In Our Time - Victorian Pessimism

Episode Date: May 10, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Victorian Pessimism. On 1 September 1851 the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon. Catching a ferry from Dover to Calais, he sat down and worked on a poem that would become emblematic of the fears and anxieties of a generation of Victorians. It is called Dover Beach and it finishes like this: “Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night”.From Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach to the malign universe of Thomas Hardy’s novels, an age famed for its forthright sense of progress and Christian belief was also riddled with anxieties about faith, morality and the future of the human race. They were even worried that the sun would soon go out. But to what extent was this pessimism spread across all areas of Victorian life? What events and ideas were driving it on and were any of their concerns about race, religion, class and culture borne out as the 19th century drew to a close? With Dinah Birch, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Peter Mandler, University Lecturer and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on the 1st of September 1851, the poet Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon. He caught a ferry from Dover to Calais

and worked on a poem that would become emblematic of the fears and anxieties of a generation of Victorians. It's called Dover Beach, and it finishes like this, despairing of everything, but what is most personal. Our love let us be true to one another, for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

but was Arnold's pessimism shared by his fellow Victorians what events and ideas were driving it on and were any of their concerns about race and religion, class and culture borne out as the 19th century drew to a close? With me to discuss Victorian pessimism a Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, Peter Mandler, reader and fellow in history

at Gonville and Keyes College, Cambridge, and Dina Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University. Dina Birch, Matthew Arnold, didn't publish Doverbeach until 1867 when he was 45. Can you tell us a little more about the poem and what Arnold was addressing in that poem? Well, I think it's a poem about fragmentation, it's about loneliness, it's about vulnerability,

and it's also about uncertainty. Nothing is sure in the world that Arnold's describing in that poem. We're all in the dark, stranded in a world of struggle and conflict. and confusion. And what really lies behind over Beach, it seems to me, is that faltering in religious belief

which hit Matthew Arnold and Matthew Arnold's generation very hard. And the other writers it turned out were dealing with this evening, one of whom was Houseman, wasn't it? That's right. Housemen, a later generation. But dealing with that sense of abandonment,

those old props and supports, really again to do with religious faith, having been removed. But he he copes with it very differently. If you think of Arnold's response to loss, the way in which he turned himself in his own life to something very different from a pessimist. He worked very hard, he became a social reformer. He was very engaged with the political life of England. Hausman responded very differently. He became a literary scholar and of course a major poet. And his pessimism, which is as deep and as marked as Arnold,

becomes a matter of austerity, a kind of imaginative discipline, a sort of economy of despair, which I think is something that provided a relish for his readers, because of course there is a pleasure in pessimism too. Also he thought it armed him for the real life that he knew to expect the worst, and so he was sort of well set up against, better set up against the future than most people. That's right. I'm just looking for context before we move on. Arnold's at Oxford, the Oxford movement, the religious, from Anglicanism to Catholicism,

there's Newman there. And there's the 39 articles, which a lot of the younger, brighter men won't sign. Can you give us more context there? because religion at this early stage seems to be either at the heart of it or said to be at the heart of it. I'm not quite sure, but still... Yes, I think it is at the heart of it. Picking up on some of the things that Dinah said, there were increasing doubts about scripture

and particularly about the literal truth of the Bible. That the Bible was a book and not the Word of God. Yes, that's right. And open to different interpretations. An historical document, basically. Yes, that's right. And that comes largely from German historians, comparative historians, who write about the Bible as if it were any other historical text.

And the German Strauss, David Friedrich Strauss, wrote The Life of Jesus, which was translated by the unknown at that time, George Elliott in 1846. And all these young Oxford people, Matthew Arnold, his younger brother, Tom Arnold, their great friend and Dr Arnold's best pupil at rugby are Arthur Hugh Clough. They were all in Oxford, all finishing their degrees, taking fellowships, wondering what to do.

