In those far off days when her power was at its zenith, Margaret Thatcher delighted in celebrating what she called Victorian values: the qualities of thrift, independence, sobriety, entrepreneurship and self-reliance which she claimed she had learned at her father's knee at his corner shop in Grantham; which she believed had made Britain pre-eminent during the 19th century; and which she was certain would make the country great again under her own formidable leadership. As Lytton Strachey had observed before Thatcher had been born, this was a selective catalogue of Victorian conventional wisdoms: it failed to recognise the complexities of 19th century society, and it took no account of the accidental advantages which the UK then enjoyed relative to other nations. The rediscovery of Victorian values in the 1980s was intended to bring about a national rebirth, but the British public proved reluctant to embrace once more the unbending doctrines of Samuel Smiles and Mr Gladstone.
With the fall of Thatcher and the arrival of John Major in 1990, these Victorian values went back into hibernation in the UK. They are sometimes debated by historians, but they are no longer espoused by most front-ranking Conservative politicians. Neither the past nor the future figure as prominently in the present prime minister's vision of things, as shown by his ill-judged "back to basics" campaign. To be sure, Major's idealised picture of England-of a nation at ease with itself, with warm beer in the pubs, cricket on the village green and ladies bicycling to holy communion-might plausibly be derived from the late Victorian era. But it is more likely that his notion of Englishness is an amalgam of Stanley Baldwin's emollient rhetoric of rural decency, George Orwell's wartime celebration of national consensus and Agatha Christie's depiction of cosy English villages in the early 1950s. While Thatcher's vision was certain and heroic, Major's (as befits his less messianic personality) is merely vague.
But while Victorian values have vanished from the political agenda in the UK-except among those Thatcher ideologues who follow Michael Portillo or John Redwood-they have unexpectedly re-appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, where they have been eagerly embraced by fundamentalist Republicans determined to roll back the state and to reinvigorate the US in the same way that Thatcher sought to reinvigorate the UK. Here is Newt Gingrich, addressing the National League of Cities: "Queen Victoria's emphasis on morals changed the whole momentum of British society. They didn't do it through a new bureaucracy. They did it by re-establishing values, by moral leadership, and by being willing to look at people in the face and say: 'You should be ashamed when you get drunk in public; you ought to be ashamed if you're a drug addict.'"
This recent American version of modern British history is suspect in at least two ways. In the first place, it gets many of the facts wrong. There was a new bureaucracy established in the 1830s and 1840s, which successfully and expensively extended the reach of the Victorian state: factory inspectors, health inspectors, school inspectors, the police force, local government officials. And such quintessential Victorian statesmen as Lord Palmerston (who fathered several illegitimate children and was cited as co-respondent in a divorce case at the age of 80) and Benjamin Disraeli (who took drugs and prided himself in being unrespectable) hardly provided the nation with moral leadership. In the second place, the very idea of Victorianism resonates far less powerfully in the 20th century US than in the 20th century UK. While for the UK, the 19th century was an era of unchallenged supremacy from which it has since declined, the US's rise to global greatness had scarcely then begun.
Although she knew little in detail about it, Thatcher was right in believing that the Victorian era could be presented to a glory-starved British audience as a golden age of domestic peace and international pre-eminence: which is why, for all its superficialities, "Victorian values" became such a popular phrase. Gingrich has faced a much harder task in making the same slogan take wing in the anxious US of the late 1990s. Or, rather, he has only been able to get it airborne by using it as a proxy for something else which is both historically and geographically much closer to home. For Thatcher and her acolytes, "Victorian values" really did mean their 19th century. For Gingrich and his colleagues, by contrast, it actually means their 1950s: that golden era in the history of the US when (as they see it) Uncle Sam was the unrivalled policeman of the world; when un-American enemies were easy to identify both abroad and at home; when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and Richard Nixon was vice-president; when neither civil rights nor affirmative action had yet even been thought of; when women were virgins on their wedding night and stay-at-home mothers thereafter, and when sons ate cherry pie and daughters wore gingham dresses and bobby socks. For all their talk of Victorian values, it is the US of the "Pax Americana," rather than the United Kingdom of the "Pax Britannica," which the Republican right today most ardently wants to see restored.
This has not deterred Gertrude Himmelfarb from producing an impassioned polemic, The De-Moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1995), in which she seems to think she is providing historical validation for the view that 19th century UK offers the best model for that renewal of late 20th century US which she hopes Gingrich and the Republicans will undertake. For Victorian England was, she insists, a society in which those virtues subsequently celebrated by Thatcher were widely recognised and generally accepted. Thanks to the Bible, 19th century Britons knew what was right and what was wrong: these beliefs were not imposed on one class by another, but pervaded society at all levels. Whatever the shortcomings of their individual behaviour, Victorians believed in respectability, self-reliance and self-help: in thrift, hard work, cleanliness, discipline, philanthropy and orderliness. And if they failed to live up to this exacting moral code, they were likely to suffer private anguish or public censure-as, in their different ways, did George Eliot, William Gladstone, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.
