Late Victorian Britain
State and society
From the 1880s a mounting sense of the limits of the liberal, regulative state became apparent. One reflection of this awareness was the increasing perception of national decline, relative to the increasing strength of other European countries and the United States. This awareness was reinforced by British military failures in the South African War (Boer War) of 1899–1902, a “free enterprise war” in which free enterprise was found wanting. One consequence of this and other developments was the growth of movements aimed at “national efficiency” as a means of establishing a more effective state machine. The recognition of social problems at home—such as the “discovery” of urban poverty in 1880s in the assumed presence of plenty and increasing anxiety about the “labour question”—also raised questions about the adequacy of the state in dealing with the mounting problems of an increasingly populous and complex society. Toward the end of the century, the possibility of a violent outcome in the increasingly intractable problem of Ireland brought existing constitutional methods into question. Behind much of this anxiety was a sense that the Third Reform Act of 1884 (see Reform Bill) and changes in local government were precipitating a much more democratic polity, for which the classical liberal state had no easy answers. The example of what was called at the time municipal socialism, especially as it existed in Birmingham under the direction of its mayor, Joseph Chamberlain (1873–76), indicated what the local state could accomplish. Instead of the old “natural order” religion that had underpinned the state previously, different currents of thought emerged that saw the state and community as necessary for individual self-realization. German idealism, socialism, and new liberalism (see libertarianism) all encompassed different ways of rethinking the state.
This rethinking revolved around the belief that the operation of the state must incorporate consideration of the collective characteristics of society—that is, solidarity, interdependence, and common identity—in a much more direct way than hitherto. Indeed, the idea of the “social” came to characterize the entire period and even much later eras. Notions of a distinct social sphere, separate from the economic and political realms, had emerged much earlier, based upon the idea that the characteristics of this social realm were evident in the biological, vital characteristics of populations, so that society was very often understood in organic terms. The influence of Malthus in the early 19th century and Darwin in the mid-19th century contributed powerfully to this worldview, giving rise to late 19th-century representations of society in the strongly biological terms of “social eugenics” and other variations of “racial” thought, such as the idea of the “degeneration” of the working class. From about the turn of the 20th century, the concept of the social realm as autonomous developed alongside and partly incorporated older understandings. The social question became a sociological question, as indeed it has remained until very recently in British history. Society was now understood, unlike in earlier times, to work according to its own laws and to be divorced from moral questions, although, in practice, political interventions were invariably designed to change moral behaviour.
One major result of this questioning of the state and of new conceptions of society was the extensive social legislation of the Liberal administrations after 1905, which is widely seen as the foundation of the 20th-century welfare state. The new Liberal government embarked upon a program of social legislation that involved free school meals (1905), a school medical service (1907), and the Children’s Act (1908). The Old Age Pensions Act (1908) granted pensions under prescribed conditions to people over age 70, and in 1908 the miners were given a statutory working day of eight hours. In 1909 trade boards were set up to fix wages in designated industries in which there was little or no trade union strength, and labour exchanges were created to try to reduce unemployment. In 1911 the National Insurance Act was passed, whereby the state and employers supplemented employees’ contributions towards protection against unemployment and ill health. This act clearly represented a departure from the manner in which government had been carried out, as it began to be executed in supposed accordance with the social characteristics of the governed (age, family circumstances, gender, labour). Under this new dispensation, individual rights, as well as the rights of families, were secured not by individual economic action but by state action and by the provision of pensions and benefits. These new rights were secured as social rights, so that individual rights were connected to a web of obligations, rights, and solidarities extending across the individual’s life, across the lives of all individuals in a population, and between individuals across generations—in short, a network of relations that was in fact one early version of society as a sui generis entity.
However, much of this new relationship of state and society was still recognizably liberal in the older sense, constituting a compact of social and individual responsibility. At the heart of this compact was the belief that it was necessary to safeguard the individual from the unfettered operation of the free market, while at the same time making sure that there must be an obligation to obtain gainful employment. Contributory pension schemes required individuals to make regular payments into them rather than providing social insurance from general taxation. The National Insurance Act provided a framework within which workers were to practice self-help, and, although involvement was mandatory, the administration of the legislation was largely through voluntary institutions. David Lloyd George, who did most to push the legislation through, himself combined these characteristics of old and new liberalism. At the same time, in practice this new formula of government emerged in a very piecemeal and haphazard way, often driven by the circumstances of the moment, not least the circumstances of party politics. Moreover, the circumstances of war were of overwhelming importance. It was World War I in particular that fostered the idea of the increased importance of the interventionist, collectivist state. The demands of winning the war required an unparalleled intervention in a running of the economy and in the operations of social life, particularly when the radical Liberal Lloyd George took power in 1916. Perhaps the most important factor legitimizing the increased role of the state was conscription in the armed services, and the most important general outcome was the idea that “planning” (understood in many different ways) was from this point forward a fully legitimate part of governmental enterprise. Nonetheless, despite the piecemeal nature of the change, what is striking is how this understanding of the relationship between state and society obtained across the whole political spectrum and how it lasted so long. This increased role of the state was accompanied, after World War I, by the increasing specialization and professionalization of an expanding civil service.
