Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain (review)

The fate of the British aristocracy in the modern period has been one of gradual euthanasia rather than mass slaughter à la mode Française.  From a predominating position—strengthened perhaps by a modicum of Wilberforcian moral reform—prior to 1832, the aristocracy experienced a gradual political, and rather less social, decline through the mid-century that was greatly hastened by falling agricultural prices from the mid-1870s onwards. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill pondered aloud who would take over the task of governance once noblesse oblige had finally been renounced, a question taken up early in the twentieth century by H. G. Wells (who, surprisingly, is not mentioned here). Today, with some of the last vestiges of Britain's feudal institutions being eliminated by the oft-delayed restructuring of the House of Lords, the aristocracy have been relegated, with a few notable exceptions, to ostentatiously displaying their wares beside those of parvenu soap opera stars and other minor list celebs in the pages of Hello! magazine.

Antony Taylor's later nineteenth-century starting-point still finds the peerage in its heyday. Deference, celebrated as a spectacular British achievement by Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution (1867), was still thriving. In an age of constant change the landed governing classes provided an element of stability and continuity, linking the sovereign to the people, opening their ranks to newcomers with a readiness lacking elsewhere in Europe, and not merely maintaining but reinforcing a gentlemanly ethos that, as Martin Wiener argued some years ago, actually came to pervade the middle-class professional classes and their system of education in the late Victorian period. Some of the more unabashedly forelock-tugging and hat-tipping literature of the last two decades has celebrated, in the face of historians having ignored them for several generations, the aristocracy, played up the "culture" of the country house, and risked accidentally undershoring that rapidly vanishing snobbism that was long the bane of the British class system. Taylor argues that there was a solid case against the aristocracy that had been long in formation, but came of age after the 1867 Reform Act. To its severest critics aristocracy meant corrupt manipulation of parliamentary boroughs, low agricultural wages, class insolence, and moral degeneracy. There was plentiful evidence for all these charges, substantiated by writers from Thomas Paine to the Chartists on the plebeian side, and James Mackintosh to James Mill amongst the middling orders. But relatively little has been written on the era surveyed here, and Taylor's achievement is to offer a series of loosely-connected vignettes that illuminate anti-aristocratic thought in the period.

Taylor divides the leading arguments against the peerage into four types: a moral argument about degeneracy, an economic case about concentration of landownership, an emotional case respecting the blood-lust of animal sports, and a political account of parliamentary manipulation. Each case is examined through a specific example: one chapter on the issue of debauchery, as illustrated by Colonel Valentine Baker; one chapter on the influence of Henry George's land reform program in Britain; one chapter on still-controversial attitudes to hunting and animal rights; and one chapter on campaigns to reform the House of Lords between 1870 and 1911. The subject of an 1875 court case for attempted rape in a railway carriage, Baker seems an appropriate instance of the case for aristocratic depravity. A guilty verdict ruined his career, though he was imprisoned as comfortably as possible. But as Taylor demonstrates, sexual misconduct in particular was legion, and republican journalists like G. W. M. Reynolds helped to identify such cases with the aristocracy. In the instance of George, Taylor reminds us of the phenomenal popularity of Progress and Poverty (1880), which sold some 400,000 copies annually within a few years. George proposed a single tax on land...