We live, now, in a low trust society. We now expect our governments to deceive us into compliance using psychological manipulation. We assume our insurance company will be rewarding our loyalty by quietly escalating our premiums. We have no way of negotiating the cashless world without a bank account, but the banks are free to freeze our account without explanation at any time. And, of course, we take it for granted that abortions, divorces and STD will increase exponentially, that schools and universities will teach our kids perversion and political propaganda, that real wages and jobs will decline as corrupt oligarchs prosper, and that the police and courts will routinely favour critical ideology over truth and justice. And, of course, Christianity has been all but expunged from polite society. Even the organised crime and rape gangs operated by foreign actors have only come about because successive British governments were elected on mandates to cut immigration, but wilfully lied.
Older people know that things were, within living memory, different. For all the problems in the old Britain, from the Kray twins to industrial disease, we lived in a high trust society where gang-rape was virtually unknown, individual prosperity and real educational opportunities had been rising for generations, and (according to many witnesses) you could safely leave your doors unlocked in working-class neighbourhoods.
When prime ministers speak about “British values” they don’t seem to mean anything at all. But when cultural conservatives do so, they are wont to project them back on a thousand years of tradition and culture. They often lay emphasis on the progress made through the Enlightenment. But whilst that has some truth, when I looked up “Victorian morality” on Wikipedia, I found it describes a far more specific origin for the “flavour” of the society we knew and took for granted until it began to unravel in the second half of the twentieth century. According to credible sources, Britain’s high-trust, high-probity values came about only in the mid-nineteenth century:
Victorian morality was a surprising new reality. The changes in moral standards and actual behaviour across the British were profound. Historian Harold Perkin wrote:
Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.
Wikipedia goes on to cite Asa Briggs (who was incidentally a good friend of my wife’s academic cousin):
Asa Briggs emphasizes the strong reaction against the French Revolution, and the need to focus British efforts on its defeat and not be diverged by pleasurable sins. Briggs also stresses the powerful role of the evangelical movement among the Nonconformists, as well as the evangelical faction inside the established Church of England. The religious and political reformers set up organizations that monitored behaviour, and pushed for government action.
Note that this moral reformation was not a top-down imposition, like today’s DIE programs, but a percolation from a grass-roots movement throughout society:
Among the higher social classes, there was a marked decline in gambling, horse races, and obscene theatres; there was much less heavy gambling or patronage of upscale houses of prostitution. The highly visible debauchery characteristic of aristocratic England in the early 19th century simply disappeared.
Historians agree that the middle classes not only professed high personal moral standards, but actually followed them. … [N]ew research using computerized matching of data files shows that the rates of cohabitation were quite low—under 5%—for the working class and the poor. By contrast, in 21st-century Britain nearly half of all children are born outside marriage, and nine in ten newlyweds have been cohabitating.
This is all very interesting, because the Enlightenment had predominated in its influence through the eighteenth century, mainly amongst the intellectual and social elites, and it rejected not only the religious authority of Scripture (espousing Socinianism, Unitarianism, Deism, or frank atheism), but the moral framework the Bible provided. It produced Laplace, Voltaire, Byron and de Sade, and hence Wikipedia’s “aristocratic debauchery.” And it introduced Income Tax and the National Debt, of course.
If we accept Asa Briggs’s analysis, the reaction against the French Revolution was a rejection of the Enlightenment values that inspired it. And the positive “Victorian morality” arose from an Evangelicalism that was as unfashionable then as now, which achieved its success by lobbying, preaching Christ and his law, and practising what it preached. Remember that Nonconformists had been repressed severely since the Restoration – the universities and public office were closed to them. Evangelicals in the Church of England were a despised minority unlikely to gain preferment.
Yet by 1851, probably largely owing to the Methodist revival (which had, in itself, not brought about national moral reform), around half of churchgoers were Nonconformist, and much of that support came from working class people. That explains how the anti-slavery movement, the first issue mentioned in the Wikipedia article, achieved such political success against the opposition of wealthy slave-owners. Wilberforce’s people laboured long and hard in the political arena, but even his well-to-do supporters were outnumbered by many thousands of working people who knew something about powerlessness. As one example, from my own rural Baptist church proceedings book, on 4th November 1833, after the Abolition Act was passed:
Our Monthly Missionary prayer meeting was blended with thanksgiving to Almighty God for his Gracious interposition on behalf of the poor enslaved negros in our west india Collinyes
The scope of this moral revival was immense. Wikipedia mentions, as well as the rather significant abolition of slavery: animal welfare (including anti-vivisection laws); reform of child labour; sexual mores on marital fidelity and homosexuality; attempts to regulate prostitution on the basis of public morality, public health, and the protection of socially disadvantaged women; the organisation of police forces; and penal reform.