the 39 articles, then reading Strauss and thinking, should I be doing this? Because the 39 articles required them to believe in the canonicity of the Old Testament books, including Genesis, the literal truth, in other words. That was one of the stumbling blocks for them. Geology was another. Charles Lyle, writing principles of geology in the 1830s,

suggesting gradualism, erosion of rocks and the earth's surface over many eons, rather than a six-day creation 4,000 years before, which is what was the orthodox belief. So geology and historical criticism of the Bible are the two main planks, I think, which caused a generation of young people to think, can I, in all conscience,

continue to sign these articles in order to retain my fellowship, take my degree, go on and be a clergyman, whatever it was they were going to do. And it's this group of young people who men, who then not only lost their faith and their place at Oxford, let's say, but they lost a profession, a future profession. What were they going to do? Peter Mandler, in 1869, just after Dover Beach,

Matthew Arnold published Culture and Anarchy, which raged against barbarians and Philistines in British society. Who were the barbarians and the Philistines? And what was he driving up there? This stems directly from Rosemary's last comment and your last question, which is the very peculiar social position of someone like Arnold. I mean, we've been speaking about a whole generation, but we are talking about a whole generation of a particular kind of person,

someone from the professional classes who have been used to being, more or less the servants and supports of the establishment, both the Church of England and the political establishment, Thomas Arnold educating them and the young clergyman serving its church, and who either because they feel the establishment is beginning to break up or because they've simply lost faith in it, They find themselves now out on a limb. They have the support of the old establishment,

and yet they're not sure at all that they like what might pose themselves as the establishment successors of world of democracy and mass rule. And culture and anarchy is Arnold's very frank statement of how isolated he feels. The barbarians are the old landed classes, who he has not much faith in as well-rounded human beings. though he admires their ability to govern things, keep control. The Philistines are all the other members of the middle classes, apart from himself and his friends,

non-conformists, rather dure, unimaginative, materialistic people. And then he leaves open and less specified, the other great social group in contemporary Britain, the great mass of the people, the democracy, about whom he knows very little, and is not yet sure how much faith he can invest in them. But he rather thinks of most potty in his hands. He became a great educationalist, as I said,

and he wants to form them. So when you look at what he thinks about the aristocracy and the middle classes and the working classes, it only leaves him and his pals who really know, were free to say and untainted to have a opinion that counts. Yes, although he does have a very high opinion that he and his friends represent

all the best that has been thought and done in the world. And he also is looking around for ways to institutionalize themselves. Again, this relates to our earlier comment about the lack of jobs that these guys sink themselves into when they give up the church and government.

Which is quite bold. I mean, we must emphasize, that's quite a bold thing for people to do. It's cutting themselves off from preferment. It's taking a stand on principle. It seems in some ways remote to us now. but it's a bold thing, they have nowhere to go after that. So we're talking, we're not talking about silly people. We're talking to people of principle and determination.

But idealistic. And I think, I mean, Arnold does have one somewhat unexpected recourse, which you don't expect from a Victorian liberal, which is the state. And he's very clear cut in culture and anarchy that the state does need to fulfill in a secular way some of the functions that had formerly been filled by the church. So you've got this group of men, we've got the religious dimension, which we've mentioned, there are other things down in Belgium, but also, of course, we can't, and we don't want to,

Miss Darwin and his contribution to this pessimism, I haven't put it that way. Yes, a huge influence. I mean, I think we are now so used to concepts of evolution as central to our understanding of human identity, that it takes a real effort of the imagination to move back in time and understand what a shock it was for Arnold, his generation, and those who came after Arnold, to come to terms with this new idea that we were not, after all, the centre of creation.

We were subject to change. We were the product of change, that that change is still happening, that we might evolve into new forms, or, of course, and this was another very unsettling idea that became prevalent in the late 19th century, that we might, as it were, devolve. It wasn't necessarily going to be a matter of forward progression

that would change us into something higher and finer and better. There was also the possibility that we would sink back into something that the Victorians feared as a sort of primitivism that lurked beneath civilisation. And that shows itself in text after text. So this is moving around thinking people, Rosemary Ashen. Can we just talk about the other repercussions

from what Darwin said? It takes us into algebra genics, for instance. Eugenics was a term which was coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who was also a scientist, and he introduced the name, which means beautiful heredity, and the idea that if you take evolution and you take a kind of positive view of it,