The political situation
Gladstone and Chamberlain
Gladstone’s second administration (1880–85) did not live up to the promise of its election victory. Indeed, in terms of political logic, it seemed likely in 1880 that the Gladstonian Liberal Party would eventually split into Whig and radical components, the latter to be led by Joseph Chamberlain. This development was already foreshadowed in the cabinet that Gladstone assembled, which was neither socially uniform nor politically united. Eight of the 11 members were Whigs, but one of the other three—Chamberlain—represented a new and aggressive urban radicalism, less interested in orthodox statements of liberal individualism than in the uncertain aspiration and striving of the different elements in the mass electorate. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Chamberlain’s municipal socialism were the Whigs, the largest group in the cabinet but the smallest group in the country. Many of them were already abandoning the Liberal Party; all of them were nervous about the kind of radical program that Chamberlain and the newly founded National Liberal Federation (1877) were advocating and about the kind of caucus-based party organization that Chamberlain favoured locally and nationally. For the moment, however, Gladstone was the man of the hour, and Chamberlain himself conceded that he was indispensable.
The government carried out a number of important reforms culminating in the Third Reform Act of 1884 and the Redistribution Act of 1885. The former continued the trend toward universal male suffrage by giving the vote to agricultural labourers, thereby tripling the electorate, and the latter robbed 79 towns with populations under 15,000 of their separate representation. For the first time the franchise reforms ignored the traditional claims of property and wealth and rested firmly on the democratic principle that the vote ought to be given to people as a matter of right, not of expediency.
The most difficult problems continued to arise in relation to foreign affairs and, above all, to Ireland. When in 1881 the Boers defeated the British at Majuba Hill and Gladstone abandoned the attempt to hold the Transvaal, there was considerable public criticism. And in the same year, when he agreed to the bombardment of Alexandria in a successful effort to break a nationalist revolt in Egypt, he lost the support of the aged radical John Bright. In 1882 Egypt was occupied, thereby adding, against Gladstone’s own inclinations, to British imperial commitments. A rebellion in the Sudan in 1885 led to the massacre of Gen. Charles Gordon and his garrison at Khartoum (see Siege of Khartoum) two days before the arrival of a mission to relieve him. Large numbers of Englishmen held Gladstone personally responsible, and in June 1885 he resigned after a defeat on an amendment to the budget.
The Irish question
The Irish question loomed ominously as soon as Parliament assembled in 1880, for there was now an Irish nationalist group of more than 60 members led by Charles Stewart Parnell, most of them committed to Irish Home Rule; in Ireland itself, the Land League, founded in 1879, was struggling to destroy the power of the landlord. Parnell embarked on a program of agrarian agitation in 1881, at the same time that his followers at Westminster were engaged in various kinds of parliamentary obstructionism. Gladstone’s response was the Irish Land Act, based on guaranteeing “three fs”—fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale—and a tightening up of the rules of closure in parliamentary debate. The Land Act did not go far enough to satisfy Parnell, who continued to make speeches couched in violent language, and, after a coercion act was passed by Parliament in the face of Irish obstructionism, he was arrested. Parnell was released in April 1882, however, after an understanding had been reached that he would abandon the land war and the government would abandon coercion. Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish, a close friend of Gladstone and the brother of the Whig leader, Lord Spencer Hartington, was sent to Dublin as chief secretary on a mission of peace, but the whole policy was undermined when Cavendish, along with the permanent undersecretary, was murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, within a few hours of landing in Ireland.
Between 1881 and 1885 Gladstone coupled a somewhat stiffer policy in Ireland with minor measures of reform, but in 1885, when the Conservatives returned to power under Robert Arthur Salisbury, the Irish question forced itself to the forefront again. Henry Herbert, earl of Carnarvon, the new lord lieutenant of Ireland, was a convert to Home Rule and followed a more liberal policy than his predecessor. In the subsequent general election of November 1885, Parnell secured every Irish seat but one outside Ulster and urged Irish voters in British constituencies—a large group mostly concentrated in a limited number of places such as Lancashire and Clydeside—to vote Conservative. The result of the election was a Liberal majority of 86 over the Conservatives, which was almost exactly equivalent to the number of seats held by the Irish group, who thus controlled the balance of power in Parliament. The Conservatives stayed in office, but when in December 1885 the newspapers reported a confidential interview with Gladstone’s son, in which he had stated (rightly) that his father had been converted to Home Rule, Salisbury made it clear that he himself was not a convert, and Carnarvon resigned. All Conservative contacts with Parnell ceased, and a few weeks later, in January 1886, after the Conservatives had been defeated in Parliament on a radical amendment for agrarian reform, Salisbury, lacking continued Irish support, resigned and Gladstone returned to power.