As a direct result of this powerful and essentially self-regulating morality, Victorian England became the most civilised, successful and stable society of the age: crime fell, violence diminished, drunkenness was reduced, illegitimacy rates went down. All males, of whatever social background, could aspire to become gentlemen-provided they were honest, generous, polite and courageous. The family and the home were repositories of both private and public virtues. Marriage was for life and women accepted the powers and the responsibilities of their domestic position. The New Poor Law of 1834 ensured that the sick and the aged were still appropriately supported, while able-bodied paupers were put in the workhouse but encouraged to look for employment. Thereafter poverty diminished because individual charitable giving became so high. The Victorians, Himmelfarb insists, were concerned and dutiful philanthropists: witness Toynbee Hall, the Charity Organisation Society and Charles Booth's survey of life and labour in London in the 1880s.
Since then, the author maintains, things have gone inexorably downhill, as this virtuous civilisation has been replaced by our increasingly de-moralised society. As a result of the permissive legislation of the 1960s, crime, divorce and illegitimacy rates have risen exponentially, both in the UK and the US. To these alarming trends must be added the accumulating evidence of welfare dependency, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, illiteracy and homelessness. To make matters worse, Himmelfarb contends that, for a long time, "social critics and policy makers have found it hard to face up to the realities of our moral condition, in spite of the statistical evidence." In our "non-judgmental," politically correct world, where there is no longer any such thing as right or wrong, and where accusations of racism, sexism and elitism are so easily made and difficult to refute, such anti-social behaviour is more likely to be empathised with rather than condemned. The result is our narcissistic, solipsistic, relativistic universe.
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By so linking 19th century UK and 20th century US, in such an arresting and apocalyptic account, Himmelfarb has produced an historical polemic which has been avidly acclaimed by rightwingers on both sides of the Atlantic. It has received ecstatic reviews in such conservative American journals as Commentary; and in To Renew America, Newt Gingrich gave it the ultimate accolade by hailing it as a "great book." For many of those in the UK and the US who think that their nations have gone to the dogs and that things were much better in the past, this book seems to offer substantial scholarly support. But not everyone has been so impressed. On the one hand, such historians as Stefan Collini, Deborah Epstein Nord and Fritz Stern have complained that Himmelfarb has seriously misrepresented Victorian England, and has failed to do justice to the darker side of 19th-century life: the poverty, the inequality, the greed, the hypocrisy, the snobbery, the misery, the intolerance. On the other hand, Anthony Gottlieb and John Gray have argued that she is no less mistaken when writing about our own times. The statistics which Himmelfarb claims prove complete moral degeneration need careful interpreting. There is ample evidence of strong, rather than "non judgmental," feelings about many contemporary moral issues. And most people today, just like their Victorian forbears, still believe in marriage and family life, condemn drugs, crime and violence, and prefer to work than to be unemployed.
There is actually much in the book which supports an alternative, less roseate interpretation of 19th century UK. "I am," Himmelfarb admits, "painfully aware of the difficulties and iniquities of Victorian life." There was, she concedes, "a fair amount" of hypocrisy "in Victorian times." There is, she recognises, "a good deal of truth" in the widespread idea that Victorian women were "lowly creatures, capable of little more than menial tasks in the kitchen and dutiful submission in bed." The New Poor Law was devised by people who were "excessively rationalistic, utilitarian, single-minded," and judged by today's standards, it was indeed "grudging and harsh." Among philanthropists, there were "self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-satisfied individuals." In short, there were enough unpleasant things going on in 19th century England "to give pause to the most ardent Victoriaphile": "social and sexual discrimination, class rigidities and political inequalities, autocratic men, submissive women and overly disciplined children, constraints, restrictions and abuses of all kinds." Thus described, Himmelfarb's version of Victorian England hardly corresponds to the moral Utopia of Thatcher or Gingrich.
But it is not just that 19th century England was in truth a Janus-faced civilisation, witnessing both the "good old" and the "bad old" days. It is also that the Victorian state played a far greater role than today's anti-government free marketeers would find palatable. As Himmelfarb reluctantly admits, parliament had never been busier, passing legislation concerning conditions of work, health, education, housing, sanitation and transport, while local authorities assumed responsibility for water supply, sewage, public baths, street lighting, libraries and parks. And this legislation also provided the essential moral framework within which ordinary Victorians lived out their lives. "Victorian values," such as they were, were not invented in a vacuum: they were the product of a specific political culture which was increasingly interventionist. Consider these words of Joseph Chamberlain, self-made industrialist, radical mayor of Birmingham, and colonial secretary under the Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury: "Private charity is powerless, religious organisations can do nothing, to remedy the evils which are so deep-seated in our system... I venture to say that it is only the community acting as a whole that can possibly deal with evils so deep seated as those to which I have referred." To be sure, this was not the only opinion on offer at the time. But in any account of Victorian England, the attempts to curb the excesses of unbridled capitalism by state intervention deserve more explicit discussion than Himmelfarb gives them here.
