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First Lecture: Empire, Modernization, Progress and Dickens’s Humorous Critique

in Bleak House
The Victorian Age, named after the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) – is the
age of the British Empire, a significant national age for Britain, which had become The
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1801. 1Geopolitically speaking,
the British Empire came to be in control of 1/3 of the world during the 19th century – with
possessions on all the continents (Australia and New Zealand, several Islands in the
Pacific West Indies, India , also called the Subcontinent; India which had begun as a
colony of the merchants from the East India Company, was turned into a Crown
possession in 1877, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India so as to curb
generalized corruption in the West India Company, which had led to the Indian Mutiny of
1857 ; in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria to the North and South Africa at the southern tip of
the continent, completely British and defeated after the Boer Wars of the century’s last
decades.2
Four keywords can be used to begin the economic, political and sociological description
of Britain in the nineteenth century: wealth, capitalism, democracy and socialism.
Wealth was produced thanks to the scientific and technological advances, which enabled
Victorian man to control nature and increase the living standard of the rich, in accordance
with the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Capitalism, the economy based on capital, rested on the accumulation of wealth as a sure
path to progress. It was made possible by the massive scientific and technological
advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Zirra, Contributions of the British
Nineteenth Century – the Victorian Age – to the History of Literature and Ideas, vol. I,
9,10) and by the liberalization of trade which boosted Britain’s already huge imperial
market .
The main issues of nineteenth century politics were the need to strengthen the free
market, to enfranchise the men of property, and turn them into mature, responsible
citizens with equal rights and powers – moreover, by granting them the power to
consume an increasing variety of goods.
Victorian middle-class democracy was modern because, by comparison to Athenian
democracy, it was aimed at creating a perfect middle-class establishment whose strength
would be increased by numbers. The first electoral reform, the Reform Bill3 of 1832

1 Great Britain was created in 1707 after the union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland (though

the merging of the English with the Scottish Royal House had happened one century earlier, after the
death of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, who had no heir, because she remained unmarried).

2 On the North American continent, Canada was granted autonomy (it achieved dominion status) in the

1830s, which meant it did not severe the links with the British Empire completely.

3 Because a law is just a Bill while it is discussed in the British parliament and before it receives the Royal

assent to become a statute, the name ‘the Reform Bill’ as retained by history indicates the serious
debates preceding its adoption. This revolutionary measure turned the democratic masquerade practices
and traditional political favoritism towards the modern, genuine political representation of wide masses
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enfranchised male owners of property whose annual income was at least 10 pounds, the
next one, of 1867, doubled the number of middle-class voters and the third, in 1884,
secured the universal male enfranchisement.
Though modern democracy incorporated some of the revolutionary principles for which
people had died in America and France in 1777 and 1789, respectively, in Britain4, it was
actually carried out in peaceful confrontation, and in fact in cooperation, by the two
political parties of the nineteenth century: the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party.
(The following paragraphs reformulate the material available in Zirra, vol. 1,10-
12)Between the two of them, they carried out the reforms which brought about the
modernization of Britain: the electoral and free-market reforms, firstly, and then
generally social, religious , urban and cultural reforms, for example the reforms in
education.
Reforms:
In 1846, a law that put an end to the British monopoly on the corn market was the repeal
of the Corn Laws and by 1860, a full-fledged free market had become operative in
Britain. Other reforms that modernized British society and made it resemble nowadays’
society were the Catholic Emancipation (which became effective after 1830), which gave
the Catholics equal opportunities, civil rights and access to the middle-class professions
(of lawyers, doctors, professors), the 1870 Education Act, which generalized literacy by
making primary education compulsory and setting up English State Schools all over the
Empire, the 1871 Repeal of the Test Acts. The last of these reforms gave free access to
prestigious universities ( Cambridge and Oxford) to non-Anglicans and opened their way
to elite careers in the establishment.
Cultural campaigns:
The cultural campaigns conducted in the Victorian age, which we can read about at large
in the essays and fictional literature preserved in anthologies, indicate that culture was
regarded as one of the important levers for social emancipation and control. This leads to
the paradox that the Victorian first mass age had a high-culture. It can be stated without
exaggerating that the Victorian society was held together by quality press circulated in
broadsheets: one magazine which carried parliamentary reports, essays, poems and
fiction, for example, was read by one hundred thousand people, and one issue, by the
family and servants of the person who bought it and by friends, neighbours and relatives.
Indeed, apart from the gentry, after the Education Act, even the servants in the genteel

of middle-class people. This meant the abolition of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’, for example – fake
constituencies that sent to parliament representatives of places on the map with no real population to
represent.

