Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain 9781139862769, 9780521868365

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Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain Janice Carlisle

Picturing Reform i n V i c to r i a n B r i ta i n

How did Victorians, as creators and viewers of images, visualize the politics of franchise reform? This study of Victorian art and parliamentary politics, specifically in the 1840s and 1860s, answers that question by viewing the First and Second Reform Acts from the perspectives offered by Ruskin’s political theories of art and Bagehot’s visual theory of politics. Combining subjects and approaches characteristic of art history, political history, literary criticism, and cultural critique, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain treats both paintings and wood engravings, particularly those published in Punch and the Illustrated London News. Carlisle analyzes unlikely pairings – a novel by Trollope and a painting by Hayter, an engraving after Leech and a high-society portrait by Landseer – to argue that such conjunctions marked both everyday life in Victorian Britain and the nature of its visual politics as it was manifested in the myriad heterogeneous and often incongruous images of illustrated journalism. jani ce carlisle is Professor of English at Yale University, and she has published a wide variety of essays and books on Victorian novels and autobiographies, including a study of the works of John Stuart Mill. More recently she has focused on the culture of Britain in the 1860s, publishing a book on the sensory registers of novels written during that decade (Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction, 2004).

c a m br i d g e s t u di e s i n n i n e t e e n t h- c e n t u r y l i t e r at u r e a n d c u lt u r e General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Kate Flint, Rutgers University Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London Mary Poovey, New York University Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

Picturing Reform i n V i c to r i a n B r i ta i n J a n i c e C a r l i sl e

cambrid g e unive r si t y p re ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge c b 2 8ru , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521868365 © Janice Carlisle 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Carlisle, Janice. Picturing reform in Victorian Britain / Janice Carlisle. pages  cm. – (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 79) Includes bibliographical references and index. is bn 978-0-521-86836-5 1.  Suffrage in art.  2.  Painting, Victorian–Great Britain.  3. Magazine illustration– Great Britain–19th century.  4. Art–Political aspects–Great Britain–History–19th century. 5. Art and society–Great Britain–History–19th century. I. Title. N8251.S 568C34 2012 704.9′49941081–dc23 2012011694 is bn 978-0-521-86836-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Kate

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

page viii xi

Introduction

1

1 Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

27

2 Pictures on display

61

Representing Parliament, 1832–1860 Decorating Parliament, 1841–1863

64 85

3 Redrawing the franchise in the 1860s: lines around the constitution

117

4 Within the pale

184

Conclusion

213

Notes Bibliography Index

220 249 266

Contexts of place and placement Punch and his Working-Man The ILN and the strength of numbers

vii

122 134 152

Illustrations

0.1 A Map of Society Island, wood engraving, Poor Man’s Guardian [1832]. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, Goldsmith Library, [G. L.] Broadside Collection 543. page 4 1.1 “The Cotton Famine: Distributing Tickets for Bread, Soup, Meat, Meal, Coal, Etc. …,” wood engraving, Illustrated London News (November 22, 1862: 541). Courtesy Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 51 1.2 W. J. Palmer, “The Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield,” wood engraving after C. J. Durham, ILN (September 21, 1861: 298). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 54 1.3 “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (May 20, 1865: 203). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 56 2.1 Sir George Hayter, The House of Commons, 1833, oil on canvas (1833–43). © National Portrait Gallery, London. 62 2.2 Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Reform Banquet, Held in the Guildhall, City of London, 11 July 1832, oil on canvas (1832–34). Courtesy of Charles Howick and the Reference Library, Yale Center for British Art. 71 2.3 “First Assembling of the First Reformed Parliament, 1833,” wood engraving after Sir George Hayter, Illustrated London News (May 27, 1843: 373). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 80 2.4  “The Curse,” wood engraving after Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Book of Art (1846). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 93 2.5 “An Abstract Representation of Justice,” wood engraving after Ford Madox Brown, The Book of Art (1846). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 94 2.6 “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall,” wood engraving, ILN (July 8, 1843: 17). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 97 viii

List of illustrations 2.7 “Substance and Shadow,” wood engraving after John Leech, Punch (July 13, 1843: 23). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 2.8 “The Great Room of the Royal Academy,” wood engraving, ILN (May 20, 1843: 338). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 2.9 “Portrait of the Hon. Ashley Ponsonby,” wood engraving after Edwin Landseer, ILN (June 17, 1843: 415). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.1 “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” wood engraving, ILN (August 4, 1866: 117). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.2 “No Rough-ianism,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (August 4, 1866: 51). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.3 William Thomas, “Rotten-Row,” wood engraving after G. H. Thomas, ILN (May 17, 1862: 502–3). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.4 “The Riot in Hyde Park,” wood engraving, ILN (August 4, 1866: 117). Courtesy Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 3.5 “The Fenian-Pest,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (March 3, 1866: 89). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.6 “An Allegory of Hyde Park,” wood engraving, Punch (“Almanack,” 1867: [ix]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.7 “A Block on the Line,” wood engraving after John Tenniel; “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” wood engraving after George du Maurier, Punch (March 2, 1867: 86–87). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.8 W. M. Thackeray, “Professor Byles’s Opinion of the Westminster Hall Exhibition,” wood engravings after W. M. Thackeray, Punch (July 17, 1847: 8). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.9 “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park,” wood engraving after J. Palmer, ILN (July 7, 1860: 21). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.10  “The Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton: The Defending Force Retreating across the Valley of Bevendean,” wood engraving, ILN (April 14, 1866: 356–57). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

ix

102 108 110 118 119 126 132 139 141

144

151 160

165

x

List of illustrations

3.11 “Members of the South Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps at Work by Torchlight in the Gardens of Burlington House, Piccadilly, Clearing the Ground for a Drill-Shed,” wood engraving, ILN (January 18, 1862: 77). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.12 “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last,” wood engraving, ILN (June 30, 1866: 644). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 3.13 “The Great Reform Demonstration: Forcing an Entrance into the Park near the Marble Arch,” wood engraving, Illustrated Times (July 28, 1866: 49). © The British Library Board. 3.14 “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” wood engraving, ILN (August 4, 1866: 117), detail. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4.1 “The Great Reform Demonstration on Monday Last: The Procession in Piccadilly Passing the Green Park”; “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton: The Procession Escorting Her Majesty up Snow-Hill,” wood engravings after C. R., ILN (December 8, 1866: 560–61). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4.2 “The Reform Meeting in Hyde Park,” wood engraving, ILN (May 18, 1867: 485). Courtesy Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 4.3 “D’Israel-i in Triumph; Or, the Modern Sphynx,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (June 15, 1867: 246–47). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4.4 Edward Poynter, Israel in Egypt, oil on canvas (1867). By permission of the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London. 4.5 “A Sketch Taken in Park Lane, May 6, 1867,” wood engraving after Ernest Griset, Punch (May 18, 1867: 201). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4.6 “A Leap in the Dark,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (August 3, 1867: 47). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4.7  “Check to King Mob,” wood engraving after John Tenniel, Punch (November 30, 1867: 221). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

