Dickens's England (39 page)

More successful was the policy of colonisation, as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; here, as elsewhere, the British government was keen to devolve governmental responsibilities and expenses – it was never clear that empire was particularly successful financially, defence and administration costs falling not far short of trading profits. While some, such as John Seeley, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, looked forward to a grouping of Anglophone countries bonded with Britain in a ‘United States of Greater Britain', the idea of Empire became increasingly popular, and in 1876 Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. The map of the world was splashed with red.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

A.E. Housman, ‘1887' (1896)

* * *

ABSENCE OF MIND

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of thinking; nor have we even now ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe. [Historians] do not perceive that . . . the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia.

John Seeley,
The Expansion of England
(1883)

HALF DEVIL AND HALF CHILD

Those who know Ireland best will, we believe, without exception, be found to be also those who feel most tenderly for her people, while they admit that in Celtic veins there runs, along with the largest share of the milk of human kindness, a drop of intensest gall, having no appreciable parallel in the Saxon constitution; a drop which in evil hours seems to turn the whole nature into bitterness. Doubtless, a larger philosophy of human character, a better acquaintance with the different families of earth, will in some way explain how it is that the most loving are thus oftentimes transformed into the most ferocious. We shall learn to accept it as a law, that true tenderness is the correlative only of strength, and where there is much softness, mildness, easily-excited emotion, and general
malleability
of character, there also will surely be latent the complementary colours of possible treachery and ferocity, and of that worst cruelty which comes of fear. The ‘mild Hindu' proved himself the inheritor of all the feline qualities amid the horrors of the Mutiny; the Negro has shown that his cruelty can reach
almost
that of the Southern planters, who so often, in cold blood, burned and scourged to death his brethren of Georgia and the Carolinas. He can be treacherous and ferocious for his brief hour of frenzy beyond, perhaps, what a Saxon well may be. What lesson, then, are we to learn from this fact of human nature? Surely not that Celt, or Hindu, or Negro, are irreclaimable human beings, never to be given the rights of civilised men, but simply that, like children of mingled virtues and faults, they must be treated with a view to
their
characters, and not to the characters of far other races; and that, in all our dealings with them, we must bear in mind the law that, in proportion as they are habitually mild, warm-hearted, docile, religious, in that proportion also we must expect to find in them a predisposition towards occasional outbursts of insane violence, fanaticism and treachery.

Frances Power Cobbe,
Hours of Work and Play
(1867)

IRELAND

I: BEFORE THE POTATO FAMINE

An Irish cabin, in general, is like a little antediluvian ark; for husband, wife and children, cow and calf, pigs, poultry, dog and frequently cat, repose under the same roof in perfect amity. A whimsical calculation sometime since ascertained that in eighty-seven cabins there were one hundred and twenty full-grown pigs, and forty-seven dogs. The rent of cabin and potato plot in the county of Wicklow and neighbourhood is from one to two guineas; the family live upon potatoes and buttermilk six days in the week, and instead of ‘an added pudding', the Sabbath is generally celebrated by bacon and greens. . . .

Upon an average, a man, his wife and four children will eat thirty-seven pounds of potatoes a day. A whimsical anecdote is related of an Irish potato. An Englishman, seeing a number of fine florid children in a cabin, said to the father, ‘How do your countrymen contrive to have so many fine children?' ‘
By Jasus it is the potato, Sir,'
said he. . . .

Three pounds of good mealy potatoes are more than equivalent to one pound of bread. It is worthy of remark to those who live well, without reflecting upon the condition of others to whom Providence has been less bountiful, that one individual who subsists upon meat and bread consumes what would maintain five persons who live on bread alone, and twelve who subsist upon potatoes.

John Carr,
The Stranger in Ireland; or, a Tour in . . . 1805
(1806)

II: THE BLIGHT

On August 6, 1846 – I shall not readily forget the day – I rode up as usual to my mountain property, and my feelings may be imagined when, before I saw the crop, I smelt the fearful stench, now so well known and recognised as the death-sign of each field of potatoes . . . the luxuriant stalks soon withered, the leaves decayed, the disease extended to the tubers, and the stench from the rotting of such an immense amount of rich vegetable matter became almost intolerable. . . .

But my own losses and disappointments, deeply as I felt them, were soon merged in the general desolation, misery and starvation which now rapidly affected the poorer classes around me and throughout Ireland. It is true that in the more cultivated districts of the Queen's County [Laois] and the midland counties generally, not many deaths occurred from actual starvation. I mean, that people were not found dead on the roads or in the fields from sudden deprivation of food; but they sank gradually from impure and insufficient diet; and fever, dysentery, the crowding in the workhouse or hardship on the relief works, carried thousands to a premature grave. The crop of all crops, on which they depended for food, had suddenly melted away, and no adequate arrangements had been made to meet this calamity – the extent of which was so sudden and so terrible that no one had appreciated it in time – and thus thousands perished almost without an effort to save themselves.

