Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England by Trygve Tholfsen

Author:Trygve Tholfsen [Tholfsen, Trygve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781000076677
Google: QkjWDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-09T15:58:56+00:00

(2) The Sensibility of Aspiration

The mid-Victorian propensity for the public proclamation of high ideals reflected a distinctive sensibility: moral earnestness and high seriousness, the exaltation of aspiration and striving, an emphasis on noble feelings and sentiments, and an ostentatious idealism and optimism. Such traits bear the impress of evangelicalism and romanticism. While the dominant ethos was utilitarian and rationalist at the core, its spirit owed a great deal to the afterglow of the evangelical revival and to a vestigial romanticism. Since these aspects of mid-Victorianism are, for good reason, associated with the middle-class, their broader historical origins have to be kept in mind. They were the product of a cultural inheritance common to all classes, although the middle-class embraced them with special zeal and left its stamp on their dominant manifestations. Hence working men who displayed similar traits were not ipso facto submitting to the intellectual tutelage of their superiors. In this instance, as in others, working-class radicalism, like middle-class liberalism, embodied elements derived from a common culture inherited from the past.14

There is no reason to dispute Canon Smyth’s judgement that evangelicalism was the primary cause of the moral earnestness so characteristic of the Victorians.15 From this source came the overpowering inclination to find moral significance in every corner of human life, individual and social. From the evangelical legacy — and the older Puritan traditions that it carried on — came the characteristic moral tone of the high Victorian age. It contributed directly to the tendency to exalt and worship the values of the society, to celebrate every attempt to achieve them, and to sanctify the activity devoted to those ends. To be sure, the Enlightenment had been endowed with a full measure of idealism and moral intensity. The Puritan temper of the utilitarians has often been noted. Conversely, the ethical intensity of the Enlightenment had non-Christian roots in Greek humanism and rationalism. From the Enlightenment the Victorians inherited a preoccupation with principle and from the evangelical revival an overriding concern with morality. This double dose of high seriousness, in turn, was magnified by the enthusiasm of romanticism, with its emphasis on sentiment and feeling. While romanticism in England did not approach the sort of domination that it achieved in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century, the romantic spirit, especially as expressed by the Lake poets, entered English culture and infused it with new attitudes.16 Even such severe critics of romanticism as Macaulay came under its sway. In interaction with other intellectual forces, it contributed to the mid-Victorian affinity for high aspiration and noble sentiment.

A glance at the literary culture of mid-Victorian England may provide an illustration of these themes, while also reminding us of a broader cultural reality common to England as a whole. Writers such as Tennyson and Ruskin clearly have to be understood in terms of a mid-Victorian culture that was not limited to one class or region. That is, they were manifestations of an historically created culture which, in diverse forms, was common to squire and bourgeois, nobleman and artisan, village and city.

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