169 177

179 181

188 193 196 198 201 203 205

Acknowledgments

In the course of my work on this project, I have become indebted to many individuals and institutions. First among the latter is the Yale Center for British Art because it is an institution so rich in the expertise of its curators as well as in its holdings. I am grateful for the assistance of Kraig Binkowski in the Reference Library, Elisabeth Fairman in the Department of Rare Books, and Gillian Forrester in the Department of Prints and Drawings. In addition, I want to thank Adrianna Bates for being such a knowledgeable and welcoming presence in the study room of the Center. Other libraries and librarians at Yale have been important to my research, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection and the Lillian Goldman Law Library. At Sterling Memorial Library, Barbara Rockenbach, Roberta Pillette, and Alan Solomon were particularly helpful. Emily Coit and Kwabena Antwi-Boaskiako provided bibliographical support. Katherine Haskins shared with me her extensive knowledge of Victorian wood engraving; and Janet Henrich, Master of Trumbull College, made it a wonderful place to live and work. I have also been fortunate to have had access to the resources of the Howard Tilton Library at Tulane University; the National Library of Art, as well as Prints and Drawings, at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the British Library; the Caird Library, National Maritime Museum; and the Huntington Library. To the editors with whom I have worked, I owe a great deal of thanks. I am indebted to Wendy Toole, the copy-editor, and to Emma Wildsmith and Jodie Hodgson, project manager and production editor, respectively. Gillian Beer, the series editor at Cambridge University Press, had faith in the initial version of this book, and she continued to offer her cheering support throughout the process of its revision. Finally, I hope that Linda Bree understands how deeply grateful I am for her consistent kindness, understanding, and patience. Tim Barringer’s generosity as a colleague is, in my experience, unequalled. He read the entire manuscript twice, once as I was just feeling my way toward research in a field not my own and again when the manuscript had reached its penultimate form. His perspectives on the history of British art and his faith in this book were invaluable, though he cannot be held responsible for any of its remaining shortcomings. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

My family has given me, as it always has, support far beyond what a­ nyone deserves. Joseph Roach, my partner, has encouraged the completion of this book for longer than I would like to admit; and to him I will continue to be grateful for his unfailingly astute advice. My son, Joseph Roach, provided long-distance encouragement and, more specifically, late-night consultations during computer crises. My daughter, Catherine Roach, and my son-in-law, Josh Chafetz, are models of scholarly achievement; and Josh shared with me his expertise in British constitutional history. To Catherine – Kate – I owe both professional and personal debts. As an art historian, she has welcomed me into her field and shared her knowledge and enthusiasm about Victorian art, making visits to galleries and special exhibitions occasions of both learning and delight. She read two versions of this book from beginning to end and parts of it more than twice. With love and appreciation, I dedicate this book to Kate.

Introduction

“Visibility,” wrote Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution, is “the great quality which rules the multitude.”1 By the time that he made that assertion in the mid 1860s, Bagehot would have seen ample evidence of the central role in Victorian culture of visual experience. Spread before him and his contemporaries were apparently endless arrays of scenes and images – outdoor advertising, industrial fairs, theatrical spectacles, traveling art exhibitions, magic-lantern shows both amateur and professional, cartes de visite, optical gadgets, and plates in lavishly illustrated books.2 Victorian elections were similarly spectacular affairs: they typically involved a flamboyant “politics of sight,”3 complete with parades and banners, ribbons and party colors, outdoor voting, and the chairing of elected candidates. During the years of the Victorian mid century, a spectacle of another sort was rising on the banks of the Thames, the new Palace of Westminster, which replaced the parliamentary buildings that had been destroyed by fire in 1834. Yet three decades later Bagehot was writing specifically about the kind of “visibility” that underwrites a government’s political authority, and he seems to have had in mind such ceremonial events as the queen’s procession through the streets of London, especially when she rode in a state coach on her way to open Parliament. Such sights, according to Bagehot’s thinking, win the assent of the governed. While this study takes much of its impetus from Bagehot’s theories, it looks at images made with paint and printer’s ink rather than those created by a royal progress or Gothic grandeur; and it brings within its purview the political work done by the wood engravings of illustrated journalism when they depict not only explicitly political subjects but also the more mundane activities of everyday life. Bringing together Victorian painting with pictures from Punch and the Illustrated London News provides a way, I argue, of understanding a distinctively Victorian conjunction of art and politics created by the plentitude and heterogeneity of such images. These visualizations also shed light on the institutional politics that altered and were altered by the franchise qualifications mandated by the First and Second Reform Acts, statutes that, in the shorthand of historical generalization, gave the vote, respectively, to men of the middle classes in 1832 and to many of their working-class counterparts in 1867. Responding to 1

2

Introduction

the first of these measures, artists tested the extent of its democratizing tendencies. Anticipating a second extension of the franchise, the ILN and Punch practiced a politics of vision by inviting their readers to think with their eyes, to see the state of the suffrage in the present and the possibilities for its changed shape in the future. The principal art objects treated here include two sets of images directly or indirectly related to franchise reform, one from the 1830s and 1840s and another from the 1860s. In the first set are commemorative paintings, chiefly Sir George Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833, and prints that record parliamentary activities after the passage of the First Reform Act, particularly wood engravings that were published in the ILN and Punch in 1843.4 In the second set are pictures that appeared in those two papers primarily during the 1860s as preludes to and referenda on the Second Reform Act of 1867, images that brought together the quotidian realm of street politics and the public arena of institutional politics. By moving back and forth between painted images and wood engravings, this study also demonstrates the fluctuating fortunes of these two visual media as forms of political commentary: the public role of the fine art of painting at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, for which there were so many hopes, gave way by the 1860s to the influence of the visual commentaries on parliamentary politics provided by the illustrated press. As these initial pairings  – First and Second Reform Acts, Punch and the ILN, prints and paintings – already signal, the method of this study is unabashedly and insistently comparative. It reflects the remarkable extent to which explicitly recognized binary oppositions dominated mid­Victorian theory and practice in a wide variety of domains and disciplines. Demonstrating both the rigidities and instabilities of such formulations is one of the aims of this study. To the conjunctions already adduced here, I add many others, including the conventions of history painting and genre painting, the 1840s and the 1860s, artists and engravers, middle and working classes, individuals and numbers. This introduction examines a number of such oppositions, including those between electoral laws, newspapers, and decades, and it also provides preliminary accounts of the specific Victorian writers and artists whose work features prominently in this study. Finally, I identify the particular kind of social interaction that authorizes my approach to all these materials. Among the most important of the conjunctions here is the one that joins together two Victorian thinkers: Walter Bagehot, one of the period’s most lastingly significant political commentators, and John Ruskin, its preeminent art critic. I treat the latter’s The Elements of Drawing (1857) as the companion text to The English Constitution (1867). In their very different ways these two writers brought their extraordinary acuity to bear on the effects of visual experience, explaining why and how certain pictures illuminate political processes and structures. For Ruskin, the compositional

