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Historical And Cultural Contexts:
Gaffer
Governess
New
Poor Laws
Parish
(i.e., Local Government)
Parliament
The Railroad
Reform
(i.e., Reform Bills)
Religion
(Church of England, Parish Priests, Methodists)
Recycling
Economies
Servants
Wealth(Investments
and Taxes)
Whigs,
Tories, Radicals
The Workhouse
(or the 'House,' the 'Union')
Unless
indicated otherwise, excerpts are from Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen
Ate and Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily
Life in 19th-Century England (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
Gaffer
"An old man or a man of high position.
In Far from the Madding Crowd someone speaks of 'a great gaffer
like the Lord.'" Dickens's Our Mutual Friend,on the other
hand, refers to a lower-class character as "Gaffer Hexam."
Parish
"The term 'parish' referred not to an ecclesiastical unit of
jurisdiction but rather to the fundamental form of local government in
England. Virtually all of England was divided
into parishes (some 15,000 in the 1830s), units presumably modeled after
or derived from the parishes of the Church of England but with whose boundaries
they had often long since ceased to coincide. Created in Elizabethan
times, the parish was organized to serve the purposes of poor relief, keeping
the peace, and maintaining the highways and church property. Parishes
ranged in size from a tiny cluster of rural cottages to areas in London
full of vast numbers of tenement houses.
The parishes were overseen by a churchwarden (there were often two), a constable, an overseer of the poor, and a surveyor of highways. The term of office was one year, and all local members of the parish were required to take their turn at these posts, except august folk like the nobility, clergy, and M.P.'s... Overseers of the poor were charged with maintaining the workhouse and providing for any necessary 'outdoor relief' to those not living under its roof, and they would presumably see to it that the 'settlement' laws were vigorously enforced. These laws generally required that one be born in the parish, have lived there a year, or have been apprenticed there at least forty days in order to find shelter in the local workhouse. The overseers were replaced by elected boards of guardians under the Poor Law of 1834...
As all this suggests, not so much an organ of self-government as it was a handy unit of administration through which services could be exacted from the locals and order maintained. The same may be said of the county... There were fifty-two counties in England and Wales in the 1800s... In the early 1800s, most of the counties had the right to send two members of the local gentry to the House of Commons as members of Parliament (M.P.s).
The boroughs could often send representatives to Parliament, too, but over the years many boroughs lost most -- or almost all -- of their electorate as the local population died out or emigrated, with the consequence that often a member of Parliament was representing only a handful of people. These virtually depopulated, or 'rotten,' boroughs were in some cases scarcely different from that of the borough of Queen's Crawley that Thackeray describes in Vanity Fair, in a village of which Sir Pitt Crawley's former servant Horrocks leases an inn. "The ex-butler had obtained a small freehold there likewise, which gave him a vote for the borough. The Rector had another of these votes, and these and four others formed the representative body which returned the two members for Queen's Crawley." In fact, shortly before 1800, it was found that fewer than 50 voters elected the members of Parliament in 51 of the parliamentary constituencies, and in 130 of the boroughs there were less than 300 votes cast. Thus, a distinction developed between a parliamentary borough that could send someone to Parliament and a municipal borough at was a self-governing municipality.
Middlemarch is evidently a borough of both varieties, however. In its municipal capacity it was governed by Mr. Vincy as mayor, while as a parliamentary constituency, it was the object of a campaign by Mr. Brooke, "and his estate was inherited by Dorothea's son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declines, thinking that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he remained out of doors."
Parliament
"In Jane Austen's era, Parliament was a sleepy collection of worthy peers
in the House of Lords and landed gentlemen in the Commons who sometimes
fought off intermittently mad George III's efforts to be another royal
strongman but in general spent their time haggling over minute questions
of local government such as whether or not a particular road should have
a turnpike and whose fields should be enclosed in tiny villages in the
Midlands. There were no hard and fast party lines, no mass party
organizations, no clear rules on when a government could stay in power
(or when it should resign), not truly popular elections. And there
was very little pressing business - other than to vote the army
budget. George Eliot could have been describing the entire country
when she wrote Middlemarch during this period, "before Reform had done
its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a
clearer distinction of ranks and dimmer distinction of parties."
The House of Lords consisted of the peerage together with the archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, who held their sears, so to speak, ex officio rather than by election. Members of the House of Commons had to get elected in their boroughs or counties, not usually a difficult task since they were generally men of considerable standing in their home areas and probably the landlords of many of the electors, as the voters were called. (There was no secret ballot until 1872.) The candidate - if for some reason he actually had to make a real speech - spoke from a platform called the husting after the alehouses had been opened for some hours to get everyone in a receptive frame of mind. There was then a public vote to determine who had won. The bias in favor of the wealthy and influential was reinforced by the fact that until 1838 M.P.s were required by law to have a L.600 a year annual income in the case of a county member and L.300 a year in the case of a borough member. Property qualifications were not completely abolished until 1858, and members received no salary until the 1880s. Plus, Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1829, nor Jews until the 1860s...
