Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

The reform in the system of officers’ education which the Prince Consort launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be recognised to-day in Thackeray’s Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish; before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day, naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers, – the school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was, and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.

The man-of-war’s-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books, with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after Albert Smith’s medical student.

Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any afternoon issuing from the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley. Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot, Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of over-estimating the good done by his book on the Operations of War. This was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley’s great treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and M’Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct from that of mere information.

Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks. Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy, cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the personnel of the officers of the Queen’s army, who will continue to be, as they have been, men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities placed technically at his disposal.70

CHAPTER XXII

FROM WOODEN WALLS TO FLOATING ENGINES

Great reduction of the navy, as well as of the army, between the Napoleonic wars and the Queen’s accession. But silently a reaction soon set in. First beginnings of new policy. Reform in the training of sailors in gunnery; later developments of naval education for officers and men; the existing course compared with the past. Successive stages in the replacement of sails by steam power. A navy transformed by Steam and Iron. Lessons of contemporary experience gradually applied to the English navy, especially those learnt from the American Civil War and the Austro-Italian War.

After the Napoleonic wars the British navy, like the British army, was greatly reduced. In the Navy List of 1837, 132 vessels are named. Sixty years later they had increased to 461. Now the naval policy of successive Administrations seems to have acquired the same continuity as belongs traditionally to foreign policy. It is a first principle to-day with all parties in the State that the iron walls which, as our first line of defence, have replaced the walls of wood, should not be reduced to a point at which they need fear the combined opposition, if not of Europe, still of the two or three most powerful of European fleets. At the moment when the great reductions in our fleet were contemplated, Napoleon at St Helena, in the course of the conversations recorded by O’Meara,71 said: ‘It was bad policy to encourage the military mania instead of sticking to your marine, which is the real force of your country.’ In 1832 the naval vote had been 4¼ millions. Two years later, it was reduced to 3 millions. The fleet reductions did not, however, reach their limit until the year before the Queen’s accession. Then the naval vote was reduced to 2¾ millions, with the dwindling of our squadrons already noted. Contrast with this the 1896-97 estimate of £22,774,318, providing for the services of a total, every branch included, of 93,750 officers and men, inclusive of the 461 ships already named.

The history of the naval transformations through which during the Victorian age we have passed, may be described as a succession of periodical scares, a steadily progressive instruction by science in its latest application to maritime affairs, and by the lessons contained in the experience of other countries. The English operations by sea during the Crimean War; in a still greater degree perhaps the improvements in naval construction, attack and defence, shown in the hostilities between the Federal and Confederate navies in the civil war on the other side of the Atlantic; later again the lessons taught by the engagements between Italian and Austrian squadrons, notably at Lissa; – these are the incidents that have gradually taught us, as well as our European neighbours, to bring our naval arrangements and appliances up to the latest mark of mechanical perfection.

Even during the time when the security brought by relief after long war was causing England to neglect her navy, some of those movements which in Victorian days have given us our present race of seamen were in progress.

Seven years before the Queen’s accession, the ‘Excellent,’ as a gunnery school for sailors, had been established. Soon after its establishment, it was gradually enlarged and improved till it has become to-day the chief source from which our ships are manned. Before that institution, naval gunnery was taught, or not taught, at the discretion of the captains in command. From being, as at the beginning of the present age it was, always precarious and generally insufficient, the supply of sailors has become fairly adequate and regular. Weeks and months used to be wasted before a crew could be put together. The social haunts of seamen were visited by officers; thus eventually by promises or threats men were induced to join the ship. When the commission of the ship came to an end, the sailors were thrown adrift, usually returning to their civil vocations until a new job was offered. By the time of the Crimean War all this had been changed. Apart from the inducements of prize money sailors flocked in animated by a real enthusiasm. Thus though in France the naval conscription had existed since the time of Colbert the manning of the English fleet proceeded more quickly in Crimean days than that of the French. The continuous service for ten years certain, with the choice of prolonging that term and receiving a pension, has transformed the condition of our navy. Other reforms have given us in time of war a reserve of 20,000 sailors of the mercantile marine, the equivalents of our rifle volunteers on land. These are annually subject to gun and small arm drill on our coasts, and, in the opinion of an expert like Captain Eardley Wilmot, will prove adequate to any demand.72