4 ‘England’ is an incorrect way of referring to Britain, in the nineteenth century, just as today: the
country’s name is the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in the nineteenth century, and
of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. The citizens are formally ‘the British’/’the
British people’, and informally, the Brits. The contrast between ‘British’ and ‘English’ comes from that
between politics and linguistics/literary culture, ‘British’ being politically correct, because it naturally
includes the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Wales and Scotland and Ireland. People study English in
Britain and abroad, in (high)school or when they are at university.
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households had access to the literature read at home. In the Victorian genteel households
literature was originally read on Sundays, after Church, as another instrument for the
generally moral education and entertainment.
In general, it is fair to say that the British Liberals were keener on home reforms, as they
were partisans of the little England policy. At their head was William Ewart Gladstone,
four times Prime Minister (between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3). One famous
example of the Liberal foreign policy was the campaign for putting an end to the Union
between Ireland and Great Britain through the Irish Home Rule bills unsuccessfully
passed (debated) in 1886 and 1893, owing to the alliance between William Ewart
Gladstone, nicknamed ‘The Old Man’, and the Irish uncrowned king, Charles Stuart
Parnell. The Conservative Party was imperially minded, the partisan of the Bigger
England policy, of wars and the investment policies implicit in them. The head of the
Conservative Party was Benjamin Disraeli,5 in office as Prime Minister for one year in
1868 and between 1874-1880. He was also Queen Victoria’s friend, an elegant dandy and
a writer. In his 1845 novel Sybil, or the two Nations (available on the portal of the Project
Gutenberg on the net, in electronic form for anyone who may wish to read it), he
introduced the idea that the rich and the poor were two separate British nations.
This point is proved by the last keyword announced at the beginning of the lecture:
socialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the lower classes were almost completely
neglected by the leaders of the Victorian establishment and the non-interventionist state6.
Among the few reforms which regarded the poor in Early Victorianism was the1834 Poor
Law Amendment, which created the workhouses, which resembled prisons more than
asylums and in which were gathered (confined) the begging, underfed and overworked
poor from the streets. The Factory Acts passed between 1833 and 1878, though,
eliminated child labour and gross overworking. Moreover, there was no chance for
substantially extending any modernization reforms to the people who were not
represented in parliament as proved by the Chartist Movement. Between 1836 and 1854,
several petitions or Charts were drafted in perfect ignorance of the legal forms with
which Parliament operated. Although they were endorsed by millions of signatures of
people who gathered in long street-demonstrations (the 1840 Chart, for example was
signed by over three million three hundred people), they were not taken into
consideration by parliament because of their formal aspect and the civil rights claimed in
them were not granted. The first general strike took place in Britain in 1842 and Trade
Unionism became a steady movement between the 1860s and 1870s. No wonder, then,
that the end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of two brands of socialism: radical or
utopian socialism (which envisaged the complete abolition of property as a source of
justice for a perfect modern age and as the only way for regenerating a society that
reduced its people to mere mechanisms at the mercy of entrepreneurs) and Fabian (or
moderate) socialism. The rise of socialism proved the limitations and actual injustice of

5 The fact that Disraeli, who was a dandy and a writer, in addition to being a great politician and a Jew,

demonstrates how complex a modern leader of a really advanced country can and should be.

6 The non-interventionist state was a state committed to the principle of laissez-faire which bequeathed

the political prerogative of the state to the entrepreneurial class (the capitalists) and allowed the invisible
hand of the market, i.e., free competition, to rule undisturbed.
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modern, capitalistic and very partial democracy. It demonstrated that the material criteria
for the general, average “greatest happiness of the greatest numbers” (as advocated by
Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century) needed to be completed with
virtues that the mercantile, capitalist world-order could not rise to. The failure of
communism to right the wrongs of capitalism one century after the Victorian age,
however, demonstrates the shortcomings of any modern utopia, be it capitalist or
socialist. This is why the slow-pace, rational reformism which the Fabian socialists
advocated and tried to implement in Britain seems to have more chances of success in
principle because, though being moderate , pragmatic and corporatist in spirit, it does not
destroy existing structures of social, economic and political life but tries to correct evils
gradually while retaining the overall frames.