Originally, Parliament was an assembly of notables collected by the monarch to advise him and perhaps to do his bidding, and its origins as an instrument of the monarch continued to be reflected in various practices long after the realities of the situation had changed dramatically. Thus, genial deference continued to be paid to the fiction of royal leadership by having the monarch open each session of the two houses with a speech explaining why they had been summoned... In fact, the monarch had long ceased to play anything but an advisory role in the government, although Queen Victoria tried once, to intervene early in her reign... [T]he power of the House of Commons should be noted, for by [the mid-1860s] not only the monarch but the House of Lords as well was becoming irrelevant to the real exercise of power within the government. The growing tide of democratic sentiment in the nation meant that the nonelected House of Lords could not credibly interfere with legislation proposed by a popularly elected body like the Commons. After the king threatened to pack the Lords by vastly enlarging the peerage when they refused assent to the Reform Act of 1832, the Lords backed off and became something of a rubber stamp to the Commons thereafter.
The House of Commons was divided between two main parties, which were known as the Whigs and Tories until the 1830s and, thereafter, respectively, as the Liberals and Conservatives. (There were also a small number of extreme democrats known as the Radicals.)"
Religion
"In 1800 the Church of England enjoyed a position
of extraordinary influence in English society. It was the official
state church, it had its own court system, with virtually exclusive jurisdiction
over wills, marriages, and divorces, it was entitled to one tenth of the
nation's farm produce each year through the tithing system, and its members
alone were eligible to attend (and teach at) Oxford and Cambridge and to
hold public office...
The local representative of the church was the parish "priest," as the vicar, rector, or perpetual curate of a parish was known. He conducted the services in the local parish church, tended to the sick, officiated at baptisms, christenings, funerals, and so on. His post was officially known as a "benefice" or a "living" and it could be used to maintain a handsome life-style. The minister was entitled to all or part of the local tithes, the mandatory annual payments by parishioners to sustain the church...
Naturally, as we learn in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, these were sought-after positions, especially since the only formal obligation was to preach one Sunday sermon each week... In later years, such livings generally passed into the hands of large landowners..., and then people might curry favor with the patron to get the post, since the church would not usually ordain someone a full priest unless he had a living to go to.... In 1830, some 7,268 of the 11,342 livings in England and Wales were in the control of private parties... Since they carried a nice steady income with them, however, such livings... were widely bought and sold- just like annuities - as well as simply given away...
Altogether different from the dean [with his high position] curate, a full-fledged clergyman - but now without a benefice or living of his own. He assisted the rector or vicar a parish... The real curate was, in fact, the "poor relation" of the of England, a source of cheap labor who very often made life cushy for clergymen who held livings but didn't really want to do the parish work associated with them. In Middlemarch, for example, Edward Casaubon is the rector at Lowick, but his absorption in his studies leads him to abjure all duties except giving the Sunday sermon; he leaves the rest to his curate.
The situation in another nearby town is somewhat different, as we learn when Eliot tells us of the rector, Mr. Cadwallader, "being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton." That is, the rector held more than one living simultaneously, not an unusual circumstance in the early part of the century...
[I]n the fourth and fifth decades of the century, ....a larger wave on against laxity [occurred] in the church, a reaction born in part of the preachings of John Wesley, a member of the Church of England who had begun preaching a new, back-to-the-Bible, born-again gospel of the heart at open-air services attended by craftsmen, poor people, and laborers in the early 1700s. His followers separated from the church of England and formed the Methodist Church. Its grim emphasis on hellfire and damnation made the term "methodist" a by-word for dour, uncharitable churchgoing fanaticism. The term is applied to the misanthropic farm servant Joseph in Wuthering Heights and to Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch by Mrs. Cadwallader when she describes Dorothea as having "a great deal of nonsense in her - a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff."
Wesley's message was really for the poor and the working class. When it filtered upward to the middle class, it took the form of the Evangelical movement, whose members, like the Brontes' father, remained inside the Church of England... As influences from within the Church of England grew, they transformed it from the relatively relaxed latitudinarian institution that we encounter in Middlemarch... into the austere, disapproving bastion of grimness that Bishop Proudie and his wife represent in Barchester Towers."
