baron von Schroeder (to take one instance of many) bought a country house in Cheshire about 1868, became a magistrate in 1876, and was high sheriff and returning officer at the time of the First county council elections in January 1889. He was a well-known follower of the Cheshire hounds. In Cheshire, as elsewhere, it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between the habits of a banker, like 'Fitz' Brocklehurst, a Liberal and a Unitarian, who insisted on spending three months in every year shooting in Scotland, and those of the aristocracy. Several generations would complete the transformation. J. M. Lee, examining the Cheshire elite, instructively compared the careers of James Watts, born in 1804, and his grand-son, James Watts, born in 1878: The former was a Manchester businessman, possessed of only the most rudimentary education. A Congregationalist and an active participant in Liberal politics, he became mayor of Manchester during the eighteen-fifties. From the huge profits of a warehouse trade in fancy goods, he built an impressive country house, Abney Hall. His grandson was sent to Winchester and New College, Oxford, rowed for his college at Henley, and followed all the fashions of his generation, 'even to the extent of taking an American wife!'

The peculiar flexibility of the English aristocracy snatched a class victory from the brink of defeat, and helped alter the course of national development. At the moment of its triumph, the entrepreneurial class turned its energies to reshaping itself in the image of the class it was supplanting. That self-conscious spokesman of a bourgeois revolution, Richard Cobden (1804-65), watched with dismay his troops deserting the cause:

We have [he complained to a friend in 1863] the spirit of feudalism rife and rampant in the midst of the antagonistic development of the age of Watt, Arkwright and Stephenson! Nay, feudalism is every day its power and prestige that it draws to it the support and homage of even those who are the natural leaders of the newer and better civilisation. Manufacturers and merchants as a rule seem only to desire riches that they may be enabled to prostrate themselves at the feet of feudalism. How is this to end?'

As capitalists became landed gentlemen, JPs, and men of breeding, the radical ideal of active capital was submerged in the conservative ideal of passive property, and the urge to enterprise faded beneath the preference for stability.