Introduction

3

features of a work of art stand for political ideals. Arrangements of “line and colour” in a “great picture” can “remind us, in all we do, of the great laws of Divine government and human polity.” In The Elements of Drawing Ruskin equates “pictorial composition” and social organization: “if you enjoy the pursuit of analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters in a piece of painting by merely considering what are the noble characters of man in his association with his fellows.” The forms of “visible things” figure forth, as Ruskin writes in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, “the great truths which are the basis of all political science.” For Bagehot, by contrast, the splendid or “dignified” sights typical of the royal and aristocratic “parts” of British society, all “brilliant to the eye,” so overawe those who see them that they submit to be ruled by politicians whom they do not see, in most instances by the “efficient parts” of Parliament, specifically the cabinet members of a particular ministry.5 The ideas of these two theorists are in many ways mirror images of each other, construing in opposed but comparable ways the relation between the seen and the unseen. For Ruskin, the seen stands for the unseen, pictorial forms representing immaterial abstractions or ideals. For Bagehot, the seen obscures the unseen, the spectacular allowing the functional to get on with the task of governing. In both cases the seen bestows significance on the unseen. Although the relation between literature and politics is often taken to turn on the various meanings of the word representation,6 Bagehot and Ruskin suggest that the political implications of the formal features of an image depend on questions of composition or constitution. For Ruskin, pictorial design makes visible a hoped-for continuity between human and divine politics: “Composition” is in a “pure sense … the type, in the arts of mankind, of the Providential government of the world.”7 That insight is particularly relevant to British art and parliamentary politics in the nineteenth century. As Thomas Erskine May, long-time clerk of the House of Commons and the foremost Victorian authority on its functions, claimed first in 1844 and then in eight subsequent editions of Parliamentary Practice, understanding the constitution depends on understanding its parts.8 The questions raised by such a formulation are equally relevant to works of art and to the nature of a state. What elements constitute a particular phenomenon, be it a picture or a polity? How are they related to each other? Most important, do those elements compose a coherent and stable whole? A Map of Society Island (fig. 0.1), an engraving that appeared in the early 1830s as a supplement to a working-class newspaper, the Poor Man’s Guardian, illustrates the force of such questions because it explicitly charts the relation between the shape of society and the shape of the constitution. The creator of this image is “F. G. T., Geographer to their Majesties, the Rabble,” a cartographer whose allegiance is to the authority and

4

Introduction

Fig. 0.1  A Map of Society Island, wood-engraved broadside, Poor Man’s Guardian [1832]

regality of the ironically designated “Rabble.” The resulting map depicts a ­pyramid-shaped island whose forms materialize the realities of social hierarchy. The natural irregularities of mountains, rivers, and coastlines are made to conform to the requirements of human culture by the most regularly linear feature of the image. At the apex of the island, less than a quarter of its entire territory is cut off from the “Land of Production” below it by a dark, heavily ruled demarcation labeled “Line of Representation or Reform.” The largest word on the land mass, a word that starts at the acme of the Peak of Power, is “ARISTOCRACY,” below which are located “Church States” and then “Middle Lands” that rest on “Mountains of Wealth.” These three groups, ranging from the elite to the middling, therefore share one part of the island, a prescient formulation of the way in which middle-class reformers ignored their alliances with members of the working classes once the 1832 act became law. The text below the

Visualizing reform

5

image emphasizes that those respectively “tyrannous” and “­carnivorous” and “crafty” individuals living above the Land of Production have joined together in “a lasting treaty, called the Reform Peace,” which will allow them to “totally subdue[e] the unfortunate people” who are their topographical inferiors. In a fashion conventional in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political satire, this wood engraving fashions the constitution as an object, here ironically the ship of state that has long ago gone down in the “SEA of ERROR and SUPERSTITION”: “the famous Barque Constitution was lost in this Sea many years since.”9 Although this image of the constitution materializes it as an absence, a place where something ought to be, the triangular land mass substitutes for it, conveying the working-class protest against a constitution whose composition of the body politic forces the majority of its inhabitants to live below the “Line of Representation or Reform.” Although Bagehot sees the spectacular as a form of visibility that governs those who readily subject themselves to its authority, F.G.T. of the Poor Man’s Guardian uses the visibility of the lines of this engraving to contest that authority. During the first three decades of Victoria’s reign, renderings in oil of everyday events and of ceremonial occasions, along with wood engravings in Punch and the ILN, gave their viewers graphic formulations that sometimes countered and sometimes agreed with the visual argument of A Map of Society Island. Yet all such images made visible the fact that every new law, but particularly every new conception of the parliamentary suffrage, created a new political composition, a revised constitution. Even in their most apparently apolitical images – depictions of art exhibitions and epic building projects or visual jokes about the trivialities of domestic life – Punch and the ILN in particular used the resources of graphic art to picture reform in ways that offered both those who were governed and those who governed them opportunities to envision the changing shape of Britain’s unwritten constitution. Vi sua li zi ng re f o r m Conventionally treated as the event that inaugurated the Victorian era, even though it preceded the young queen’s accession to the throne by five years, the passage of the First Reform Act seemed at the time so momentous as to make its achievement inconceivable, and it is treated here primarily in terms of its immediate effects during the first years of her reign. By ­contrast, I examine the run-up to the Second Reform Act, which involved much more low-key parliamentary maneuverings that appeared at times to be leading to a foregone conclusion, so that I can gauge how and how well the visual practices of the ILN and Punch in the 1860s served a variety of political purposes. In a typically Victorian binary fashion, both acts distinguished between the borough franchise and the county franchise, which,

