letters on the pages that you memorize

[lotesse]

I'm reading James Eli Adams' book A History of Victorian Literature - exams approach apace - and thinking about a conversation I had with my mama over holiday about history and social justice. Neither of my parents quite understand how they came to raise a Victorianist. I think papa was hoping for a philosopher or a mediaevalist, and mama for a poet. And mama was asking me why, if I was bent on doing this feminism thing, I'd choose such a repressive era. (Oh, historiomythic accounts of the nineteenth century!)

Adams articulates, in his introduction, something that I tried to point out to her (though with less rhetorical aptitude): "Much of the elaborate etiquette that we think of as distinctly Victorian – rituals of introduction, calling cards, the chaperoning of unmarried women, intricate decorums of dress – is at root a strategy for coping with social mobility, by affirming one’s own claims to recognition while at the same time maintaining a distance that allows one to “place” new acquaintances (Davidoff 1973). The Victorian novel developed into a form uniquely suited to represent these dynamics, capturing the textures of social interaction, aspiration, and anxiety, within which social hierarchy could seem both a stimulus and a barrier to personal achievement" (&). This seems really key to me: the moment when society pushes hardest on the brake has to also be the moment when everything is already different, and folk just haven't figured out how to deal with it yet.

Which, actually, gives me some hope for the present political scene. This much repression must mean that, somewhere down deep, we're doing something right.

Tangential, but not unconnected: I have a politics question for those of y'all who inhabit the United Kingdom. I have a feeling that the very simplistic definitions of "whig" and "tory" I've hacked together aren't capturing the entire social context. In my own milieu I can trace all the strands of culture and lifetyle that make up US Republicans and Democrats, even down to breaking each group into a number of subsets: Repubs = Boston Brahmins, The One Percent, Rural Racists, Christian Evangelicals, ect. But I can't seem to get a real grip on Whigs and Tories. I'm guessing they don't just simply map onto US political categories, amirite? How do you understand those terms/groups/identities?

Comments

[ilthit]

Have you met sharpiefan and latin_cat? They aren't victorianists, rather focused on the Napoleonic era, but they could at least talk about the Whig-Tory rivalry in the early 19th century (and they are English). If you don't want to approach them directly, a question on anything_aos (run by Sharpie) would do it.

[lotesse]

ooh, thanks, there's a thought!

[naraht]

No, they don't map onto US political categories. They don't map onto modern British political categories, come to that; really the Whig-Tory divide only takes you up to the mid-nineteenth century before you start getting into the creation of the Liberal and Conservative parties.

To start with, it's misleading to think of either grouping as political parties in the modern sense. They were both looser and made up of much smaller groups of people: in a system that isn't a real representative democracy, like early nineteenth-century Britain, there's no pressure for the creation of a modern party apparatus with party manifestos, strict voting discipline and national election campaigns. Almost all of the Whigs and Tories are the one percent representing the one percent--if not this, then pretty close.

In order to understand these groupings you really have to read about how they came into being in the eighteenth century in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. John Brewer's Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III is a classic. For the reconstruction of the party system in the Victorian period, I like Jonathan Parry's The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. There's a literature on conservatism as well. This is only scratching the surface in reading terms so let me know if you want more.

I am pondering this and may come back with a longer essay later in the day!

[lotesse]

Thank you so much for the citations - I hadn't thought about what a difference the lack of real representative democracy would make in things. I think that part of my confusion may have stemmed from the way neither seemed to get love from progressive scholarship - but if they're both essentially parties of the privileged, one trending liberal and the other trending conservative but still essentially upperclass, that makes perfect sense.

[naraht]

You're very welcome. No, I wouldn't expect either party to get love from progressive scholarship: if you're looking for expressions of popular sentiment you would have to look to the Chartists, though "party" is probably the wrong word there.

Thinking of them in terms like "liberal" and "conservative" is probably going to lead you astray as well, at least if you're using those terms with their modern American meanings. In particular you'll want to make sure that you know the difference between classical liberalism and American-style liberalism. There's a reason why many European liberal parties are centrist or even rightist within their political system.

In thinking about the Whig/Tory divide, you might find it more helpful to think about cleavages like urban/rural, trade/agriculture (to some extent), Hanoverians/Jacobites, Protestant toleration/Church of England, free trade/protectionism and so on. With their paternalistic and protectionistic stance, the Tories sometimes came across as more interventionist than the Whigs.

And of course the issue that finally broke the Whigs apart was Irish home rule.

Let me know if you want more reading recommendations or to chat more. I taught intellectual and cultural history for this period and I can't imagine trying to grasp it all without a solid understanding of the political background.

[legionseagle]

Tangential, but not unconnected: I have a politics question for those of y'all who inhabit the United Kingdom. I have a feeling that the very simplistic definitions of "whig" and "tory" I've hacked together aren't capturing the entire social context. In my own milieu I can trace all the strands of culture and lifetyle that make up US Republicans and Democrats, even down to breaking each group into a number of subsets: Repubs = Boston Brahmins, The One Percent, Rural Racists, Christian Evangelicals, ect. But I can't seem to get a real grip on Whigs and Tories. I'm guessing they don't just simply map onto US political categories, amirite? How do you understand those terms/groups/identities?

