"Empire, What Empire?" Or, Why 80% of Early-and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It

The context of this short paper¹ is the unease I have been feeling for some time with what seems to have become the accepted wisdom in certain areas of nineteenth-century British studies, and even popularly: that the British Empire in one way or another permeated every aspect of Victorian life. In a book to be published shortly I shall be questioning this; its main thesis will be that an awareness of the limits of the Empire's impact on the home society is far more crucial to an understanding both of British society in the nineteenth century (and also, I would go as far as to say, the twentieth); and of the British Empire itself.² There is no room here for an adequate summary, even, of the full argument. It involves theoretical and semantic questions, of course. One problem that combines both of these is the tendency of some scholars to reify "imperialism," as though it were a phenomenon, an ultimate cause of events, instead of merely a word used as a shorthand description of a plethora of widely different phenomena. In Bloomington I suggested that we might try to organise a moratorium on the "i" word—and its related "e" and "c" ("colonialism") words—for, say, ten years, in order to force some less lazy and more discriminating thinking on this. Another problem is that there is, in fact, very little joined-up "theory" behind the "cultural imperialist" approach: just the application of a formula. (A bright idea is not a "theory.") A third has to do with historical context. Some of the cultural imperialist claims simply do not fit with that: unless of course we "read them into" it. That applies across a wide spectrum of British society. In this paper I shall concentrate on just one section of that society: the British working classes before about 1880.

Our cultural imperialists usually ignore the working classes, for reasons I am sometimes at a loss to understand. They did, after all, comprise 70 to 80% of the British population throughout the nineteenth century. Yet most of the evidence that is sometimes given for the wide cultural spread of imperial ideas, values, assumptions, prejudices, and so on at this time concentrates on the cultural productions of a small elite in British society (the literati and the artistic set), which—I think I can show—scarcely touched them.³ Is this because cultural imperialists do not think the working classes matter? They have no "culture," and consequently are not worthy of their study. Is it through simple ignorance? (I have found one American authority who labours under the impression that The Times was a "popular paper."⁴ ) Or, lastly, is it because they believe "high" cultural discourses must reflect "low" ones too; perhaps because—as another authority clearly assumes—the workers are too dumb to have any ideas of their own, and so can only soak up the ones that come "down" to them from "above"? This is with reference to G. A. Henty: "It provides a sediment in the mind which it requires a conscious intellectual effort to erase. Since the majority of people are not intellectuals, it follows that only a minority will for a variety of reasons make this effort" (Richards 2). That would explain it.

For whatever reason, this idea that there was only one culture in Britain, or one hegemonic one, which is fairly represented by writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and the rest of the literary "canon," is unproven, to put it at its best. Anyone who has ever delved into the other cultures that made up Victorian society, in fact, will know that it is wrong, even risible. Some of the canonical writers themselves knew that: Dickens, for example; Elizabeth Gaskell; Austen (she must have known—in her books the workers aren't even real people); and Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil: or the Two Nations (1845)—a significant and perceptive title. That is what Britain was in the nineteenth century: two—or even more—distinct...