6

Introduction

according to a widely accepted generalization, demarcated ­boundaries that separated the cities and towns from the villages and countryside. That neat distinction frequently dissolved before the customary ­practices that determined where one constituency ended and another began, but I adopt it by focusing solely on the borough ­franchise in England and Wales as it was altered by the first two reform acts. (Since the Third Reform Act of 1884 dealt principally with the country franchise by bringing it in line with that already operative in the boroughs, it is beyond the scope of this study.) Because analyzing representations of franchise reform requires an understanding of what is at stake in a particular measure, I offer here some preliminary distinctions. The relation between the First and the Second Reform Acts presents itself initially as a simple contrast. By the 1860s, the measure of 1832 was acknowledged as the Great Reform Act and that of 1867 inevitably became, as Punch labeled it, the “little” one (March 31, 1866: 133).10 Many oppositions seem equally obvious. The first act was the work of a Whig government: Lord John Russell presented three reform bills in the House of Commons for Earl Grey, the prime minister in the Lords. The last one finally passed in May of 1832, much to the consternation of the Tories, whose disorganized forces the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel tried with difficulty to manage. Conversely, the second act was a victory for the Conservative party, won after the Liberals, led by W. E. Gladstone in the House of Commons and by John Russell, now Earl Russell, in the Lords, had failed to pass a more moderate bill in 1866. Like their defeated Tory counterparts in 1832, the Liberals gave way before the more determined efforts of the Conservatives, politicians led by Benjamin Disraeli in the Commons and in the upper house by the ageing Lord Derby, who had over thirty years before served in Earl Grey’s first post-reform ministry. Other contrasts between the two acts are also sharply drawn. The scale of enfranchisement legislated by them differed greatly. In 1832 the number of potential electors grew immediately by approximately 40 percent or 50 percent, an increase that yielded a proportion of one voter for every six or seven adult men; in 1867, the number eligible was enlarged by about 90 percent, to about one man in three,11 though both acts continued to exclude specific groups of men by virtue of their status or occupations. In some locales the earlier act disfranchised large numbers of working men: in Stafford, for instance, over 80 percent of those previously eligible to vote were not so under the new law. In contrast, by 1868 in some cities like Leeds, the later act had enlarged the electorate to nearly five times its size in 1866.12 During the debates of the early 1830s, the word people was understood to mean men of the middle classes; in the mid 1860s, it indicated the working classes. Earl Grey, in support of the earlier bill, said famously that the people deserved good legislation, not the right to vote for their legislators; some thirty years later his son was committed, theoretically at

Visualizing reform

7

least, to the idea that a very different sort of “people” deserved both.13 In 1832 cases of widespread and endemic corruption – rotten boroughs with few electors, pocket or nomination boroughs controlled by aristocratic landowners, unabashed and rampant bribery, and the consequently high costs of elections – were often cited as motivations for reform; later, debate focused more consistently on whether workers had earned inclusion in a re-formed constitution. Before 1832, the middle classes were lauded as the “very sinews of the nation”;14 in 1866 and 1867, working men were often similarly idealized. Many recent accounts of these two acts make two important points: the redistricting or lack thereof mandated by them had greater and more lasting effects than did the changes in franchise qualifications; and, particularly in the case of the 1867 measure, some of the changes in the qualifications for voters in the counties were more significant than those in the boroughs.15 Yet the borough franchise was the issue that received the most vigorous and often nervous attention in the debates over reform in both the early 1830s and the mid 1860s. Again the contrast between the two bills seems stark. The clauses dealing with the borough franchise in 1832, historians often assert, depended on the principle of property, thereby applying to middle-class men.16 The stipulations of 1867 were based on the principle of householding, thus encompassing working-class men. Yet the terms typically used to convey this difference – a “property qualification” versus “household suffrage” – are misleading. The actual phrasing of the statutes tells a different story. (A word of warning is in order here. The provisions of both acts are so arcane that they were often misunderstood by the MPs voting for or against them. During the debates of the early 1830s, one member lamented that the bill under discussion was a “web” beyond “the ingenuity of man to unravel”; and one of his counterparts in the 1860s could not help crying out that “it was quite impossible to know what was going on.”17 As I hope my citations make obvious, my analysis is greatly indebted to the historians who have studied these two reforms. Yet even the most detailed of their accounts leave important questions unanswered. When I am forced to speculate on such matters, I try to signal clearly that I am doing so.) The Act to Amend the Representation of the People in England and Wales (1832) created what came to be known as a “fixed-line franchise”: it gave the right to vote to “every male person of full age, and not subject to any legal incapacity, who shall occupy” in a city or borough “as owner or tenant, any house, warehouse, counting-house, shop, or other ­building  …  of the clear yearly value of not less than 10l.,” the amount of rent at which poor rates typically began to be assessed on unfurnished property. Additionally, potential voters had to have occupied the premises for one year, and paid all the taxes on the property and all rates levied for the relief of the poor, without having themselves received poor relief

8

Introduction

in the previous twelve months; they needed also to have lived for at least six months within seven miles of the borough.18 Possession of property is another term often used to describe the 1832 standard for the suffrage. Yet in a country in which only approximately 10 percent of the population at mid century lived in houses that they or their families owned, with most in that small minority being artisans,19 “possession” meant in relatively few instances owning a “house,” either as a place of business or as a dwelling. In most cases it meant renting. When MPs referred to £10 occupiers, they were often assuming, I think, that the property owned by such men was of the personal, movable variety rather than real property, furniture rather than land or buildings. Even movable belongings could encourage stability. In the worst days of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, those who fled first were people living in furnished dwellings; only later did those who owned furniture decide that they had to abandon their homes.20 The Act Further to Amend the Laws Relating to the Representation of the People in England and Wales (1867) repeated the 1832 prohibitions against granting the vote to young or incapacitated men and to those who had been on the dole in the previous twelve months. Yet, without invalidating any of the forms of enfranchisement legislated by the 1832 act, it also granted the vote to men who had been for one year “an Inhabitant Occupier, as Owner or Tenant, of any Dwelling House within the Borough.” Such an elector must also have paid “all Rates” for that purpose, with the added qualification that those rates “if any” should be “equal” to the “Amount in the Pound … payable by other ordinary Occupiers” – in other words, I think, that the voter had not been exempted from paying the poor rates, as was standard practice in many parishes, because he himself was too poor to be asked to do so.21 In essence, then, the reforms of 1832 and 1867 involved, respectively, an occupation franchise and a residential franchise. In both pieces of legislation, what mattered most was the steady use of property over a period of time: rate-paying and stability of tenure, rather than the ownership of real property, were as much the requirements for the vote in the mid 1830s as they were in the late 1860s. In the case of both these acts, many debates on the borough franchise turned on matters of civic and moral worthiness. Respectability became the watchword of those who championed franchise reform both early and late. It even seems at times as if the MPs in the 1860s were reading parliamentary debates in the volumes of Hansard from the early 1830s when they framed their arguments in support of changes in the suffrage. Lord Palmerston, the Whig prime minister in the first half of the 1860s, remained obdurately opposed to any new extension of the franchise; and he acted as if he had been betrayed when in 1864 Gladstone, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, raised the issue by famously asserting that “the qualities which fit a man … for the franchise” are “self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the