It's worth bearing in mind that "Whig" and "Tory" are both terms for different brands of essentially *aristocratic* politics; there are sections of British constitutional commentary which treat Earl Spencer's oration at his sister Diana's funeral in 1997 as being a last flicker of the old Whig grandee spirit - the Spencers were notoriously one of the great Whig houses and their clashes with the monarchy go back a very long way.

Also, while everyone knows that peers don't have votes and can't sit in the House of Commons, what people don't appreciate is that the sons (including the heirs) of peers can and jolly well did. Coupled with no payment for Members of Parliament (which meant only those of private means or with wealthy sponsors could stand), a hugely restricted franchise based on land ownership or rental above a certain value and an open ballot, which meant that everyone knew for whom you were voting, this created a situation where seats in Parliament were contested by the sons, nephews and proteges of the aristocracy and voted for in public by the people who paid them rent.

The politics of the nineteenth century show a rising middle-class and an increasingly vocal and utterly disenfranchised working class superimposing a different political landscape upon the old Tory/Whig battlegrounds (which centred upon the Divine Right of Kings versus curbing monarchical power). The Corn Law league, which was active during the 1830s and 1840s was the first manifestation of the urban middle-classes pushing a free-trade agenda and though it was opposed very strongly by the Tory interest who depended on protectionist tariffs.

Though the Corn Law repeal is often set up as a great triumph for popular politics it was a solidly urban driven middle-class affair and the Chartists, who were the working class popular movement of the day had little in common with the Corn Law antagonists apart from in both cases it gave further opportunities for traditionally non-politicised groups (including, importantly, women) to learn organisational and polemicising skills (already mobilised earlier in the abolition to slavery movements) which then fed into the great parliamentary reform debates which characterised the second half of the nineteenth century.

If you want a good primary source to look at the political landscape as it stood at the outset of Victoria's reign, you can't do better than to start with Friedrich Engels "The Condition of the Working Classes in England".

[lotesse]

Thanks for this - my little cohort of midwestern Victorianists is earnestly trying to educate ourselves in the basics of nineteenth-century British politics, which our graduate program has not entirely succeeded in illuminating for us, but which we all rather feel we ought to know. We keep making confused noises at one another about the Corn Laws and the House of Commons and all these things that sounds familiar but that we really don't understand at all.

[legionseagle]

If you can face reading another lot of Victorian novels (and haven't done so already) I can recommend Trollope, specifically (for politics) Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister though The Small House at Allington and another of the Barchester Chronicles also has a politics subplot.

The Corn Laws were a bunch of protectionist legislation which stated that wheat might not be imported into the United Kingdom (which at that date comprised both Great Britain and Ireland) until the price of domestic wheat exceeded [insert ludicrous sum here]. Their repeal coincided with the Irish Potato Famine, though it is over-simplified to consider that the one caused the other; if anything, the anti-Corn Law faction welcomed the famine in that it was the sort of meltdown scenario that they'd always been predicting and now it had, sort of thing (compare it to a rabid anti-nuclear activist talking about the Fukushima disaster) and took advantage of it to bring in a few waverers and make it very difficult for their political opponents.

[lotesse]

Oh, I've got the novels, no problem - it's just that there's only so much you can get from novels. At a certain point, solid political history becomes both necessary and, ultimately, comforting!

[legionseagle]

Yes; because the novels are contemporary they don't bother with "As you know, Bob" about things that people actually do know.

[executrix]

And, of course, there was a period when there was not only a limited electorate but no secret ballot, so basically one's landlord would take an active interest in how the tenants voted.

[lotesse]

Do you remember offhand when that period was? Googling has not sufficed to locate particulars, and that seems like an important wrinkle!

[naraht]

Jumping in here... it was until 1872.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Act_1872

[legionseagle]

Trollope hated the idea of the secret ballot; he witters on in the novels about it, I know. One of the things which is so bizarre about the demands of the Chartists which were considered appallingly radical to the point of insanity in the 1840s is that all of them - except annual elections - are now bog-standard principles of democracy.

[naraht]

Trollope and, of course, Mill--your archetypal nineteenth-century liberal.

[legionseagle]

I hadn't realised that about Mill. Do you know what his argument was? (Trollope seemed to think it was somehow dishonest).

[naraht]

Mill is an interesting case because he was originally for the secret ballot, but it seems that Harriet Taylor managed to change his mind.

He discusses his views in On Representative Government:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/chapter10.html

[legionseagle]

Um. Talk about "Only connect" eh?

He produces

His vote is not a thing in which he has an option; it has no more to do with his personal wishes than the verdict of a juryman. It is strictly a matter of duty; he is bound to give it according to his best and most conscientious opinion of the public good

and doesn't therefore argue that the debates in the juryroom should be thrown open to public scrutiny.

[executrix]

Don't remember, sorry! But I'm pretty sure that both in Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch, the landlord knew damn well who you voted for.

[legionseagle]

Also in Emily Eden's The Semi-Attached Couple which has one of the best election scenes in Victorian literature, imho, mainly because it's seen from the point of view of the women who have no votes but an intense personal interest.