The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (review)

The Victorian period has in recent years been subjected to intensive revision. Some scholars have dismissed the idea that there was in any meaningful sense an Industrial Revolution going on in the period. Others contend that a three-class system in society is not apparent before the turn of the century. Evangelicalism (in its Anglican manifestation) is no longer seen as a solvent to, but rather as the bedrock of laissez-faire economics. Finally, even the Victorian period itself is questioned as a valid or useful period for study.

It is unlikely that David Roberts would even entertain the last proposition. But, though revision is not his primary purpose, he does not fail to take that of others into account. He stands firm for the Industrial Revolution. He is rather more cautious about the three-class system, but largely agrees that the working class at any rate does not emerge in a form recognizable to us until early in the next century. The connection between Anglican evangelicalism and laissez-faire he seems to accept as a valid concept, though he himself is seeking a more complete reality. Though in an early chapter he removes elements of the social conscience for a brilliant analysis, his primary focus is on fitting them all back together again to provide a more complicated, but also a much more satisfying, picture of what the Victorian social conscience actually comprised.

In a short review, it is best to concentrate first on that picture. Roberts says,

The social conscience of all early Victorians was a fusion of different attitudes. There was no pure utilitarian and no pure paternalist, but rather utilitarians who were somewhat paternalist and paternalists who were a bit utilitarian; and both wove into their outlook other strands—political economy, self-reliance, voluntarism, the worship of property, a belief in a providential order—a compound made more complex by the conflicting strands of philanthropy and humanitarianism, mixing with self-, vested, and class interests.

(445-46)

There is indeed complexity in this compound, but the picture that emerges is one much truer to life than any that will come from studies concentrated on a single element alone. William Wilberforce, for example, is generally known as a great Evangelical philanthropist (which under the current interpretation suggests a less than open-handed one). Yet, as the towering figure in the anti-slavery movement, hard as some historians have tried to wring every ounce of humanitarianism out of it, Wilberforce was also a great humanitarian.

So was another famous Evangelical. By birth and upbringing, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was a paternalist, by choice an Evangelical and a philanthropist. None of these stances would fully explain the ambitious reforming line he undertook in his important and influential factory and mines legislation. There was doubtless some paternalism in his solicitude for the weak and defenseless, some Evangelical prudery in his concern about conditions in factories and mines, but most of all he could not stand human (or animal) suffering. Other examples of his favorite projects might underline the point. The little climbing boys encountered no sin to tempt them in the chimneys, and the horses for whom he so assiduously provided watering troughs, to slake their thirst and ease their toil, had no souls.

Do the social positions of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury reflect those of Evangelicals in general? Wilberforce clearly had massive support from evangelicals, Dissenting as well as Anglican, in his reforming efforts. Shaftesbury, however, complained that he did not. The ideological mixture in his period had changed, probably more reflective of what is now seen as the conventional Evangelical attitude. Yet the changing mixtures brought Shaftesbury new sources of support, for example, from John Bowring, a Unitarian and an intimate friend—but not a disciple—of Jeremy Bentham. (Roberts is firm on the point that Benthamism was not a school, but rather a loose array of like...