Visualizing reform

9

law, regard for superiors.” Yet when Palmerston himself had supported electoral reform in the early 1830s, he had used nearly the same terms that Gladstone invoked some thirty years later: according to Palmerston, the vote should be given to those “distinguished by morality and good conduct – by obedience to the laws – by the love of order – by attachment to the Throne and Constitution [and] devotion to their country.”22 Similarly, Earl Grey in the 1830s and Gladstone in the 1860s used the same phrase when they specified that new electors should be “fathers of families.”23 That standard clearly defined the limits of any extension of the franchise. Even among those who championed manhood suffrage, the term manhood indicated that only a particular kind of man was deemed worthy of the vote; it specifically excluded, as the radical MP John Bright explained, the “residuum” of those living in the borough constituencies, men characterized by their “almost hopeless poverty and dependence.”24 In the debates over each reform measure, another congruity emerged: the men soon to be included in the franchise were described as both trustworthy enough to be granted the vote and “dangerous” enough to threaten revolution if they were not.25 Again both early and late, that danger was seen to result from the sheer numbers of men who might be enfranchised. The contrast between the unique individual and massed numbers26 – frequently evoking other differentiations such as those between weakness and strength or mind and matter – often dominated reform debates. In 1832 that opposition involved on one side the ranks of potential middle-class voters, with individuality the preserve of their so-called betters, members of the landed gentry and the aristocracy. In the 1860s, working-class men were the unenfranchised numbers; middle-class voters, the representatives of the values of individuality. Yet in both contexts this opposition functioned in much the same way to distinguish those who had been deemed worthy of political power from those who were attempting to gain it. When the House of Lords rejected the second reform bill that had passed Commons in 1831, a radical poster inadvertently made the case against reform by comparing the will of “200 individuals” against the political aspirations of “millions.” Debating the next bill in 1832, T. B. Macaulay, then a young MP, entangled himself in inconsistencies when he declared that the “nation” should be ruled by “property and intelligence,” not by “mere numbers,” even though he referred to the men of the middle classes as “vast numbers.” For the Whig Henry Brougham, similarly, the middle classes of the 1830s were “those hundreds of thousands of respectable persons – the most numerous, and by far the most wealthy order in the community.” (To which the radical working-class newspaper the Poor Man’s Guardian replied in scornful disbelief, “the most numerous!”)27 When the Conservative government took up reform in 1867, with amendment after amendment altering its original provisions until they included even lodgers, the previous focus on the

10

Introduction

artisans who as individuals could be expected to conform to middle-class conceptions of respectability was replaced by an overriding concern with the apparently incalculable number of working men who might be added to the registers. In the 1860s opponents of reform deplored the potential “swamping” effect of extending the suffrage to workers. Palmerston decried the “Scum of the Community” who would rise to the surface if “Power [is placed] in the Hands of the Masses.” As both Palmerston and Bagehot recognized, concerns about electoral “fitness” inevitably involved troubling questions about the numerical extent of an increased franchise.28 Ruskin shared Palmerston’s fears, and the distinctions that Bagehot and Ruskin draw in their writings between respectability and numerousness suggest how Victorian paintings and engravings might give visual form to the issues raised by changes in the qualifications for the suffrage. Bagehot argues that in “deferential nations” the “numerous unwiser part” of the population is ruled by the “less numerous wiser part,” or, as he later calls them, “the vacant many” as opposed to “the inquiring few.” The difference between these “parts” of society, however, is not simply a matter of intellect. The members of the “élite,” especially when there is a “family on the throne,” are unquestionably respectable, and the “pretty events” in which they participate attract attention by “appeal[ing] to the senses” of the “many.” Ruskin, for his part, conjures up a vision of numerousness that is little short of nightmare. Slipping without effort or apparent contradiction from a discussion of the features characteristic of the “­masterly work” of great painters to “the rules … that hold in moral things,” he describes a society that fails to honor individuality as a society without reverence or charity or gratitude or admiration, a world “in which every man would walk as in a frightful dream, seeing spectres of himself, in everlasting multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness.” The loss of “differences” and “dissimilarities” and “irregularities” is, for Ruskin, a calamity in the realms of both art and government; and, like Bagehot, he sets himself against the reign of the many.29 The ways in which paintings and wood engravings from the 1830s to the 1860s portray the respectability and numbers of men therefore illuminate what was at stake in altering suffrage qualifications during those decades. Historical accounts of the First Reform Act typically debate whether it actually lessened the power of the landed interests in British political and social life. Hayter’s enormous ceremonial group portrait The House of Commons, 1833 and the prints published by Punch and the ILN during their first years serve as visual evaluations of that act by providing images of the constitution that had been amended by its provisions. Particularly when those pictures relate to the state-sponsored project to decorate the new Houses of Parliament, they reveal that contemporaries had good reason to see both democratic and anti-democratic principles at work in the new law. In the decade of the Second Reform Act, the ILN and Punch

Visualizing reform

11

offered engravings that put into question widely accepted explanations that its passage resulted from class collaboration. The visual evidence points instead to the fact that the attributes of working-class men, even the physical force that still evoked fears associated with the Chartists of the 1840s, had become by 1867 qualities to be not only valued but also imitated. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of franchise reform typically pay more attention to the issue of respectability than to that of numbers. Whether the visual politics of the period supports such a focus is one of the questions that this study proposes to answer. Even when Victorian artists depicted subjects that were not directly related to the issues that Parliament was currently debating, they made formal choices that could have political implications. Complementary theories proposed by Ruskin and Bagehot demonstrate how such a process might work. In The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin distinguishes between curved and straight lines in a way that conforms, with surprising precision, to Bagehot’s contrast between the aesthetically pleasing and the functional portions of government. Ruskin assigns the task of creating the beauty of an object to curved lines, the job of providing its stability to straight lines: “all beautiful objects whatsoever are thus terminated by delicately curved lines, except where the straight line is indispensable to their use or stability.”30 Analogously for Bagehot, the dignified “part” of government provided principally by the monarchy and aristocracy offers the beauty of spectacular display, while the efficient elements perform the largely invisible functions or “uses” of governing. In the crudest of terms, such oppositions can be read as class distinctions: curves body forth the relatively elite forms of the privileged, and straight lines represent the more obviously functional groups in Victorian society, oddly enough, in different instances, legislators and members of the working classes. Such can be the implications of curved and straight lines in both wood engravings and paintings, although the values that attach to such forms can and are altered from one historical or conceptual or aesthetic context to the next. In the specific case of wood engraving, the contrast between the tools chosen to create curved or straight lines both sets up and undercuts a similar distinction. Figures that are relatively flat and those that project an illusion of three-dimensionality involve different styles of engraving achieved by different implements, gravers, and tint tools. A figure in an image may be shaded by the interlacing of relatively sketch-like forms of cross-­hatching, typically made by a graver, and relatively straight and evenly spaced lines, typically made by a tint tool or, to make more than one such line at a time, by what Victorians called a tint or ruling machine, in which a number of points have been aligned in one implement.31 This distinction, like the others that I am offering here, is analytically useful only if it is understood to be always highly and inescapably relative. A tint tool differs from a graver only in the angle of its point and in the shape of