But we could also add education, initially via Sunday Schools, then taken up by government, improved housing standards in cities, clean water, drains and lights (the greatest contributors to improved health), opposition to the ravages of drug-culture (ie the Temperance Movement*) and honest financial and business ethics. It is not insignificant that “An Englishman’s word is his bond” comes from the nineteenth century, rather than before. It still made much sense when I was growing up – but not now.
History is, of course, always more complex than historiography’s explanations. Clearly not all opponents of slavery, or supporters of biblical morality, were Evangelicals. And certainly once probity began to be the norm, social conformity (now termed “cultural Christianity”) affected the whole nation, not to mention its Empire, which was no bad thing. That explains, of course, much of “Victorian hypocrisy,” for apart from the human sin of the best people, even the wicked wish to be seen as decent – “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” (François La Rochefoucauld).
In business, many of the most benevolent magnates were Quakers – Nonconformist but not Evangelical – and no doubt many were Anglo-Catholics, Free-thinkers, Socialist atheists, and so on. Some, of course, had the public eye as their main motivation:
Victorian era movements for justice, freedom, and other strong moral values made greed, and exploitation into public evils. The writings of Charles Dickens, in particular, observed and recorded these conditions. Peter Shapely examined 100 charity leaders in Victorian Manchester. They brought significant cultural capital, such as wealth, education and social standing. Besides the actual reforms for the city they achieved for themselves a form of symbolic capital, a legitimate form of social domination and civic leadership.
Dickens, of course, was himself a severe critic of what he saw as Evangelical hypocrisy, as well as commercial rapacity, the first exemplified by the dreadful Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House and, of course, by Mr Bumble the beadle of the workhouse in Oliver Twist. Although one should bear in mind that even now non-believers are not exactly unbiased in their assessment of biblical faith, his work reminds us that not all that was attempted was entirely beneficial. In the Wikipedia piece there is an ironic quote from Harold Perkin:
[The transformation]… turned Sunday into a day of prayer for some and mortification for all.
I won’t be the only one to remember the English Sunday: hymn-singing round the piano in my Methodist Grannie’s otherwise unused front-room and scratchy suits. But is compulsory Sunday working, and children unable to attend church because of sports, necessarily much improvement?
The unforeseen problems from trying to eliminate prostitution, the bowdlerisation of literature (not unlike today’s woke censorship), the evils of the workhouse in trying to “nudge” the indolent back into work, or various experimental and inhumane “rehabilitation” regimes in prisons are inextricably linked to the idea of “Victorian Values” today. But society is always a work in progress, and what the Victorians had to deal with was the fallout from the Industrial Revolution, which had produced – besides enormous benefits – crowded and insanitary cities full of poverty, disease, and lack of spiritual provision.
Like science, unplanned consequences of bad policies can be, and are, corrected. What led to progress was the underlying morality which, according to Wikipedia was primarily the achievement of socially inferior Evangelicals working peacefully for change. Wikipedia, not surprisingly, underemphasises the truth that what powered that Evangelical fervour was not moralism as such, but commitment to Christ and his Kingdom.
My great-great uncle and aunt, confectioners in Greenwich, sold the family jewellery to build a chapel, which is still there but now a trendy dwelling. My paternal ancestors were black-country Irish iron-workers, but kept a family Bible to record the marriages and infant deaths – and presumably to read. My old Cambridge (Baptist) landlady showed me her own Victorian family KJV Bible, under whose title page “Appointed to be Read in Churches” an ancestral pen had inscribed “and in the home!” A majority of the best English hymnody comes from the Victorian era.
What I have not really explained here is what, exactly, produced such a revolutionary and long lasting change in the nation, since even John Wesley’s revival had not, at the time. I’m going to re-read Elliott-Binns Religion in the Victorian Era, which I obtained for my theology studies a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps that will give some clues, as I have no doubt we desperately need some similar movement today.
However, my suspicion is that nothing earth-shattering will emerge from that, and that the real reason is that the Evangelical Christians prayed, in the Spirit, for revival, and that God answered. That, perhaps, is the take-home lesson.