you could, he didn't really find ways of sorting this out, but you could encourage the beautiful, the intelligent, the moral in the human sphere to marry and reproduce. But it is a hot potato, of course, because with Darwin in origin species, he keeps the human species pretty well out of the picture. For obvious reasons, he knows he's dropping this bomb, and it would be even more of a bomb if you looked at the sticky problem about this struggle for life. He quite cheerfully says,

let the strong live and the weak die. Well, that's all right for plants and animals. What about human beings? Well, I think, again, we have to remember that when we're talking about the Darwin's and the Galton's and the Cluffs and the Arnold's, we are talking about that group of people who were in that peculiar position

feeling with some prescience that they saw big changes in society and that they weren't personally going to necessarily going to benefit from them. But I think when we talk about that, and also they have these worries about the teeming mass that were collecting in the big cities. And this late 19th century is the period of peak urbanization in Britain.

I mean, Britain by 1901 reaches basically the level of urbanization that it enjoys today, and that's way ahead of anywhere else in the world. So these are radical new phenomena and rather frightening ones. On the other hand, precisely those currents that people like Arnold and Darwin identified that scared the dickens out of them, those same currents were benefiting, vast millions of people and giving them a sense of power and growth and development rather than anxieties about degeneration and decay. I mean, the power of steam to transform human ability to travel,

the advent of electricity, the instantaneous communication around the globe, and then some of the things that come along in the train like cheap food, grain pouring in from North America and Eastern Europe, making the average working man much wealthier, and giving him a greater sense of possibility than it ever had before. Then that worries someone like Darwin and Galton who see their type being outpopulated.

But it doesn't worry the people who are doing the outpopulating. I think Peter's absolutely right in that we've been talking so far, mostly about a cultural elite, Clough and Arnold, those who were the product of a very sophisticated education and felt their position to be threatened. The classical education. Yes, that's right. And their pessimism arises from that.

But there is another strand to the pessimism that we're talking about. That's the product of people who are taking advantage of that breaking up that Peter's being describing, breaking up of all certainties, full of aspiration to move up through the social hierarchies, but at the same time, full of a sense of pressure, strain, isolation, loss. And I'm thinking now of people like Gissing, for instance, George Gissing, very powerful voice of cultural pessimism in the latter decades of the 19th century, who had created a literary life,

a literary career for himself, but at the same time had alienated himself from his own community, his own identity, and writes about that process of alienation, really very powerfully. This is what's interesting toward the end of the century, I think. This is a different group from the Oxford educated people. So they did, as it were,

they did, as it were, in a university, start something, yeah. But they must have had their finger on the pons of... On the... ...to use a much better word that Peter Offered up a few senses ago. But you now get, partly because there is, of course, throughout the 19th century a movement to extend education and University College London was set up in the 1820s to allow people to have a university education

who could not sign the 39 articles required at Oxford and Cambridge. And that's indeed where it's to UCL and to London that Clough and others fled when they left Oxford. But in a later generation, you've therefore got people of, shall we say, a more lower working class background, like Gissing, like HG Wells. They struggled because they struggled financially, but they managed to get a toehold into some kind of education

and further education. But then when they started writing their books, both Gissing and Wells are rather depressed. They're pessimistic. They feel it's partly a personal thing. They feel a grudge, you know, a heavy hand on their shoulders, they don't feel they've succeeded as much as they should. But they're also, they've also read Darwin

and they also take the pessimistic view of Darwinism. I think it's also worth remembering that some of the gloomier text that we've been talking about written by men like H.G. Wells were enormously popular. HD Wells, I think, is particularly fascinating. Such an intelligent writer. And someone who brings together these scientific movements that we've been talking about.