There have been later reforms than this in the professional education of our sailors. Till between forty and fifty years ago men and boys entered the navy without any previous training. In, or about 1855, all sailors entered the service as boys chiefly from fifteen to sixteen and a half years old. They now begin by passing from twelve to eighteen months on board the training ship. Here they are instructed in seamanship and gunnery. They thus bring with them to sea a practical knowledge of their duties. The system which has given us a new race of naval officers dates from nearly the same time as that which began to produce a fresh generation of seamen. Before 1857, no regular system of training midshipmen existed. All their knowledge was actually acquired afloat, exactly as Captain Marryat describes. The large ships only were furnished with regular naval instructors. Since the ‘Britannia’ was instituted in 1857, all midshipmen receive from fifteen months to two years education in naval subjects and in mathematics. The educational term is not over when the professional career begins. The course of study necessary before the examination for Lieutenant can be passed has been greatly expanded. Formerly acting mates were supposed to satisfy all educational tests for Lieutenant in about three months. Now a year is occupied with these studies; the qualifying standard for the pass examination is pitched far higher than was ever known before.

The transformation undergone by our navy which strikes the eye most forcibly is of course the replacement of the wooden walls by the floating ironclad and the substitution of steam for wind-filled sails as the propelling power of our fleet. A naval officer, Sir William Symonds, instead of a member of the School of Naval Architecture, was appointed Surveyor of the Navy; the first step towards improving ship construction was taken. Almost on the eve of the Queen’s accession, certainly during all the earlier thirties, steamers 5 of which in all existed, were only used to tow ships of the line in and out of harbour; or at the utmost for a trip to Gibraltar or Malta. When Captain Charles Napier predicted that steam would soon become to the navy what cavalry is to the army, and have the post of honour, the prediction seemed impossible. The adoption of steam was a very gradual and tentative process. First the ‘Active,’ a 46-gun frigate was fitted with paddles, but not as yet engines. The result was progress at a maximum of from 2 to 3 knots an hour. Captain Napier carried the experiment a little further; but in no case was steam yet exclusively relied on for working the paddles. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the navy included 5 steam paddle vessels. Each of them had three masts furnished with sails. All were generically known as steam sloops. The largest was 830 tons; the maximum of speed from 8 to 10 knots. Larger steamers called steam frigates, from 1,200 to 1,800 tons were introduced soon after the reign began. They were first actively employed at the bombardment of Acre in 1840, and notwithstanding their old lines of construction, proved the usefulness of armed ships at sea against forts on land. The Acre operations seem to have been important, as showing for the first time the skill of Victorian seamen in gunnery and in the management of the machinery of steam ships. Similarly, long before this only the skill with which English ships were handled had overcome, in their encounters with French, the faults of their design. The weight of metal thrown by the largest guns on board these earlier craft, e. g. the ‘Nelson,’ was 2,750 lbs. Further steam progress was marked when, eight years after the reign began, the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ in which Sir John Franklin’s expedition sailed for the Pole, were fitted with the screw.

As yet iron had not been employed on the present scale in ship construction. Both in 1857 and 1858 larger ships than had yet been known, the ‘Niagara’ first, the ‘Orlando,’ the ‘Mersey,’ afterwards, were built, all, however, of wood. Long after steam was partially employed, sails were retained. Even during our Black Sea and Baltic operations in Crimean days, screw and paddle were still combined with canvas. Such success as our fleet secured at this time was not promoted by the excellence of our naval organization which according to Captain Eardley Wilmot, was not much better than our military.73 The first lesson as to the new mode of motion by sea learnt from the naval operations in Crimean waters was recognized by Kinglake and is confirmed by Captain Eardley Wilmot as being that ‘in regions where land and sea much intertwine, steam is stronger for attack than for defence.’

The iron ships now almost as essential to the idea of a navy as steam itself, had been tried for different purposes long before our Admiralty adopted them; the material had been used, first in 1812 for canal barges, secondly, a little later, for the mercantile marine. Iron was not employed for our navy till the last days of William IV. The tragic fate of the first iron ship, the ‘Birkenhead,’ may well have prejudiced both the Department and the public against the new material.

