A contrary form of political action began to emerge in England. From 1886 a number of strikes took place in London. John Burns and Tom Mann, both of the Social Democratic Federation, were intent on organizing the engineers and promoting their claims for a fixed living wage. At the beginning of February 1886, the Federation also held a meeting in Trafalgar Square to demand the provision of public works for the unemployed. The crowd in the square grew in size, and on the advice of the police they moved to Hyde Park, but Pall Mall, with its clubs and emporia, lay along its route. The temptation was too great. Windows were smashed and shops looted. Burns told the waiting crowds at Hyde Park: ‘We are not strong enough at the present moment to cope with armed forces, but when we give you the signal will you rise?’ There were loud calls of ‘Yes! Yes!’ London heard the cries. The shops were boarded up and the banks were closed. Bernard Shaw put the response in context. ‘They do not want revolution,’ he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘They want a job.’ The ‘unemployed’ and the phenomenon of ‘unemployment’ reached the public vocabulary in this period.
In the autumn of the year demonstrations and parades were banned from Trafalgar Square, which had taken over from Clerkenwell Green as the centre for radical activity. A free speech demonstration took place in the Square on 13 November which became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, with the police confronting the crowds. Skirmishes and scuffles occurred in Holborn and the Strand until the Life Guards cleared the Square; one hundred were injured and two were killed. It was the largest disruption of the period, though by continental standards it was relatively modest. In 1888 a group of radical agitators attending the annual Trades Union Congress at Bradford pressed for the foundation of an independent Labour party. In the same year Keir Hardie was instrumental in the establishment of the Scottish Labour party. There was no mention of socialism. That was considered too continental and redolent of revolution.
Nothing could be more paradoxical than the fact that the summer of 1887, when public discontent prevailed, marked the golden jubilee of Victoria. The little old lady insisted on wearing her bonnet (although garnished with jewels) as she drove in an open landau through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey. She was surrounded by her royal guards as well as seventeen princes, close relations from the Battenbergs to the Wittelsbachs, and innumerable imperial potentates. According to the Illustrated London News it was ‘the grandest State ceremony of this generation; one, indeed, practically unique in the annals of modern England’. The less she had to do, and the more remote her life became from that of her subjects, the more she was celebrated.
The empire now extended to Buckingham Palace and Balmoral, where two new Indian servants took the place of John Brown. Mahomet Buksh and Abdul Karim were soon to be given the title of munshi, or clerk and teacher. Victoria had decided to learn Hindustani.
George Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) charts the temperature of the nation at this juncture, and it records a prevailing indifference over the state of the monarchy, despite an intense love of spectacle which the jubilee provoked. Gissing’s characters are of the middle class and lower middle class living in the environs of Camberwell and Denmark Hill in south London, where the young women are sighing for higher status and more income. It is not the world of Anthony Trollope. It is the opposite. It is a world which was largely taken for granted, mild grey like its atmosphere on the borders of the great city. Gissing was a connoisseur of slovenly rooms in these suburbs. ‘The pictures were a strange medley – autotypes of some artistic value side by side with hideous oleographs framed in ponderous gilding.’ An autotype was a photographic print popular in the late nineteenth century; an oleograph was a photographic print made to resemble an oil painting. On tables and chairs:
lay scattered a multitude of papers: illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellanies, penny novelettes and the like. At the end of the week, when new numbers came in, Ada Peachey passed many hours upon her sofa, reading instalments of a dozen serial stories, paragraphs relating to fashion, sport, the theatre, answers to correspondents (wherein she especially delighted), columns of facetiae and gossip about notorious people.
The children of a similar family ‘talked of theatres and racecourses, of the “new murderer” at Tussaud’s, of police-news, of notorious spendthrifts and demireps’. A demirep was a female of dubious reputation. In a slightly more elevated household, ‘on the table lay a new volume from the circulating library – something about Evolution … Her aim, at present, was to become a graduate of London University … to prepare herself for matriculation, which she hoped to achieve in the coming winter … She talked only of the “exam”, of her chances in this or that “paper”.’
The setting for the first part of the book was the great public occasion of the year.
She’s going to the Jubilee to pick up a fancy Prince … These seats are selling for three guineas, somebody told me … Thank goodness everyone is going to see the procession or the decorations, or the illuminations, and all the rest of the nonsense … I want to go for the fun of the thing I should feel ashamed of myself if I ran to stare at Royalties, but it’s a different thing at night. It’ll be wonderful, all the traffic stopped … And you know, after all, it’s a historical event. In the year 3000 it will be ‘set’ in an examination paper, and poor wretches will get plucked because they don’t know the date … What have I to do with the Queen? Do you wish to go? Not to see Her Majesty. I care as little about her as you do … I didn’t think this kind of thing was in your way. I thought you were above it … You have heard that Nancy wants to mix with the rag-tag and bobtail tomorrow night? … Now I look at it this way. It’s to celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of Queen Victoria – yes but at the same time and far more, it’s to celebrate the completion of fifty years of Progress. National Progress without precedent in the history of mankind.
Most people had a clear sense in which the direction of events was moving. ‘Now, before the triumph of glorious Democracy … after all the people have got the upper hand nowadays.’ The phrases of the period ring through the pages of the novel. ‘Look sharp about it. Do you twig? … his temper was that ’orrible.’ A boyfriend was a ‘masher’. A fine man or woman was ‘a great swell’. ‘Oh what a silly you are. Go ahead! What’s the latest?’
Gissing reports the nature of the Jubilee from the level of the streets: ‘At Camberwell Green they mingled with a confused rush of hilarious crowds amid a clattering of cabs and omnibuses, a jingling of tram-car bells. Public houses sent forth their alcoholic odours upon the hot air.’ You can hear the voices: ‘A woman near her talked loudly about the procession, with special reference to a personage whom she called “Prince of Wiles”.’ An argument breaks out among the crowd: ‘We’re not going to let a boozing blackguard like you talk in that way about ’er Majesty.’ The characters often break into the latest music-hall song, sometimes mixed with pathos rather than with humour.
‘Ta-ta.’
26
Daddy-long-legs
The Salisbury government was held together more by Gladstone than by any other Tory grandee. As long as he pursued his dream or vision of Home Rule, and pursued it with determination, the administration would ensure that he remained locked out of office by staying in its place. That at least was the theory. Salisbury himself was still a remote figure, pessimistic or cynical according to taste, temperamentally averse to change of any kind and naturally appalled by social reform and social reformers. Yet it was his government that pushed through some legislation that seemed to Cardinal Manning to be the most radical since the 1830s.