It is important to understand why the Victorian age was also one of contrasts and
paradoxes.
The limitation of access to modernization and democracy to the middle classes 7explains
the appearance of socialism in the most advanced modern nation in the nineteenth
century.
Though modern Britain became secularized in the nineteenth century (as France had done
in the previous century) – as a result of the advancement of natural science, whose
progress secured man’s control over nature – Victorians were, as Thomas Carlyle put
things, devoid of faith but terrified of their own irreligiousness. Irreligious people were
convinced that Darwin was right in writing about the origin of species and natural
selection of the fittest, but when it came to the descent of man (from apes), according to
the evolutionist theory, people were terrified to realized their marginal position in the
natural world (if man was no longer created as a divine being, in God’s own likeness, but
was the result of the evolution of species from inferior to complex organisms, then there
was no room for soul and spirit). The spread, in the 1870s, of agnosticism (indifference
to theological matters since they could not be proved as scientific facts were,
increasingly) also contributed to man’s sense of self-alienation in the universe as a whole.
To this should be added the fact that there was no consensus about democracy in the
Victorian age, which should be seen as a troubled and self-divided, rather than perfect, as
was claimed by the Whig/imperialist understanding of history. However, the
controversies over democracy and education which will be studied will help students
grasp the complexities of the modern civilization whose possibly decadent phase we are
traversing in the twentieth century. It will be possible to understand, for example, the
roots and damaging effects of populism as a malady of democracy which is threatening
Europe and America at present (and one thinks of the co-ocurring Brexit and results of
the latest American elections)

Bleak House chapter IV: Telescopic philanthropy - the bleak vision on Empire

7 The middle classes included not only the upper tier, represented by entrepreneurs, who were directly

connected to the growth of wealth and capital, but also the members of the professions, lawyers, doctors,
teachers and the lower white collar clerks connected with the branches of trade and with the professions.
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Notice the grotesquely domestic feminization of the Bigger England imperial

preoccupations which were part of the (politically) masculine conservative paradigm

Chapter IV Telescopic Philantropy

"In-deed! Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire
and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby's
biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes
herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety
of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else
attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general
cultivation of the coffee berry—AND the natives—and the happy
settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home
population.
(…)

There was a confused little crowd of people, principally children, gathered

about the house at which we stopped, which had a tarnished brass plate on
the door with the inscription JELLYBY.
"Don't be frightened!" said Mr. Guppy, looking in at the coach-window.
"One of the young Jellybys been and got his head through the area railings!"
"Oh, poor child," said I; "let me out, if you please!"
"Pray be careful of yourself, miss. The young Jellybys are always up to
something," said Mr. Guppy.
I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little
unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and crying
loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a
beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him
back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible
by those means. As I found (after pacifying him) that he was a little boy with
a naturally large head, I thought that perhaps where his head could go, his
body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be
to push him forward.
(…)
Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could
not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its
passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted
seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity.
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She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with
handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long
way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer
than Africa!
"I am very glad indeed," said Mrs. Jellyby in an agreeable voice, "to have
the pleasure of receiving you. I have a great respect for Mr. Jarndyce, and no
one in whom he is interested can be an object of indifference to me."
We expressed our acknowledgments and sat down behind the door, where
there was a lame invalid of a sofa. Mrs. Jellyby had very good hair but was
too much occupied with her African duties to brush it.
The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great
writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very
untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that with our sense
of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed the poor child
who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the back kitchen, where somebody
seemed to stifle him.
But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking though by
no means plain girl at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen
and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink. And from
her tumbled hair to her pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and
broken satin slippers trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no
article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper
condition or its right place.

"You find me, my dears," said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great office
candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow
(the fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle
of wood, and a poker), "you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that
you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It
involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private
individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am
happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a
hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and
educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger."
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