The iron-plated ship of the modern type appears to have been a French idea, first tried by Colonel Paixhaus in 1825. The floating batteries employed in the Crimean War in which Napoleon III. was specially interested, marked a fresh advance in this direction. Nor does it seem easy to overrate the value of the lessons in scientific seamanship derived from the French and English operations on the Black Sea, 1854-5. The result was the invitation by the Admiralty of designs from all quarters, the ordering of the ‘Warrior,’ designed by Mr Scott Russell, in 1859, completed in 1861.74 This vessel was equipped with a battery extending her whole length. Before the fifties were out, the naval and the national mind had been familiarized with the idea of mastless ships, long repulsive to the national sense of the picturesque at sea. The ‘Warrior,’ however, was furnished with sails in addition to steam and marked an epoch in the development not only of the English navy, but of the navies of the world, as the first absolutely complete iron ship ever built.

The French ships, earlier in point of time were not equally perfect as regards material. They were, in fact, wooden ships cut down and plated with iron. Thus with literal truth referring to the launch of ‘Warrior’ could our Naval Minister of the day, Sir John Pakington, describe the whole world as interested in the bold experiment. Other ships of the same kind soon followed, and of even larger proportions. It is to the credit of English workmanship that the building of these vessels at Chatham was performed by shipwrights who had hitherto worked only on wood; and that the craftmanship shown by them in the new material was pronounced by experts to be excellent. Timber having been definitely superseded by metal, there followed the long and technical controversy about the relative merits of turret and broadside armaments. The concentration of guns into a single citadel on board ship was first in England powerfully advocated by Sir E. Reed. Since then, the naval warfare between Federals and Confederates on the other side of the Atlantic, followed by the exciting manœuvres off Cherbourg between the ‘Alabama’ and the ‘Keersage,’ and in Europe the naval portions of the Austro-Italian war of 1866 have taught lessons the full results of which are not, perhaps even yet, perfectly realized. So long is the experimental stage which has to be traversed before the newest system of maritime defence and attack with its complicated machinery can be said entirely to have reached what is alone to be called properly the scientific stage.75

CHAPTER XXIII

TRANSFORMATIONS OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE

The Prince Consort’s influence in organizing pursuits and departments of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures. Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of science traced in all intellectual pursuits.

If in a few words the contrast between the England of the later and the earlier part of the Queen’s reign were to be summed up, it might be expressed by the single word, organization. For that process, as for its most impressive results, Victorian England is indebted primarily to the husband of its Queen. To-day Englishmen are reminded locally and visibly of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the elaborately picturesque memorial of the man who spared no pains to secure its success, situated, as that monument is, on the spot where the great glass house once stood.

That event was the earliest triumph of the new epoch of culture including science in its application to the conveniences or luxuries of daily life. From 1851 too, may be dated the organized encouragement of the inventor in all departments of scientific ingenuity.

Such a world’s show might in due course have been devised by the wit of man, even if the Queen’s husband had not recalled for reproduction in England the idea of the Frankfort fairs of the sixteenth century.76 It is quite certain that without the Prince’s personal enterprise and sustained supervision, and but for the invaluable co-operation of the late Sir Henry Cole, the movement which has transformed the Court suburb from laundry grounds, or riding schools, into a centre of artistic or scientific education for the whole country had it taken place at all, would not have occurred till many years later than it actually did. The contrast between the South Kensington of the Queen’s accession year with its suburban desolations, and of the sixtieth anniversary year, with its palaces of art, its private mansions rivalling those of Park Lane, its Imperial Institute, its provision for educational classes by day, for musical fêtes by lamplight, might have been indefinitely postponed.

The name of Her Majesty written in the clear bold hand of youth when she became Queen may be read to-day in the register of the Royal Society. That entry prefigured the close connection between science and the Court which, for the first time in the history of the monarchy, was to signalize her reign. The period preparatory to the enthronement of science and art beneath the glass roof of Paxton was of scarcely less educational value to the Kingdom than, to most appliances of daily life, the Exhibition itself was to prove. The instructive addresses delivered at this time by the Prince Consort, now to a gathering of artists and writers, now to more popular audiences at Birmingham or elsewhere, may seem to those who read them to-day familiar or even commonplace. They were then entire novelties, not only from their authorship, but from their subject.

In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign experiment which the Queen’s husband would most wisely have left unmade. In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly from South Kensington penetrated into every corner of the land, and made their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of peer.

Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those of birth and rank.

Up to the moment of his death the Queen’s husband was endeavouring to make his wife’s Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified. Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.

Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort’s son possesses was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father’s choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Society. The progress now spoken of seems to be symbolized by the acceptance of the word ‘science’ as the nearly exclusive synonym for that physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable. Francis Bacon’s equalization of human ingenia, and his elaborately tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature’s secret had been yielded in the past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe even their methods to the Schools.