It is not easy to summarise the values of a Victorian UK, and it is even more difficult to make direct connections with the 19th century US, something which the book's polemical purposes crucially require. "'Victorian America,'" Himmelfarb rather breezily informs us, "was not at all different, at least in terms of values, from Victorian England." But this is an exceptionally tendentious remark. The two countries had a common language and, up to 1776, a common history, but thereafter they rapidly diverged. The UK was an insular and imperial power, with a strong state, an established church, and a monarchy and aristocracy. The US was a continental land mass, with a federal constitution, which went through a civil war. The values of self-help, sturdy independence and moral decency which evolved in both countries were far more deferentially articulated in England than in the US. As Frederick Jackson Turner pointed out towards the end of the 19th century, the US was becoming more and more exceptional, and one of the ways in which this was so was that its prevailing values were forged by and on a frontier which no European nation possessed. Turner did not get it completely right. But in seeking to understand the differences between American values and those of the old world, he was on to something important. And he was surely correct in thinking they mattered more than the similarities.
Moving the the argument forward to the 20th century, Himmelfarb's difficulties further increase. The years from 1900 to 1945 are virtually ignored, and it is not clear how developments during this era fit in to her interpretation. It is far from helpful for the case she wants to make that Roosevelt's New Deal and Attlee's welfare state, the two most outstanding examples of interventionist government which are now so derided by the new right, were created by men born and brought up in the 19th century. The fact that conservatives have occupied both the White House and 10 Downing Street for most of the time since 1945-the very period which is deemed to have witnessed the greatest moral decay-is also highly inconvenient. And in any case, since the second world war, the UK and the US have become-and are still becoming-even less alike. In their constitutional structure, political culture, economic resources, ethnic diversity and world standing, they now have very little in common. Significantly, it is only on the right that the "special relationship" still survives. Put another way, this means that compared with John Major's UK, Bill Clinton's US is a much more violent nation, and also a much more religious one. Pace Himmelfarb, these two societies are not in the same state of moral degeneracy today, any more than they have fallen from the same state of moral grace a hundred years ago.
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As she reaches the end of her polemic, the author finds it difficult to conceal from herself that her arguments have led nowhere. "The past," she concludes (and in so doing she differs from both Thatcher and Gingrich) "cannot-and should not-be replicated": we cannot "revive Victorianism." Amen to that. "The ethos of a society," she goes on, "cannot be reduced to economic, material, political or other factors." Quite so: but so what? What is needed, she insists, is "a thorough-going re-moralisation of society." But since her account has failed to provide any convincing explanation of the complex process whereby the Victorians contested, developed and changed the values of their society, it is hardly surprising that Himmelfarb can offer no guide as to how we should set about changing our values.
The interest of this mistaken exercise in sound-bite scholarship thus derives neither from its intellectual cogency nor from its prescriptive plausibility. But it is a useful place to find out about the mind-set of today's Anglo-American conservative chic. Like them, the book is stridently apocalyptic in tone, celebrating the past, worrying over the present, fearful about the future. Like them, it is deeply hostile to the interventionist welfare state and to "the evil it has done." Like them, it is contemptuous of "liberals," and of the terrible changes they made during the 1960s. Its history may be marginally better than Gingrich's (and Thatcher's), but in its own way, it is as suspicious, alarmist, overheated, embattled, messianic, and full of righteous indignation as they are. In short, it exhibits many of the hallmarks of what Richard Hofstatder once described as "the paranoid style"-a style which has long been the special preserve of the American right, and which has recently, under Thatcher, been most effectively taken up by the British right as well.
Of course, it is easy to see why the paranoid style is so appealing to the Anglo-American new right at this time. Notwithstanding victory in the cold war, the UK's decline continues apace, and the US is not the power to be reckoned with that it once was. Communism has been defeated, so there is no longer an external foe to fear or to blame, which means that the only other place to look is under the beds back home. Hence the onslaught unleashed by the new right in both countries against liberals, intellectuals, feminists, unmarried mothers, cultural elites, chronically dependent underclasses, and anyone else who dares to disagree with it or threaten it. Hence its constant demonisation of the state, as its enemies' all-powerful, over-mighty, morally-corrupting, fiscally-irresponsible instrument of domestic subversion. Yet-as befits the practitioners of the paranoid style-there is more fantasy than fact in this formulation. For it is arguable that the real problem in the US today is not that the state is too powerful but that the state is too weak: too weak to implement necessary gun control laws; too weak to provide adequate healthcare; too weak to raise taxes to pay for essential public services; too weak to regulate Hollywood films, domestic television and the multi-national media. Contrary to Thatcher, contrary to Gingrich, and contrary to Himmelfarb, the Victorian value that most urgently needs proclaiming today is not that of incorrigible hostility to intrusive government, but the belief in the moral potential and the regenerative power of the state. Is there anyone left, on either side of the Atlantic, who is prepared to stand up and say so?
The de-moralisation of society
Gertrude Himmelfarb