I mean, the text like the Time Machine, for instance, 1895, addresses the fears of degeneration as a result of Darwinian evolution, but also brilliantly picks up the new physics. The final scene of the Time Machine, where the time traveller shoots himself forward into the far distant future, it's like 30 million years from now, talks about the death of the sun.

and it has an unforgettable vision of what he calls the abominable desolation of this huge glowing, dying red disks and the final struggles of life on earth to survive so that not only have you got the pessimism of biology, you've also got, in a sense, the far more devastating pessimism of a new physics. Peter, can I just ask you to bring this to what let's call an intellectual thing, to bring democracy into the argument and class. We need to spend a great deal of time because it seems to be a fairly clear-cut thing. The fear that democracy would enfranchise the mass

and the mass would be the mob and the mob would be uncontrollable. Did that, I know my life sort of half-setted, but you can say it much better. This period is a period of mass education, 1870, basically the starting point of universal education, state-funded education. It's the period of advancing democracy. The vote is extended to working men in Reform Acts in 1867 and 1884. One can see those as rising tide of doom,

or one can see those as more or less successful measures to integrate the mass of the people into society. I mean, Matthew Arnold worked most of his working life as an inspector of schools. This is exactly what he thought the state should be doing in order to make the best of what might be a bad lot. There's also the fear of the city, isn't there, Rosemary? The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombrosa, who said

cities-bred crime, and he said about sort of, as it were, proving it. And the idea that the cities were not the great, wonderful old, countryside with all the values and this, that and the other, but there were place that, again, we bring in degeneracy. and there's a class down there with semi-vicious, so the semi-vicious class, wasn't that? Yes, that's right. Lombroso, of course, is the early criminologist, and like Galton, he looks at physical types

and suggests that, you know, typically the low forehead is indicative of a criminal nature and so on. And, of course, the overcrowding in cities, this is a kind of legacy of the earlier Victorian period when there's overcrowding under sanitation. By the end of the century, the Thames has been embanked and things are a great deal better on the sanitation front. But still, you've got poor people, working class people,

undereducated people, in cities, crowded, squalid, and all those things. And then this moral element enters into the picture and the fear of them of. I think in a way, Dinah's given us a good picture of Wellesies' time machine. Of course, in that vision, kind of dystopic vision, there are two classes, two species, two species, almost, the higher species, the Eloy, who live above ground, and the lower species, the Morlocks, who live below ground. There's a sort of sense in which that whole idea of a whole race almost of people living below ground.

It's a kind of metaphor for working class people in cities. It comes, I think, from Marx's warnings in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 about the Lumpin proletariat, and what are you going to do if you know, the alienation of the working man from the product of his labour? So there's another, we've not only got Darwin, we've got marks coming through here, I think, as well. I do think that that image of an underground culture is a very powerful one. You find it in all kinds of literary context, but I think it's more than literary.

I mean, it's partly to do with physical developments like the underground that we travel on, which people found very exciting, but also very threatening. Yes, exactly. But Gissing, again, picks it up in his novel, The Netherworld, which is a phrase that's recurrent at the time. And it has to do, I think, with a sense of the failure of light, going right back to Dover Beach. It's a great poem about darkness.

And over and over again... On a darkling plane, yes, that's right, the darkling plane, the light that's gone. And over and over again in these pessimistic texts and movements at the end of the 19th century, we find a fear of the failing of the light, the light that failed. The sun that'll go out. Isn't it only a city phenomenon, though, Peter Mandler, in the country.

Agriculture is collapsing in this country, in the 1880s and 90s. Will you just tell us about what's happening in agriculture? Agriculture is collapsing. The countryside is depopulating. It's no longer possible to grow grain competitively with these vast prairies in North America and Eastern Europe, which can now supply England by steam railway at a fraction of the cost. And that causes another sudden burst of pessimism amongst the... the more or less established classes

because the countries had had been a talisman for centuries in English culture. The double side is that, of course, the average person in England already lives in the city, doesn't live in the country, isn't suffering from the collapse of rural employment,

and he's benefiting from the collapse of grain prices. The price of food drops into the floor, and all of a sudden people can afford jams and cakes and holidays and furnishings and maybe even put money down on a house and the origins of modern consumer society are based upon the collapse of agriculture.

But Comptuom Society itself is regarded with superstition. New anxieties. Rosemary, can we come into the sort of great, if we're looking for one as a poet of pessimism of the countryside, it would be at that time, at the end of the night session, it would be Thomas Hardy, in the bleakest of his books being Jude, and talking about the universal wish not to live.

