The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (review)

Although early Victorian Britain is usually regarded as the heyday of laissez-faire economics, it was also the age of Factory Laws and utilitarianism. How to reconcile that conundrum is the important task F. David Roberts sets himself in The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians. The answer he eventually provides is that discrete groups found government at all its levels to be best at solving limited, finite, problems. The British were consequently willing to use government as a useful tool without ever regarding its functions more comprehensively, and therefore, without challenging traditional assumptions that government itself was “a vast evil.”

This is the sort of old-fashioned history of ideas that once formed the backbone of the profession. It will remind many readers of Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind or G.M. Young’s Portrait of an Age. Exhaustively researched and systematically organized, The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians is both accomplished and sound. This, of course, will be no surprise to the many admirers of David Roberts’ long and distinguished career. Earnest, empirical, conscientious and thorough, Roberts’ sympathy for the world of the early Victorians is evident throughout. Readers will appreciate his scrupulous caution in making judgments and the care with which he avoids present-mindedness, with the exception of a few juicy nods in the direction of Margaret Thatcher that even Roberts couldn’t resist.

The subject of how the Victorian social conscience developed, and what the consequences of that development were, remain important. The Early Victorians were the first historical group to confront the social problems wrought by widespread industrialization. And they did so with an inefficiently organized, decentralized government still dominated at most levels by a landed class limited in both vision and experience, armed with a set of ideological paradigms that for the most part were either irrelevant or appalling. The great strength of this work—in addition to its wealth of source material—is Roberts’ documentation of the slide from the old paternalism into the new world of laissez-faire and thence into utilitarianism, a shorter journey than one might have guessed.

Roberts is at his gutsiest in examining the various forms of vested interest that hampered the abilities of the Victorians to solve their problems in any widespread, meaningful way. His chapter on “Self-Reliance” is painfully amusing, as one witnesses the early Victorians espousing that doctrine, useful only to the degree that it kept the poor rates down. Self-reliance that enabled the poor to forget their place was, of course, going too far. And that was one of many dilemmas faced by the Victorians. Drenched in Christianity, Christ’s call to charity sat uncomfortably with laissez-faire political economy and its denunciations of that economy’s victims.

Nevertheless, political economy was “an intellectual event rivaled only by evangelicalism in defining the social conscience of the early Victorians,” Roberts rightly tells us (p. 75), and reconciling the two was a major problem. Although the notion of Original Sin was useful in doing so, ultimately political economy’s Enlightenment origins got in the way. Humanitarianism—a sentiment rather than an ideology—fed by the popular press as well as by the artists of the time, and informed by the real-world experiences of Evangelical do-gooders and parliamentary investigators—remained at least as important a force.

Organizing the vast amount of source material Roberts accumulated must indeed have been a daunting task. He lets his evidence lead the way, but it all too often goes in many directions, leaving the reader struggling to discern what point the author is trying to make. The book is organized, like Houghton’s, around certain ideas. While this approach has its advantages, it also creates problems. Readers will be aware of dozens of recurring names—Chalmers, Lord Morpeth, Duncombe, etc.—without ever getting a clear sense of precisely what these men believed in, why they did so, or what they accomplished. Readers are often likely to...