The Local Government Act of 1888 set up popularly elected boards to run the counties and turned the cities into county boroughs. The squires and leaders of local society were at a stroke made redundant, replaced by administrators and bureaucrats who controlled everything from the police to the lunatic asylums. Thus was finally severed the link between the owners of the land and the powers of authority, even though England did not become a fully bureaucratized nation until the Local Government Act of 1894, which imposed elected local authorities for every village with over 300 inhabitants.
London had been an administrative chaos almost from the beginning of its existence, but the County Council Act, as the Local Government Act was known, ordained that it should be administered and governed by the London County Council. The ‘LCC’, as it was everywhere known, became a formidable presence in the capital, beyond the range of government departments and national policymaking. It reflected the contemporaneous taste for municipal socialism in the provision of public baths and wash-houses, parks and allotments and public libraries. It was also responsible for the swathe of ‘council houses’ and ‘council flats’ that was erected in all parts of the metropolis, and thus changed the texture of life in London for the next hundred years.
The first chairman of the LCC was a Liberal. In some respects Lord Rosebery resembled Chamberlain, although he was not himself an advocate of municipal socialism. But he was in advance of his colleagues on social matters, and was part of a new generation approaching the characteristic sentiments of the early twentieth century. He waged war against slum landlords and declared that London was ‘not a unit, but a unity’. His social radicalism was based on the principle of ‘getting things done’. He was what was known as a ‘coming man’, but no one could have known how far he would go.
The perils of the times, in an age of bewildering change, seemed infinite. To reach adulthood was itself an achievement. No one, except a few of the highly favoured, was ever completely well. It was a highly nervous age in which even the huntsmen, in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (1880), discuss
the perils from outsiders, the perils from new-fangled prejudices, the perils from more modern sports, the perils from over-cultivation, the perils from extended population, the perils from increasing railroads, the perils from literary ignorances, the perils from intruding cads, the perils from indifferent magnates … Everything is going wrong. Perhaps the same thing may be remarked in other pursuits. Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin. Trade is always bad. The Church is in danger. The House of Lords isn’t worth a dozen years purchase. The throne totters.
It is in part a satirical account of the prejudices of a narrow section of society, but it does disclose the high anxiety, the fear and trembling, that afflicted the supposedly more robust and resourceful members of the Victorian public. Wilkie Collins described ‘these days of invidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous malady’. John Morley stated: ‘all is in doubt, hesitation and shivering expectancy’. In 1888 another writer, Elizabeth Chapman, wrote of ‘a general revolt against authority in all departments of life which is the note of an unsettled, transitional, above all democratic age’. A journalist, T. H. Escott, had perceived ‘old lines of demarcation being obliterated, revered idols being destroyed’. The seismic shift, the change of society, was felt before being properly understood. Among many it provoked nervous exhaustion, tremulousness and fear.
That is why one of the defining images of the age was the railway crash. The epitome of the new world, of time and speed, of ever-increasing momentum, was also the image of death and disaster. In Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed a hare is seen running before the Great Western Railway train as it crosses the viaduct at Maidenhead. Contemporaries would have known or recalled the old proverb that to see a hare running before you portends calamity. ‘We have seen a hare. We shall have no luck.’ The steam engine itself became a metaphor. There was journalistic talk of a ‘new improved patent, steam-engine way of passing a bill through the Lords’. The new entrepreneur measured, according to John Stuart Mill, ‘the merit of all things by their tendency to increase the number of steam-engines and make human beings as good as machines’. Yet it seemed that in the game of life it was necessary to train the mind and body ‘like a steam-engine to be turned to any kind of work’. There was great admiration for the power of machines and for the people who maintained them. An early historian of the cotton trade, Alfred Wadsworth, wrote ‘that the new machinery spread quickly in England because the whole community was interested in it’. Carlyle denounced the new respect for ‘steam intellect’. The references are everywhere.
But there was another Victorian way of looking at the world. Even as George Stephenson surveyed the railway world of 1850, the power and extent of which had changed the English landscape for ever, he told friends in Newcastle: ‘as I look back upon these stupendous undertakings it seems as though we have realised the fabled power of the magician’s wand’. For many this was a world of fairy magic, of sudden transformations, of spells and enchantments; the mundane had grown marvellous. The burning down of parliament in October 1834 had been described at the time as ‘a perfect fairy scene’. When Fanny Kemble visited the newly excavated Edge Hill tunnel she felt ‘as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful’.
To recognize endless novelty and change demanded some resort to images of magic and enchantment, as if only by such means could it be understood. The lighting of the streets by gas, the building of the tunnel under the Thames, the factory machinery that could replace the work of a thousand hands, all were seen in terms of wonder. The age of electricity had become a rival to gas, too, although it was said by Arthur Young in his Travels of the 1880s that the new electrical telegraphs created ‘a universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of alarm from one end of the Kingdom to the other’. Nothing seemed very far from chaos.
In her diary for 1882 Beatrice Webb pronounced the times as exemplifying the spirit of benevolence, where ‘social questions are the vital questions of today: they take the place of religion’. Social reports and surveys now lay beside sentimental novels and sensation novels and, although most of the world passed by, some stopped to consider the ragged child or the lean and drunken mother. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) provided a less idiosyncratic account than Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published forty years earlier, when individuals, rather than classes, were the object of study. The anecdote had given way to the statistic, representing a sea change in the representation of social history. Booth surmised, for example, that 30 per cent of the London population were in poverty, of whom about a third were ‘very poor’. ‘Very poor’ in the 1880s meant one small degree above destitution. But he believed that if poverty was definable it might also be curable; he also intimated the conclusion that the government itself must incur the responsibility for removing the areas of ‘occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’, painted black, from the maps of London.
But he did not necessarily blame ‘the poor’ themselves for their condition, which had been the standard response of earlier generations. They might be ‘hard working’ and ‘struggling’ but the economic conditions of the period were fatally opposed to them. It had nothing to do with laziness or drink, but the factory gates had been closed against them. There was a growing recognition that the poor were not an original or permanent part of society, and that the conditions of many of them might be remedied. It was generally believed that the improvements of the nineteenth century, from water provision to sanitation, had in fact ameliorated the worst conditions. The poorer parts of town were known for ‘glitter and gas’, with the chop-houses, the gin shops, the cook shops and the burlesque shows together with the ballad singers, the organ grinders, the travelling bands and the stentorian tones of the costermonger.