And Hardy, it wasn't only, I mean, he was anti-god, wasn't it? It wasn't only not a god-driven universe. It was, if anything, it was a universe driven by a malign force. Absolutely. And he does hit the tips of pessimism. There are some early novels which are more jolly and bucolic and under the green root tree and so on, but mainly we think of him for his later pessimistic novels.

And he did embrace Darwinism. and at its most, I suppose, crude and extreme, really, for human society. Now it is, he thought, and indeed his novels really dramatise, those who don't adapt, don't survive. That's what happens to the mayor of Castabridge. He doesn't adapt. He doesn't survive. And to some extent it happens in tests of the Derbiville's. Jude and Jude Libesquire is slightly more complicated.

In fact, it's all rather more complicated than that. But on the other hand, the main, as it were, the main sort of story in the Hardy novels is a kind of lingering love of the old-fashioned and the historical and the local and the rural and the beliefs that went with it, the religious beliefs that went with those. But a kind of stern sense that there is no God, certainly no benign providence, and all is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds, which is really how you end up reading Hardy for all the other. things that are going on there too. I think one of the interesting things about Hardy is his assault on the romantic and post-romantic idea that the beauty of nature will be in itself

sustaining, that words worthy in notion, that nature will support our spiritual and imaginative lives. And this is yet another consequence of Darwinism. Hardy looks at nature and he finds something that may

indeed still be beautiful, but he's no longer going to be sustaining. There's a wonderful poem by Hardy called In a Wood, where he says that having been oppressed by a city, he went into a wood to try and cheer himself up and found that the wood was worse than the city because there were all the trees, the holly and the ash, and wildly competing with each other.

And he ends gloomily by saying, since then no grace I find taught me of trees, turn I back to my kind, worthy as these. The city may be grim, but it might in fact be better than nature. And that is another huge upheaval that nature itself is alien from us, not even just neutral, as Hausman had said, heartless, witless nature, Hausman had argued simply indifferent to us. In Hardy's writing, you seem to see a nature that's actively hostile that seems to consider. aspire against human welfare. Is this the, as it were, is this the peak of pessimism, of the depth of pessimism there, Peter? Yes, and actually I think

one of the things that gives Hardy his profound human credibility is that he really did understand the countryside, and he was, you know, he wasn't just a tourist, he wasn't even as much of a tourist as the leg poets, you know, who popped up to a particularly picturesque part.

Excuse me, Wordsworth has born there, but I'm not going to let this pass. No, no, as a group, though, a lot of them were incoming. and they were picking out something that they could make artificially. But... That's another program, so I'm just slumping in my seat. But, you know, at the end of the 19th century,

the country was largely emptying, and it was a lot of human misery resulting, and Hardy was right there in the thick of it. Can you give this an idea, before we leave this program, Mr. at the end of the century, in turn and century, coming to the 20th century, where was this idea in the landscape of, ideas in this country? Was it the prevailing idea? Was it still the property of a comparatively

few number of well-educated people who, in whose circle it rested? Or had it become something that had caught a real feeling and a reality about the society? Can we start with you, Rosemary? I suppose the whole Victorian pessimism thing which we've given a good airing to today is important, but it's only the other side of the great optimism, the progress, the technological progress, the empire and all that kind of thing. Dinah? Yes, as Peter said, it's always a double thing, that on the one hand, you can see it as the voice of a cultural elite.

But on the other hand, I think it wasn't just that, despite that optimism which co-existed with it. I think partly because it did become such a fashion. among a certain group of influential people and people who were not necessarily born into privilege, you can see a tone that spreads into other fields other than, as it were, literary and political. But I think when it goes, it really goes quite suddenly.

Peter, there's a man who did a very interesting comparative study of pessimism about the city, in Germany, France, Britain, and America in this period. And what he found was that the Germans were most pessimistic with baleful consequences for German culture in the 20th century. The French were least pessimistic because they had no cities apart from Paris. And the Americans of the British were somewhere in the middle. And even within Britain, the high brows were more

and the middle and low brows less pessimistic. And I think that does reflect this, both of some of the class biases and also the double-sidedness that we've all been discussing. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks, Rosemary. Steiner Burge and Peter Mandler. And next week we'll be discussing gravitational waves. Thank you for listening.

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