Split of the Liberal Party
Gladstone’s conversion had been gradual but profound, and it had more far-reaching political consequences for Britain than for Ireland. It immediately alienated him further from most of the Whigs and from a considerable number of radicals led by Chamberlain. He had hoped at first that Home Rule would be carried by an agreement between the parties, but Salisbury had no intention of imitating Peel. Gladstone made his intentions clear by appointing John Morley, a Home Rule advocate, as Irish secretary, and in April 1886 he introduced a Home Rule bill. The Liberals remained divided, and 93 of them united with the Conservatives to defeat the measure. Gladstone appealed to the country and was decisively beaten in the general election, in which 316 Conservatives were returned to Westminster along with 78 Liberal Unionists, the new name chosen by those Liberals who refused to back Home Rule. The Liberals mustered only 191 seats, and there were 85 Irish nationalists. Whigs and radicals, who had often seemed likely to split Gladstone’s 1880 government on left-right lines, were now united against the Gladstonians, and all attempts at Liberal reunion failed.
Chamberlain, the astute radical leader, like many others of his class and generation, ceased to regard social reform as a top priority and worked in harness with Hartington, his Whig counterpart. In 1895 they both joined a Salisbury government. The Liberals were, in effect, pushed into the wilderness, although they held office briefly and unhappily from 1892 to 1895. Gladstone, 82 years old when he formed his last government, actually succeeded in carrying a Home Rule bill in the Commons in 1893, with the help of Irish votes (Parnell’s power had been broken as a result of a divorce case in 1890, and he died in 1891), but the bill was thrown out by the Lords. He resigned in 1894, to be succeeded by Archibald Primrose, earl of Rosebery, who further split the party; in the general election of 1895, the Conservatives could claim that they were the genuinely popular party, backed by the urban as well as the rural electorate. Although Salisbury usually stressed the defensive aspects of Conservatism, both at home and abroad, Chamberlain and his supporters were able to mobilize considerable working-class as well as middle-class support for a policy of crusading imperialism.
Imperialism and British politics
Imperialism was the key word of the 1890s, just as Home Rule had been in the critical decade of the 1880s, and the cause of empire was associated not merely with the economic interests of businessmen looking for materials and markets and the enthusiasm of crowds excited by the adventure of empire but also with the traditional lustre of the crown. Disraeli had emphasized the last of these associations, just as Chamberlain emphasized the first. In the middle years of the century it had been widely held that colonies were burdens and that materials and markets were most effectively acquired through trade. Thus, an “informal empire” had been created that was as much dependent on Britain as the formal empire was. Nonetheless, even during these years, as a result of pressure from the periphery, the process of establishing protectorates or of acquiring colonies had never halted, despite a number of colonial crises and small colonial wars in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Most of the new acquisitions were located in tropical areas of the world and were populated mainly by non-Europeans.
There were further crises during the 1880s and ’90s, when the Liberals were divided on both tactics and objectives, and public opinion was stirred. When Chamberlain chose to take over the Colonial Office in 1895, he was acknowledging the opportunities, both economic and political, afforded by a vast “undeveloped estate.” The same radical energies that he had once devoted to civic improvement were now directed toward imperial problems. The argument about empire assumed an increasingly popular dimension. Boys’ books and magazines, for example, focused on the adventure of empire and the courage and sense of duty of empire builders, and textbooks often taught the same lessons. So also did the popular press. In consequence, the language of imperialism changed.
However, it was difficult to pull the empire together politically or constitutionally. Certainly, moving toward federation was a challenging task since the interests of different parts were already diverging, and in the last resort only British power—above all, sea power—held the empire together. The processes of imperial expansion were always complex, and there was neither one dominant theory of empire nor one single explanation of why it grew. Colonies that were dominated by people of British descent, such as Canada or New Zealand and the states of Australia, had been given substantial powers of self-government since the Durham Report of 1839 and the Canada Union Act of 1840. Yet India, “the brightest jewel in the British crown,” was held not by consent but by conquest. The Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 was suppressed, and a year later the East India Company was abolished and the new title of viceroy was instituted. Imperial control was tightened too, through the construction of a network of railways. Thomas Macaulay’s dream that India would one day be free and that such a day would be the happiest in British history seemed to have receded, although the nationalist movement that emerged after the first Indian National Congress in 1885 was eventually to gain in strength. Meanwhile, given the strategic importance of India to the military establishment, attempts were made to justify British rule in terms of benefits of law and order that were said to accrue to Indians. “The white man’s burden,” as the writer and poet Rudyard Kipling saw it, was a burden of responsibility.
It was difficult for the British voter to understand or to appreciate this network of motives and interests. Chamberlain himself was always far less interested in India than in the “kith-and-kin dominions” (populated primarily by those of British descent) and in the new tropical empire that was greatly extended in area between 1884 and 1896, when 2.5 million square miles (6.5 million square km) of territory fell under British control. Even he did not fully understand either the rival aspirations of different dominions or the relationship between economic development in the “formal” empire and trade and investment in the “informal” empire where the British flag did not fly.
Queen Victoria’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897 involved both imperial pageantry and imperial conferences, but, between 1896 and 1902, public interest in problems of empire was intensified not so much by pageantry as by crisis. British-Boer relations in South Africa, always tense, were further worsened after the Jameson raid of December 1895, and, in October 1899, war began. The early stages of the struggle were favourable to the Boers, and it was not until spring 1900 that superior British equipment began to count. British troops entered Pretoria in June 1900 and Paul Kruger, the Boer president, fled to Europe, where most governments had given him moral support against the British. Thereafter, the Boers employed guerrilla tactics, and the war did not end until May 1902. It was the most expensive of all the 19th-century “little wars,” with the British employing 450,000 troops, of whom 22,000 never returned. Just as the Crimean War had focused attention on “mismanagement,” so the South African (Boer) War led to demands not only for greater “efficiency” but also for more enlightened social policies in relation to health and education.
While the war lasted, it emphasized the political differences within the Liberal Party and consolidated Conservative-Liberal Unionist strength. The imperialism of the Liberal prime minister, Lord Rosebery, was totally uncongenial to young pro-Boer Liberals like Lloyd George. A middle group of Liberals emerged, but it was not until after 1903 that party rifts were healed. The Unionists won the “khaki election” of 1900 (which took its name from the uniforms of the British army, a reflection of its occurrence in the middle of the war) and secured a new lease of power for nearly six years, but their unity also was threatened after the Peace of Vereeniging, which ended the war in May 1902. Salisbury retired in 1902, to be succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, a brilliant man but a tortuous and insecure politician. There had been an even bigger break in January 1901 when the queen died, after a brief illness, at age 81. She had ruled for 64 years and her death seemed to mark not so much the end of a reign as the end of an age.
There were significant changes in terms of the impression organized labour made on politics. Some of the new union leaders were confessed socialists, anxious to use political as well as economic power to secure their objectives, and a number of socialist organizations emerged between 1880 and 1900—all conscious, at least intermittently, that, whatever their differences, they were part of a “labour movement.” The Social Democratic Federation, influenced by Marxism, was founded in 1884; however, it was never more than a tiny and increasingly sectarian organization. The Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1893, had a more general appeal, while the Fabian Society, founded in 1883–84, included intellectuals who were to play a large part in 20th-century labour politics. In February 1900 a labour representation conference was held in London at which trade unionists and socialists agreed to found a committee (the Labour Representation Committee), with Ramsay MacDonald as first secretary, to promote the return of Labour members to Parliament. This conference marked the beginning of the 20th-century Labour Party, which, with Liberal support, won 29 seats in the general election of 1906. Although until 1914 the party at Westminster for the most part supported the Liberals, in 1909 it secured the allegiance of the “Lib-Lab” miners’ members. Financially backed by the trade unions, it was eventually to take the place of the Liberal Party as the second party in the British state.
The return of the Liberals
The Liberals returned to power in December 1905 after Balfour had resigned. Between the end of the South African War and this date, they had become more united as the Conservatives had disintegrated. In 1903 Chamberlain had taken up the cause of protection, thereby disturbing an already uneasy balance within Balfour’s cabinet. He failed to win large-scale middle- or working-class support outside Parliament, as he had hoped, and the main effect of his propaganda was to draw rival groups of Liberals together. In the general election of 1906, the Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a cautious Scot who had stayed clear of the extreme factions during the South African War, won 377 seats, giving them an enormous majority of 84 over all other parties combined. The new cabinet included radicals and Liberal imperialists, and when Campbell-Bannerman retired in 1908, H.H. Asquith moved from the Home Office to the premiership.
Social reform had not been the chief cry at the general election, which was fought mainly on the old issues of free trade, temperance reform, and education. In many constituencies there was evidence of Nonconformist grievances against the Balfour-engineered education act of 1902 that had abolished the school boards, transferred educational responsibilities to the all-purpose local authorities, and laid the foundations of a national system of secondary education. Yet local and national inquiries, official and unofficial, into the incidence of poverty had pointed to the need for public action to relieve distress, and from the start the budget of 1909, fashioned by Lloyd George, as chancellor of the Exchequer, set out deliberately to raise money to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.” The money was to come in part from a supertax on high incomes and from capital gains on land sales. The budget so enraged Conservative opinion, inside and outside Parliament, that the Lords, already hostile to the trend of Liberal legislation, rejected it, thereby turning a political debate into a constitutional one concerning the powers of the House of Lords. Passions were as strong as they had been in 1831, yet, in the ensuing general election of January 1910, the Liberal majority was greatly reduced, and the balance of power in Parliament was now held by Labour and Irish nationalist members. The death of King Edward VII in May 1910 and the succession of the politically inexperienced George V added to the confusion, and it proved impossible to reach an agreement between the parties on the outlines of a Parliament bill to define or curb the powers of the House of Lords. After a Liberal Parliament bill had been defeated, a second general election in December 1910 produced political results similar to those earlier in the year, and it was not until August 1911 that the peers eventually passed the Parliament Act of 1911 by 131 votes to 114. The act provided that finance-related bills could become law without the assent of the Lords and that other bills would also become law if they passed in the Commons but failed in the Lords three times within two years. The act was finally passed only after the Conservative leadership had repudiated the “diehard peers” who refused to be intimidated by a threat to create more peers.
In the course of the struggle over the Parliament bill, strong, even violent, feelings had been roused among lords who had seldom bothered hitherto to attend their house. Their intransigence provided a keynote to four years of equally fierce struggle on many other issues in the country, with different sectional groups turning to noisy direct action. The Liberals remained in power, carrying important new legislation, but they faced so much opposition from extremists, who cared little about either conventional political behaviour or the rule of law, that these years have been called by the American historian George Dangerfield “the strange death of Liberal England.” The most important legislation was once more associated with Lloyd George—the National Insurance Act of 1911, which Parliament accepted without difficulty but which was the subject of much hostile criticism in the press and was bitterly opposed by doctors and duchesses. Nor did it win unanimous support from labour. The parliamentary Labour Party itself mattered less during these years, however, than extra-parliamentary trade union protests, some of them violent in character—“a great upsurge of elemental forces.” There was a wave of strikes in 1911 and 1912, some of them tinged with syndicalist ideology, all of them asserting, in difficult economic circumstances for the workingman, claims that had seldom been made before. Old-fashioned trade unionists were almost as unpopular with the rank and file as they were with capitalists. In June 1914, less than two months before the outbreak of World War I, a “triple alliance” of transport workers, miners, and railwaymen was formed to buttress labour solidarity. In parallel to labour agitation, the suffragists, fighting for women’s rights, resorted to militant tactics that not only embarrassed Asquith’s government but tested the whole local and national machinery for maintaining order. The Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, was prepared to encourage illegal acts, including bombing and arson, which led to sharp police retaliation, severe sentences, harsh and controversial treatment in prison, and even martyrdom.
The issue that created the greatest difficulties, however, was one of the oldest: Ireland. In April 1912, armed with the new powers of the Parliament Act, Asquith introduced a new Home Rule bill. Conservative opposition to it was reinforced on this occasion by a popular Protestant movement in Ulster, and the new Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, who had replaced Balfour in 1911, gave his covert support to army mutineers in Ulster. No compromises were acceptable, and the struggle to settle the fate of Ireland was still in full spate when war broke out in August 1914. Most ominously for the Liberals, the Irish Home Rule supporters at Westminster were losing ground in southern Ireland, where in 1913 a militant working-class movement entered into close alliance with the nationalist forces of Sinn Féin. Ireland was obviously on the brink of civil war.
The international crisis
The seeds of international war, sown long before 1900, were nourished between the resignation of Salisbury in 1902 and August 1914. Two intricate systems of agreements and alliances—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain—faced each other in 1914. Both were backed by a military and naval apparatus (Britain had been building a large fleet, and Richard Haldane had been reforming the army), and both could appeal to half-informed or uninformed public opinion. The result was that a war that was to break the continuities of history started as a popular war.
The Liberal government under Asquith faced a number of diplomatic crises from 1908 onward. Throughout a period of recurring tension, its foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, often making decisions that were not discussed by the cabinet as a whole, strengthened the understanding with France that had been initiated by his Conservative predecessor in 1903. An alliance had already been signed with Japan in 1902, and in 1907 agreements were reached with Russia. Meanwhile, naval rivalry with Germany familiarized Britons with the notion that, if war came, it would be with Germany. The 1914 crisis began in the Balkans, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in June 1914. Soon Austria (backed by Germany) and Russia (supported by France) faced off. The British cabinet was divided, but, after the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4, thereby violating a neutrality that Britain was committed by treaty to support, Britain and Germany went to war.
Economy and society
Changes in economic conditions during the last decades of the 19th century were of crucial importance. Mid-Victorian prosperity had reached its peak in a boom that collapsed in 1873. Thereafter, although national income continued to increase (nearly quadrupling between 1851 and 1911), there was persistent pressure on profit margins, with a price fall that lasted until the mid-1890s. Contemporaries talked misleadingly of a “great depression,” but, however misleading the phrase was as a description of the movement of economic indexes, the period as a whole was one of doubt and tension. There was anxious concern about both markets and materials, but the retardation in the national rate of growth to below 2 percent per annum was even harder to bear because the growth rates of competitors were rising, sometimes in spectacular fashion.
The interests of different sections of the community diverged between 1870 and 1900 as they had before the mid-Victorian period. In particular, grain- and meat-producing farmers bore the full weight of foreign competition in cereals, and many, though not all, industrialists felt the growing pressure of foreign competition in both old and new industries. As a result of improved transport, including storage and refrigeration facilities, along with the application of improved agricultural machinery, overseas cereal producers fully penetrated the British market. In 1877 the price of English wheat stood at 56 shillings 9 pence a quarter (compared with 54 shillings 6 pence in 1846); for the rest of the century, it never again came within 10 shillings of that figure. During the 1890s, therefore, there was a sharp fall in rent, a shift in land ownership, and a challenge to the large estate in the cereal-growing and meat-producing areas of the country. The fact that dairy and fruit farmers flourished did not relieve the pessimism of most spokesmen for the threatened landed interests.
In industry, there were new forms of power and a trend toward bigger plants and more impersonal organization. There were also efforts throughout the period to increase cartels and amalgamations. Britain was never as strong or as innovative in the age of steel as it had been in the earlier age of iron. By 1896 British steel output was less than that of either the United States or Germany, while the British textile industry was declining sharply. Exports fell between 1880 and 1900 from £105 million to £95 million.
Yet the country’s economic position would have been completely different had it not been for Britain’s international economic strength as banker and financier. During years of economic challenge at home, capital exports greatly increased, until they reached a figure of almost £200 million per annum before 1914, and investment income poured in to rectify adverse balance of trade accounts. Investing during these years in both “formal” and “informal” empire was more profitable, if more risky, than investing at home. But it also contributed to domestic obsolescence, particularly in the old industries. Thus, ultimately, there was a price to pay for imperial glory. During the last 20 years of peace before 1914, when Britain’s role as rentier was at its height, international prices began to rise again, and they continued to rise, with fluctuations, until after the end of World War I. Against this backdrop, the City of London was at the centre of international markets of capital, money, and commodities.
Meanwhile, whether prices were falling or rising, labour in Britain was increasingly discontented, articulate, and organized. Throughout the period, national income per capita grew faster than the continuing population growth (which stayed at above 10 percent per decade until 1911, although the birth rate had fallen sharply after 1900), but neither the growth of income nor the falling level of retail prices until the mid-1890s made for industrial peace. By the end of the century, when pressure on real wages was once again increasing, there were two million trade unionists in unskilled unions as well as in skilled unions of the mid-century type, and by 1914 the figure had doubled.
In terms of the distribution of the labour force in this period, among the most striking changes was the development of white-collar occupations. Between 1881 and 1921, of male workers, those in public administration, professional occupations, and subordinate services, along with those in commercial occupations, increased from some 700,000 to 1,700,000 (out of a total workforce of some 9,000,000 in 1881 and 13,500,000 in 1921). Those in transport and communications almost doubled in number to 1,500,000, while those who worked in the manufacture of metal, machines, implements, and vehicles increased from almost 1,000,000 to over 2,000,000. Those in mining also doubled in number, to 1,200,000 in 1921. These were the real growth areas in the economy. The number of individuals involved in the agricultural sector, on the other hand, declined but exceeded 1,250,000 in 1921 and thus made up a still important component of the occupational structure of the country. All other sectors remained stable or lost workers, with the growth industry of the early 19th century, textiles and clothing, decreasing from about 1,000,000 to 750,000 workers in 1921.
The economy lost a good deal of its old artisan character. Accompanying this erosion of artisan power at the point of production were some tendencies toward increases of scale in factory production. To some degree there also was a decline in the old hierarchies of skill, most notably in the erosion of the position of artisans, the mid-Victorian labour aristocracy. At the same time, the characteristics of the social structure of production in the preceding period were still apparent, namely “combined and uneven” development, whereby old and new forms of industrial organization and production methods were often combined, and overall development was not uniform. The result was that skill and authority were still distributed in a very complex way throughout industry. Older historical accounts concerning the late 19th- and early 20th-century formation of an increasingly de-skilled and uniform labour force have given way to a more nuanced picture, so that the rise of the Labour Party is no longer interpreted, as it earlier was, simply as a consequence of the supposed emergence of this de-skilled labour force. Moreover, in line with more recent scholarship, the emergence of the Labour Party in the late 19th and early 20th century is no longer viewed as a reflex reaction to economic conditions or to the situation of workers; instead, it is understood in terms of the role of political intervention and political language in shaping what was indeed a new sense of class unity and not as a direct expression of the labour force itself, which was in fact still strikingly divided not only by skill but by many other characteristics of workplace experience.
The number of women in professional occupations and subordinate services doubled to 440,000 in 1921, out of a total workforce of some 5,500,000 women. This shift did much to reshape women’s changing understanding of themselves, particularly among the middle classes, where the more public world of work called into question exclusively domestic definitions of femininity. Women’s employment in textile and clothing manufacture was, however, still massive, with the real decline in the production of textiles not coming until after World War I. In 1881 the textile and clothing industry employed nearly 1,500,000 women; though by 1921 this number had shrunk, it remained considerable, at 1,300,000. Within the textile industry, women’s trade unions made some headway, but it is testimony to the power of traditional paternalist understandings of gender relationships among workers that male authority still obtained for the most part in both the home and the workplace, where women were excluded from the better-paid and more-skilled jobs. Domestic service was still the bedrock of women’s employment, comprising some 1,750,000 workers in 1881 out of a total of 3,900,000, though by 1921 this number had grown to 1,800,000 but shrunk in relative importance.
Family and gender
The structure of families in this period was still relatively diverse and significantly unlike 21st-century versions of the nuclear family based upon co-residing parents and young children. There is some evidence to suggest that industrialization strengthened rather than weakened kinship ties and intergenerational co-residence, because of the practical help resident grandparents could render to working mothers. Relationships across generations, both within and outside the household, continued to be important. Despite the migration of production from home to factory, the traditional identity of the family as a productive unit survived quite strongly into the 20th century, notably among shopkeepers and other self-employed workers, among tenant farmers, and particularly among the still important area of “homework” production, which, as a component of the late 19th-century clothing industry, went through a massive revival. The family retained many residual economic roles and acquired some new ones. For example, there was still a strong tendency for occupations to pass from father to son in all classes. The economy of workers, however, was much more likely to involve the collective earnings of father, mother, and children, compared with the family economy of those who were better-off.
In mid-19th-century England and Wales (Scotland had its own divorce, custody, and property rights), a husband had absolute right of control over his wife’s person, as well as considerable rights over her property. He also had sole responsibility for the rearing and guardianship of children, and the common law gave him absolute freedom to bequeath his property outside his family. A wife, in contrast, had neither legal duties nor enforceable legal rights, and, indeed, under common law her juridical personality was totally submerged in that of her husband. During this period, the situation was to undergo remarkable changes as the law began to make inroads into not only the rights of husbands but also the rights of parents generally. By the end of this period, legal intervention had largely eroded the absolute paternal rights enshrined in the common law, although sexual relations between husbands and wives remained largely untouched by legal change. However, cultural changes were to lag behind legal ones.
For the better-off in society, marriage was gradually transformed from what was in large measure a property contract into a union in which companionship and consumerism played a larger role. That women were increasingly becoming consumers was reflected in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1882, which allowed women to control their own income. The period was therefore to see changes within marriage in the direction of greater independence for women, as well as changes in the status and independence of women outside marriage. At the same time, the legal and administrative code remained decidedly biased against women; for instance, income tax was framed as a duty of the male head of household. In terms of what might be called upper-middle-class society, traditional gender roles were still extremely powerful: girls were educated at home up to World War I and were trained for the social conventions of home life and home management; boys were sent to school, often to boarding school; and more companionate versions of spousal relationship were accompanied by the preservation of distance between parents and children, with much child care still being left to servants. Lower down the scale, things were much the same, although few middle-class households could afford a wholly idle wife.
In this period it was widely established that natural processes no longer gave an adequate account of motherhood, which was increasingly seen as an activity of great moral, intellectual, and technical complexity that had to be learned artificially like any other skill. Indeed, there was an unprecedented concern with the nature of motherhood, which was not seen as a private matter but as something involving the future of society, the country, the empire, and indeed the “race.” This concern was an expression of changing gender roles; but, while on one hand it embodied a reaction against forces of change, in some respects it also signaled the movement toward greater gender equality. The role of the state was to reflect these changes, as its intervention in family life also reached unprecedented levels.
From the 1860s to the ’80s, the agitation surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts—an attempt to control venereal disease in the armed forces that involved state regulation and inspection of prostitution—laid the foundations for subsequent feminism. The campaign for the repeal of the acts generated public discussion of the double standard of licence for men and chastity for women. This agitation brought women into the public sphere much more directly than before and in new ways. Moreover, it served to complement changes in education, charity work, political organization, and associational life (which for women expanded considerably in this period), all of which took women outside the home, especially better-off women. This was also the case with the growth of women’s role as consumers, with shopping and the new department stores further increasing women’s involvement in public urban life.
The discussion generated by these acts resulted in a series of feminist responses varying from the more socially, sometimes politically, conservative emphasis on traditional family roles and on maternalism, seen in the “social purity” campaigns of the late 19th century (with their links to “social hygiene” movements espousing hygiene as the gateway to moral betterment), to the more radical, egalitarian political feminism of the early 20th century. The latter form was itself split into radical, socialist, and constitutional variants. In 1903 the women’s suffrage movement split dramatically over the issue of the parliamentary vote, some pursuing the vote as merely one item on a long list of political and extra-political reforms and others concentrating on the single aim of obtaining the vote. These agitations also influenced men’s conception of themselves, notably in response to the social purity movement’s emphasis on the importance of chastity for men as well as women. Male roles were further defined in the 1880s with the consolidation of male homosexuality as a distinct social identity, given legal definition at the time (in the Labouchere amendment of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality as gross indecency), not least in the famous case involving the arrest and imprisonment of Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde. From this time the rise of “scientific” understandings of sexuality, including the science of sexology, also served to redefine gender roles. However, there as in so many other realms, recognition for women lagged behind that for men, and it was not until the 1920s that a similar delineation of lesbian identity became fully apparent.
Mass culture
Class distinctions in cultural life continued to be very important. “Rational recreation” (productive and socially responsible recreation) remained an aim of those who wished to reform the culture of the lower classes. However, it also came to characterize the provision of recreation for the upper classes too. The idea of “playing the game” and “the game for its own sake” represented an extension of rational recreation into the sphere of sports, particularly as developed in the public schools, which in this period were reformed so as to institute a sense of public duty and private responsibility among the propertied classes. The cult of the disinterested amateur was part of the notion of the classically trained English gentleman, whose education and sense of moral duty purportedly created a moral superiority and disinterestedness that uniquely fitted him to rule. The development of popular forms of literature aimed at boys in this period served to glorify this particular manifestation of gentlemanly rule. More broadly, the model of the reformed public school itself, as well as a reformed Oxbridge (the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been restructured in large part somewhat earlier to meet the needs of a changing, moralized civil service), came to have a considerable influence on educational institutions in Britain. The masculine emphasis in sports was complemented by the club life of the upper classes, which, while always decidedly masculine, in the 1880s and ’90s, in terms of the development of London clubland, served even more to emphasize expressions of masculine identity in leisure activities.
The move from the sociability that characterized upper-class culture in the 18th century to the more didactic, socially concerned interventions of the early and mid-19th century gave way to a gradual involvement in hitherto forbidden forms, forms now suitably sanitized and made rational (or, as in the case of classical music, made sacred). It was not only music that became respectable but also the reading of novels, the playing of cards, and theatre attendance. The growth of the “legitimate” theatre from the 1880s, in distinction to more popular, melodramatic forms, is indicative of this development. Institutions and locations that were defined by associations with class especially harboured these changes, most notably the school and the suburb. As the transport system developed, especially the expansion of railway commuting from the 1870s and ’80s, suburban life grew in importance, most notably in London. However, it was not only the propertied in society who sought to create rational recreation: in continuance of earlier attempts to influence change from within the labouring population, the reform of low culture was sought by the appeal to high culture in radical and socialist movements such as the Cooperative movement, the Workers Educational Association, and, after World War I, the Left Book Club. Radical rationalist recreation took the form of rambling, bicycling, and educational holidays.
However, this very negotiation of the hitherto forbidden cultural forms also represented a qualification of the class character of culture and the development of what came increasingly to be called “mass culture.” In part this represented a nationalization of cultural life that reflected the increasing importance of a mass polity. Britain also became a more centralized, homogeneous national society. But a simple, linear development toward uniform experience had not characterized British history. The earlier development of modern British society had seen an emphasis on the significance of local and regional cultures, which echoed and reflected the relationship between state and society. While the four nations of the British Isles had constituted a unitary state since the end of the 18th century, Britain remained in the early and mid-19th century a society that was highly diverse and localized. Different cultural, religious, and legal traditions reinforced the very diverse occupational and manufacturing structure that industrialization brought with it. The importance of political decentralization was reflected in very strong municipal cultures, so that the centre of gravity of a good deal of British artistic and literary life long continued to remain in the English provinces and within each of the constituent nations. The growth of organized sports reflected not only the social separation between classes but also the strength of regional and local attachments.
Nationalization was apparent in an increasingly elaborate and integrated communications structure represented in the railway, the telegraph, the postal service, and later the telephone. By the beginning of the 20th century, the local press, while strong, was beginning to give way to mass-circulation newspapers, most famously the Daily Mail. The nationwide retailing revolution apparent from the 1880s, along with the development of an increasingly nationally coordinated and centrally based entertainment industry, which could be seen, for example, in the development of music hall, were part of the process too. So was the migration of intellectual life into the universities, which tended to be dominated by Oxbridge and University of London colleges, despite strong provincial resistance and pride. London itself became the cultural centre of the country and therefore the cultural centre of the British Empire. A fundamental influence on this change was the shift in the British economy from manufacturing industry to international finance and, with it, the migration of wealth, prestige, fashion, and social status away from the provinces to London.
While organized sports might express regional loyalties, their increasingly organized and commercialized basis—whereby rules were drawn up, leagues founded, and competitions inaugurated—served to coordinate local loyalties on a national basis. National bodies were created, along with national audiences. Spectatorship gave way to participation among all classes. In this sense, a “mass” culture was evident. This culture, however, might occur within and across class lines. For example, professional football (soccer) and county cricket, the best-known instances of mass sports, particularly in the early days, witnessed the class distinction between “gentleman” and “players,” as well as north-south differences. Particular sports developed along class lines: tennis and golf, at least in England, were played by the higher orders of society, and rugby was divided along the class lines, with rugby union for the higher classes and rugby league for the lower classes. (See rugby for the history and development of both traditions.) Indeed, professional football has only relatively recently lost its working-class character in Britain. Nonetheless, in the 20th century, developments of mass culture across class lines were increasingly important—with cultural and social homogeneity increasingly going hand in hand.