12

Introduction

its blade. In terms of the labor involved in producing a block for ­printing, the difference between a ruling machine and a graver is ultimately artificial: the hand using a device to form five lines in one stroke is no less a hand than the one holding the graver that forms, one at a time, intersecting or curving lines. Yet the contrast between such implements also upholds that favorite of Victorian concepts, hierarchy: apprentices were taught the craft of wood engraving by working first with tint tools, but master craftsmen typically wielded gravers.32 Similarly, the drawing of analogies between political constitutions and artistic compositions often involves matters of orientation and size and number. An image may be orientated according to what is commonly called portrait or landscape format, which determines the number of figures typically included in a picture. That number also depends on the size of those figures and their proximity to the picture plane. An image in portrait format tends to celebrate individuality because it depicts fewer figures than are usually characteristic in a picture oriented as if it were a landscape. The former, therefore, might seem relatively elitist; the latter, relatively democratic, especially if the image depicts an urban scene or the gathering within a large architectural space of a great  – and sometimes a very great – number of bodies. Here too subject and context are all important. At times, however, the political implications of such ways of looking at aesthetic form are straightforward: the nature and number of the people who fill the frame of a picture may be analogous to the nature and number of the people who compose an electorate and who are therefore, in terms of the different conceptions of the nation current from the 1830s to the 1860s, its constitution. Enlarging an image so that it can contain numbers of commonplace people, following the lead of W. P. Frith in a painting like Derby Day (1858), is analogous to widening the basis of the franchise. In such a case, composition is constitution. Seei ng the news Those who take seriously the visual culture of the Victorian period have good reason to complain about the marginal role in historical studies now played by a “merely supplementary parade of cuts from the Illustrated London News and Punch.”33 The two papers are the repositories of the primary visual texts in this study, not because they are now the best-known examples of Victorian illustrated journals, but because they enjoyed in their own times a prominence well beyond that explained by their circulation rates, relatively impressive as those were. (Shortly after its founding in 1842, the ILN was selling approximately 41,000 copies a week; and Punch, which began publication a year earlier, sold a weekly total of about 37,500 during the 1840s. The ILN soon outstripped Punch in the contest for purchasers, probably selling in the 1860s more than one hundred

Seeing the news

13

thousand copies a week, and Punch approximately half that number.)34 Verbal and visual depictions of daily life in Victorian Britain repeatedly attest to the ubiquity of these two papers. In 1862 the essayist and novelist Eliza Lynn Linton described groups of Londoners looking into shop windows, “scanning Punch or the Illustrated as they stand with their faces against the glass.”35 Similarly, in Life at the Sea-Side (Ramsgate Sands) of 1854, Frith included three newspapers, one recognizable as an issue of The Times and another as the ILN. When he painted The Railway Station of 1862, the papers that he featured were The Times and Punch, a copy of the latter of which a newsboy is extending to a potential buyer. How rapidly fortunes in journalism change is demonstrated by Going North, George Earl’s 1893 painting of a railway station, in which a copy of the Graphic appears prominently in the foreground and a large poster advertising the Daily Telegraph dominates the background. At mid century, however, as Frith well knew, Punch and the ILN, along with The Times, were predominant national institutions. In 1862 when the publisher Charles Knight identified the papers that constituted “picture journalism,” the only examples that he cited were the ILN and Punch, the former offering perhaps only “the showy make-up of the characteristics” of the period, the latter more effectively in his view presenting “an Index to the social and political life of the Victorian era.”36 Although Knight’s homage to Punch may seem grandiloquent and his dismissal of the ILN unfair, the staff members of the two papers continually reassured their readers that providing an “Index” to the age was exactly what they intended to do. The ILN repeatedly referred to the centrality of its role of offering “stores to History,” and the death of its founder gave it yet another occasion to explain that it “chronicle[d] in pictures, as well as by description, just as it passes, the history of the world.” Punch in its relative youth boasted famously that the “hard students of life” in the year 2000 would do well to consult its pages; and for similar reasons, the ILN counseled its early readers to plan to share issues of the paper with their as-yet-unborn grandchildren.37 The claims that Punch and the ILN typically made about their future importance can be justified best, I argue, by identifying their wood engravings as major texts to be analyzed, placing them where they originally appeared  – at the center rather than on the peripheries of Victorian culture. Neither Punch nor the ILN originated the different forms of visual journalism that they practiced; rather, they thrived by drawing on the tradition of educative visuality that had emerged with the publication of the Penny Magazine (1832–45),38 and both papers responded in similar ways to the rich legacy of graphic political satire established by eighteenth-century artists such as William Hogarth, James Gillray, and Isaac Cruikshank. Such earlier designs were published as expensive, singly produced prints or in penny papers and annuals and relatively ­short-lived