W.S. Trench,
Realities of Irish Life
(1868)

III: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CHARITY

At the gate, just as Herbert was about to remount his horse, they were encountered by a sight which for years past has not been uncommon in the south of Ireland, but which had become frightfully common during the last two or three months. A woman was standing there, of whom you could hardly say that she was clothed, though she was involved in a mass of rags which covered her nakedness. Her head was all uncovered, and her wild black hair was streaming round her face. Behind her back hung two children enveloped among the rags in some mysterious way; and round her on the road stood three others, of whom the two younger were almost absolutely naked. The eldest of the five was not above seven. They all had the same wild black eyes, and wild elfish straggling locks; but neither the mother nor the children were comely. She was short and broad in the shoulders, though wretchedly thin; her bare legs seemed to be of nearly the same thickness up to the knee, and the naked limbs of the children were like yellow sticks. . . .

‘An' the holy Virgin guide an' save you, my lady,' said the woman, almost frightening Clara by the sudden way in which she came forward, ‘an' you too, Misther Herbert; and for the love of heaven do something for a poor crathur whose five starving childher have not had wholesome food within their lips for the last week past.' . . .

But Herbert had learned deep lessons of political economy, and was by no means disposed to give promiscuous charity on the road-side. . . . ‘But you know that we will not give you money. They will take you in at the poorhouse at Kanturk.'

‘Is it the poorhouse, yer honour?'

‘Or, if you get a ticket from your priest they will give you meal twice a week at Clady. You know that. Why do you not go to Father Connellan?'

‘Is it the mail? An' shure an' haven't I had it, the last month past, nothin' else; nor a taste of a praty or a dhrop of milk for nigh a month, and now look at the childher. Look at them, my lady. They are dying by the road-side.'

Herbert Fitzgerald, from the first moment of his interrogating the woman, had of course known that he would give her somewhat. In spite of all his political economy, there were but few days in which he did not empty his pocket of his loose silver, with these culpable deviations from his political philosophy. And yet he felt that it was his duty to insist on his rules, as far as his heart would allow him to do so. It was a settled thing at their relief committee that there should be no giving away of money to chance applicants for alms. What money each had to bestow would go twice further by being brought to the general fund – by being expended with forethought and discrimination. This was the system which all attempted, which all resolved to adopt who were then living in the south of Ireland. But the system was impracticable, for it required frames of iron and hearts of adamant. It was impossible not to waste money in almsgiving.

Anthony Trollope,
Castle Richmond
(1860)

TRANSATLANTIC PASSAGES

Sam Weller:
Have a passage ready taken for 'Merriker . . . then let him come back and write a book about the 'Merrikins as'll pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough.

Charles Dickens,
Pickwick Papers
(1820)

POISON

The state legislators [of Virginia] may truly be said to be ‘wiser in their generation than the children of light', and they ensure their safety by forbidding light to enter among them. By the law of Virginia it is penal to teach any slave to read, and it is penal to be aiding and abetting in the act of instructing them. This law speaks volumes. Domestic slaves are, generally speaking, tolerably well fed, and decently clothed . . . they
may
be sent to
the south
and sold. This is the dread of slaves north of Louisiana. The sugar plantations, and more than all, the nice grounds of Georgia and the Carolinas are the terror of American negroes; and well they may be, for they open an early grave to thousands; and to
avoid loss
it is needful to make their previous labour pay their value.

There is something in the system of breeding and rearing negroes in the Northern States, for the express purpose of sending them to be sold in the South, that strikes painfully against every feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity. . . .

In all ranks, however, it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralysed by the relative positions of slave and owner. The characters, the hearts of children, are irretrievably injured by it. In Virginia we boarded for some time in a family consisting of a widow and her four daughters, and I there witnessed a scene strongly indicative of the effect I have mentioned. A young female slave about eight years of age had found on the shelf of a cupboard a biscuit, temptingly buttered, of which she had eaten a considerable portion before she was observed. The butter had been copiously sprinkled with arsenic for the destruction of rats, and had thus been most incautiously placed by one of the young ladies of the family. As soon as the circumstance was known, the lady of the house came to consult me as to what had best be done for the poor child; I immediately mixed a large cup of mustard and water (the most rapid of all emetics) and got the little girl to swallow it. The desired effect was instantly produced, but the poor child, partly from nausea, and partly from the terror of hearing her death proclaimed by half a dozen voices round her, trembled so violently that I thought she would fall. I sat down in the court where we were standing, and, as a matter of course, took the little sufferer in my lap. I observed a general titter among the white members of the family, while the black stood aloof, and looked stupefied. The youngest of the family, a little girl about the age of the young slave, after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed, ‘My! if Mrs Trollope has not taken her in her lap, and wiped her nasty mouth! Why, I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars!' . . .

The idea of really sympathising in the sufferings of a slave appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered by a butcher.

Frances Trollope,
Domestic Manners of the Americans
(1832)

GREAT EXPECTORATIONS

As Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juices into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs', as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger who follows in the track I took myself will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent.