We imagine the Victorians as stuffy and orthodox; yet they were the most questioning, most radical and most open-minded generation in our history. Perhaps it is our own arrogance, rooted in a belief that we invented modernity, that prevents our seeing this.
Perhaps it is also that we see so few reasons to be confident about ourselves. Our systems of belief appear to have failed; with capitalism, private and public institutions, the so-called world order, and what passes for western civilisation under physical and moral threat. We envy the Victorians what we imagine was their sense of certainty, their determination to impose a uniform way of life not just on themselves, but on the future. This, again, is a misunderstanding, and one to which Darwin acts as a corrective.
What one of the great Victorian poets, Browning, called "doubt, hesitation and pain" were prevalent. The years from 1837 to 1901 were characterised by technological advances of such scope that they destabilised as they liberated. At the beginning of the Queen's reign, it was usual to find people who had never travelled more than a village or two, and spoke in dialects strange to those living 20 miles away. The railway changed that. There was a massive growth in population and in prosperity; but there was still unimaginable poverty. The thieves' kitchens and slums of Dickens owe nothing to poetic licence.
The first third of the reign – which included the 17 years in which Darwin went from his first sketch of On the Origin of Species in 1842 to its sensational publication in 1859 – was also a period of political turmoil. Philosophers, novelists and poets concentrated on "the condition of England question". There was indeed new prosperity, and it created a substantial middle class: but people down the ladder wanted a share. They also wanted the vote, and an education. The landed interest fought in defence of feudalism, and was not defeated until just into the 20th century: but by the 1860s, with the second Reform Act and Gladstone's Education Act of 1870, the tide was moving unstoppably.
The turmoil of these changes surpasses anything in our times. There were fights on several fronts. Before Darwin implicitly suggested that Adam and Eve might not have happened, the Catholic Emancipation Act had allowed a challenge to the Church of England. On one side, John Henry Newman argued for the one true faith; on the other Carlyle, with his own followers, described a form of post-Christian deism.
With Darwin, secularisation and atheism began to have momentum; Darwin, who had been intended for the Church before he started collecting beetles and finches, ended up an agnostic. Yet there was church building in Britain on a scale unseen since medieval times. Roman Catholics could build their own churches, and in provincial towns imitated the great edifices of Catholic Europe. Meanwhile, the expanding industrial towns, built Anglican churches that were idealised models of those built in what Carlyle called "the most perfect feudal times", to a Gothic plan approved by John Ruskin as the only architecture that could properly connect with God.
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