14

Introduction

magazines.39 Frequently these images made their points by featuring unattractive ­bodily functions or unlovely physiognomies. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, engravings by these artists and their less talented colleagues were judged to be, in the words of the novelist W. M. Thackeray, a combination of “garbage” and “foul blows.”40 Punch and the ILN made their distinctive mark by moving away from this tradition of harsh or salacious caricature, and they developed forms of visual ­commentary that were not exactly realistic as most of their contemporary readers would have understood that newly fashioned term, although they were clearly not dependent for their effects on the extreme distortions of earlier graphic journalism. Punch gently chided politicians made recognizable by their only slightly exaggerated physical traits, and the ILN soon eschewed all forms of caricature. The two papers continued to outpace their many illustrated imitators41 because they developed the staffs and procedures that allowed them to produce, week after week, a characteristically high proportion of engravings to text. Punch, or the London Charivari had identified itself from the first as a comic weekly that provided both news and commentary on current events as well as send-ups of the pretensions and reverses of middleand upper-middle-class daily life. Despite the visual similarities between earlier broadsheets and the front page of the ILN, that paper soon established itself as Punch’s more staid competitor for a weekly readership.42 Whatever their temperamental differences, the two papers covered a remarkably similar range of topics: among them, religion, economics, foreign wars and international affairs, taste and fashion, the physical transformation of London along with other technological wonders, and, not least, art and politics. In particular, both papers published extensive commentaries on painting and institutions of fine art. The ILN – “illustrated in a high style of art,” as it claimed in its first year (July 2, 1842: 127) – reproduced vast numbers of wood engravings after both old masters and contemporary artists, while Punch offered apparently endless parodies of fine art, past and present. Although the relatively radical leanings of Punch at its inception have been frequently and rightfully noted, both papers came by the 1860s to situate themselves near the center of the spectrum of possible political orientations. Yet the extent to which they embraced either liberal or conservative principles is a complicated question, one answered fully, I think, only by looking carefully at the images in which they directly or indirectly bring together the realms of politics and art. That these two papers had roles to play in the affairs of state seems to have been quickly and widely recognized at the Victorian mid century. Benjamin Disraeli might have tried to ingratiate himself with the staff of Punch as early as 1845,43 but he would hardly have bothered to expend his energies on those who worked for the downscale Fun or the shortlived Judy. Similarly, by the time of his death in 1860, Herbert Ingram, the

Seeing the news

15

proprietor of the ILN, had been able to turn the profits and ­prominence of his paper into a seat in the House of Commons – an achievement not likely to have been the result of his earlier and more socially ­dubious ­career as the promoter of Parr’s Life Pills. Commentary typical of the 1860s attributed to newspapers the ability both to indicate coming changes and to effect them. As Thomas Wright, a working-class essayist, asserted, “The press in great measure creates, as well as expresses, that public opinion to which even law-makers must ultimately bow” – a point that Bagehot made even more forcefully in the mid 1850s when he called writers for the quarterlies an “unelected commons.” In The English Constitution, when he describes the “opinion out of doors” that influences members of Parliament, Bagehot cites the example of The Times, which he conventionally credits with the power to make or to break ministries. Yet he also inconsistently claims that the press both determines and reflects the attitudes of its readers: first he notes aphoristically, “As are the papers, so are the readers,” and then he reverses himself by declaring that “the newspapers only repeat the side [of a case] their purchasers like.” Bagehot ­famously defines public opinion by personifying it as “the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus,”44 but he might have embellished that image by putting a copy of a newspaper in the bald man’s hands. During the middle decades of the century, the evolving contemporary scene to which, according to Charles Knight, the representations in Punch, if not the ILN, serve as a visual “Index” was anything but simple. Historians conventionally and rightfully view the 1830s and 1840s as decades of economic, social, and political crisis: the dislocations and privations characteristic of industrial developments, and the inadequacies of legislative responses to them, as well as the vulnerabilities caused by bad harvests, population growth, and urbanization, all made the times in which these papers established themselves seem genuinely perilous. In the spring of 1843, the social critic Thomas Carlyle published in Past and Present his celebrated indictment of the “dark misery” of the current “Condition of England,” lamenting repeatedly in the course of his analysis that his country was perishing from a “universal Social Gangrene.”45 In the context of the events of the early 1840s his diagnosis seems apt. The problems manifesting themselves as he was writing Past and Present were particularly deep and widespread.46 The economic crisis that had begun in the late 1830s had become even more severe in 1842, the Corn Laws were keeping the cost of food high, employment fell to its lowest level in twenty-­five years, budget deficits and taxes were mounting, riotous demonstrations and strikes that had to be put down by the military were then taking place in industrial cities of the North, the shockingly insanitary conditions in which the working classes lived were being revealed, an illustrated parliamentary Blue Book made visible the horrors of labor done by children and women in the mining industry, fear-inspiring unionization was gaining momentum with the

16

Introduction

enrollment of some sixty thousand adult miners, and – not least pertinent for this study – the Chartists presented to Parliament a summarily rejected “monster” petition six miles long as a call for a radical overhaul of the constitution through proposed reforms that included, among those listed in the six points of their charter, manhood suffrage and the secret ballot. The second chapter of this study focuses in particular on paintings exhibited and engravings printed in the year 1843, and it demonstrates that seeing the early 1840s as critical in a medical sense of that word – the patient will either recover or die – both is and is not justified: the visual politics practiced by Punch and the ILN provide more layered and complicated views of times during which some lives remained remarkably untouched by the actualities of hunger or the fears of unrest. A comparable, though reversed case can be made about the high-Victorian decade of the 1860s. In recent years, a number of scholars have debated whether the mid-Victorian period, the years between the early 1850s and the 1870s, constituted a “golden” time of “equipoise,” whether it enjoyed a “great boom.”47 The ills of the Hungry Forties, with their apparently intransigent economic problems and political uncertainties, seemed to have been left far in the past. Yet the visual evidence in the pages of Punch and the ILN, emerging as it does from writers and artists caught up in the issues of the day, suggests that those living in the 1860s recognized instabilities and impending troubles that often overwhelmed any self-­congratulatory feelings of complacency that they might have experienced. The period was distinguished by what were proudly recognized at the time as significant innovations and achievements in technology and commerce – the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cable, the beginning of the Thames embankment and the London underground, and the so-called triumph of free-trade principles. Industrial relations were also improving: the 1860s saw the first effective experiment in collective bargaining, and workers celebrated the extension of the protections afforded by earlier factory acts to those involved in making such products as lace and bleach and matches, as well as, late in the decade, those laboring in small workshops. Many people saw in such events the promise of the eventual accommodation of all divergent class interests. Others, however, were considerably more pessimistic: numerous strikes and lockouts, increasingly rebellious activity among Irish republicans, intermittent but repeated financial crises, including a frightening bank failure, and the bellicosity of the French – all such factors made the future appear less than secure. The uneven, sometimes regressive, and strangely conflicting energies of the 1860s manifested themselves when Punch and the ILN responded to what they deemed to be newsworthy events. The spirit of the age, to adopt an early Victorian formulation, was as anxious and hesitant as it was self-assured and, as I  demonstrate, even at times during its supposedly most peaceful years, militaristic and violent.