Wealthy
Victorians
"What did it mean to be wealthy in the days before tax shelters, credit
cards, junk bonds, and golden parachutes? No stocks and bonds, no
money market funds - what did you put your money into?
First and foremost, it went into land. Land was socially prestigious and it also produced rent from tenant farmers that was probably the major source of income for most of the landed gentry and nobility during much of the 1800s. Good land, however, was not likely to be attainable. Much of it was tied up through entail in family estates, and it was an extremely complicated and expensive procedure to purchase it. A contemporary observer toward the end of the century said the legal fees involved were enormous and also pointed out that by then the 2 percent return on land made it a bad investment unless you didn't need a big income. In families, land always went to the men, while the women got things like government securities...
Except for railway shares, no one would have had stocks or bonds from private companies until the second half of the century, for the excellent reason that even the smallest shareholders were 100 percent liable to the extent of all their goods and land for any debt incurred by the business of which they were part owners. Consequently, business transacted on the Stock Exchange, as a contemporary observer noted in 1832, "relates entirely to the purchase and sale of stock in the public funds, Exchequer bills, India bonds and similar securities." Gold and silver were popular forms of wealth, partly in the form of coins, of course, but also in the form of the "plate" (or silverware) which in great houses was locked up in a safe guarded by the butler at night....
If you were a widow or a single maiden lady or other soul without a grand establishment, at least until the middle of the century, you would have put your money into other things, notably... the "funds."
The "funds" was simply another term for the national debt, since it was generally being paid off with the revenues from various accounts or funds. As the debt was backed up by the government and didn't involve the risks entailed in buying privately issued securities, the funds were a popular investment. In addition, they generally paid a perfectly respectable 5 percent. When Jane Eyre's uncle dies, leaving her the money that finally gives her independence, her cousin informs her that "your money is vested in the English funds," and in Vanity Fair, we are told that the selfish and disagreeable heiress Miss Crawley "preferred the security of the funds." "The great rich Miss Crawley," Becky Sharp calls her, "with seventy thousand pounds in the five per cents"...
Having raised the specter of government finance, it may well be asked - what about taxes?... [T]he English [were] one of the most taxed peoples in the world. During the nineteenth century, for example, there was a tax on land, income, the practice of law, newspaper advertisements, glass, candles, beer, malt, carriages, menservants, coats of arms, newspapers, paper, bricks, stone, coal, windows, corn, soap, horses, dogs, salt, sugar, raisins, tea, coffee, tobacco, playing cards, timber, silk and - but the extent of the taxation begins to become clear...
The taxes were important not only because of the bite they put on people but because of their individual social consequences. Until repealed in 1861, for example, the tax on paper helped to keep books scarce and expensive. Soap was taxed until 1853 with the consequence of the poor personal hygiene which may have contributed to some of the epidemics of typhus and other diseases that periodically devastated elements of the population... The tax on windows mentioned in Mansfield Park was perhaps the most pernicious one, since even a hole cut in a wall for ventilation was counted as a window, making among other things, for dark houses for the poor...
And these were only
the national taxes. At a local parish level from the 1600s on, one
could be required to pay a "rate" for the maintenance of the poor (one
reason why people were always anxious to have the poor settle somewhere
else besides their parish), to which, in due course, were added rates for
highways and other local expenses. There was a also a local church
rate for the physical upkeep of the local Church of England house of worship
until 1868. To the national taxes and this local tax must then be
added the tithes which farmers and craftsmen had to pay the local clergyman
in support of the Church of England. These amounted to one-tenth
of the value of the year's annual produce and, until 1840, also had to
be paid in kind, when it was "commuted" to payment in money. It is
one of the happy attributes of the heartily democratic but well-born rector's
wife Mrs. Cadwallader in Middlemarch, George Eliot tells us, that
"such a lady gave a neighbourliness ot both rank and religion, and mitigated
the bitterness of uncommuted tithe."" (Pool, 85-88).
The Reform Act of 1832 granted the vote to the middle class - to (male) householders with an annual income of at least L.10.
This 100 percent liability was an even more serious disadvantage for the less well-off. Charles Dickens, among others, argued that unlimited liability prevented members of the working class from forming limited partnerships and societies and, thus, in effect, from cooperatively owning many of the larger concerns that employed them.
The system of lending libraries (like Mudie's), to which readers would commonly subscribe for a fee, thrived partly as a result of the expense and scarcity of books. Lending libraries powerfully influenced the format and composition of novels, by encouraging novels to be published in three volumes (so several readers could read one novel) and by discouraging the mention of shocking or off-flavor topics.
See Mrs. Humphrey Ward's
remarks on the close association between filth
and lower class status (on the Victorian Web).
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