Encounter and exchange

17

Encounter a nd e xch a nge In adopting a comparative approach in this study, one that encourages me to contrast two decades while also questioning such a clear opposition, I take my cue from Bagehot and Ruskin. The former in The English Constitution frequently pits the American constitution against the British so that he can draw a “contrast” between the “comparative deficiencies” of a republican democracy and the “cardinal” strengths of “cabinet governments.” Similarly, Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing notes that “every form and line may be made more striking to the eye by an opponent form or line near” it.48 Such formulations are rhetorical and artistic analogues to the two basic forms of social interaction that I identify as central to Victorian daily life: the first I call a comparative encounter, a meeting between individuals of unequal status; and the second, an exchange, the reversal of valuations that such an event may at times effect. Tellingly, both The Elements of Drawing and The English Constitution include analyses of this kind of social interaction; and those analyses, when brought together, as if in a social encounter, yield an exchange. To make that case, some preliminary definitions are in order. Comparative encounters that bring together two people differentiated from each other by degrees of power and prestige are perhaps as significant now as they were in the Victorian period – witness, for instance, contemporary interactions of customers and clerks in an upscale store. Then as now, such interactions occasionally elicit direct and openly acknowledged recognitions of inequality, but more often they consist of the subtle variables of glances and words and gestures by which individuals identify themselves and their standing with others – who speaks first, who yields ground, who looks, who looks away. Yet the range and unashamed articulation of the bases for such differentiations were arguably more evident during Victoria’s reign than they are currently. Among those that counted most were: church and chapel, mental and manual labor, age and youth, male and female, county and borough, English and Irish, British and foreign. In Victorian society comparative encounters occurred every time an employer faced an employee; a mistress, one of her servants; a husband, his wife; a gentleman or lady, a street-seller or beggar. In each case the superior typically expected unequivocal signs of deference from the inferior. As the lived experience of the inequalities central to Victorian culture, comparative encounters quickly, even automatically identified one person as better, more highly valued than another. Such distinctions were deemed a kind of second nature in a society wed to the differentiations of a class system in which complex gradations divided and subdivided various groups one from another – aristocracy, gentry, multiple levels of middle and working classes, as well as a “­residium” encompassing both the destitute and the criminal. When set

18

Introduction

out in such an orderly array, this hierarchy obscures the reality of the “wonderful muddle” that Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution recognized as the result of British class distinctions: only by obfuscating differences or similarities that do exist, and by highlighting others that do not, can this system maintain and foster inequality.49 Yet comparative encounters tend both to highlight and to simplify such complexities. The physical and economic difference evident in dress, manners, and speech identify the participants in a comparative encounter as two individuals defined by simple oppositions – upper versus lower, genteel versus common, middle versus working. An encounter typically allows one character to exert or to test his or her dominance over another, establishing relations – superiority and inferiority, power and impotence – based on values attaching to such factors as birth, wealth, and education as well as age, gender, and nationality. Class, whatever its larger structures or more subtle implications when used to describe society as a whole, emerges in the context of commonplace meetings of daily life as a practice dependent on palpable, visible, relentless, and apparently invariable binary distinctions. The complexities typical of depictions of comparative encounters in a Victorian text or image, however, often make it difficult to determine whether conventional attributions of value are being maintained or if those values are being reversed in what I call an exchange.50 Although structurally similar to more traditional and easily recognized instances of hierarchies undone, such as the servant’s revelation of the shortcomings of the master or the worker’s scorn for the effete foppery of a gentleman’s behavior, an exchange occurs only when either the supposedly superior party to a meeting or its observer recognizes that the customary standards no longer obtain. At such a moment the two participants to an encounter exchange the positions that they hold relative to each other. Most meetings have no such effect. Yet when they do, exchanges, which are more frequent in the verbal and visual texts of the 1860s than they are in those of the 1840s, reveal the practices of Victorian culture and the actions of its participants at their most flexible and accommodating and at times, I think, even admirable. There would seem to be little potential for a reversal of conventional expectations about the political sympathies of Ruskin and Bagehot. Like the First and Second Reform Acts, the two men were defined by their differences. When they met at gatherings of the Metaphysical Society, Bagehot reportedly “taunted” his elder to provide proof for his contentions.51 Ruskin, who scoffed at the idea of anyone’s having anything to do with parliamentary politics, would hardly have felt sympathy with Bagehot on his three failed attempts to win a seat in the House of Commons in 1865, 1866, and 1867. For all Ruskin’s road-building efforts outside Oxford and the intended good works of his Guild of St. George, he remained the idealist; Bagehot, more the man of practical realities.

Encounter and exchange

19

Their political allegiances, both combining liberalism and conservatism in different ­measures, were also motivated by distinctly opposed perspectives on the values championed by different parties, Ruskin finding in Toryism arguments for obedience and Bagehot identifying in Whiggish liberalism an appealing tradition of enjoyment. Their different but almost equally unusual educations, however, were rooted in nonconformity, and their subsequent training fostered a stunning range of intellectual interests – encompassing, between the two writers, geology, literature, history, philosophy, theology, mathematics, physics, and architecture, as well as politics and art. Moreover, the careers of both Ruskin and Bagehot involved in equal measure similarities and differences. Both of their major interests moved, to use current disciplinary terms, from the humanities to the social sciences. Ruskin was publishing on art and architecture in the 1840s and 1850s, most notably in Modern Painters (1843–60), which Charlotte Brontë, speaking for many of her contemporaries (and for me), praised when she said, “this book seems to give me eyes.”52 Similarly, after publishing articles on economics in the late 1840s, Bagehot dedicated most of the next decade to literary and biographical criticism as well as essays on history. Yet, by the late 1850s and early 1860s, both men had identified the social and political issues that would command their attention for the rest of their careers. In the year in which Ruskin published The Elements of Drawing, he was invited to lecture on the occasion of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, and he delivered two papers titled “The Political Economy of Art,” preludes to his passionate attack on political economists in Unto this Last (1860), a diatribe that Bagehot reportedly disdained.53 In 1861 Bagehot became the editor of The Economist, writing leaders which are as pithy as Ruskin’s essays are prolix, on foreign affairs, politics, and economics, before turning to his work on the constitution, published first as a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review. Ruskin’s younger colleague was arguably pursuing with more professional and single-minded intent the kinds of subjects in the treating of which Ruskin remained the more gifted and productively inconsistent amateur. Such qualities are evident in the markedly different ways in which the two men thought about encounters and exchanges. At issue are oppositions cast in material terms, indirectly in the case of Bagehot, directly in the case of Ruskin. Bagehot’s descriptions of commonplace meetings between individuals of unequal status reveal his belief in the apparently inalterable nature of inequality. To support the claim in The English Constitution that Victorian society is composed of “strata” of persons radically separated from each other, Bagehot challenges his readers to perform an experiment: “Those who doubt [this analysis] should go out into their kitchens: let an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the

20

Introduction

housemaid and the footman, and he will find that what he says seems [to them] unintelligible, confused, and erroneous.” Going into one’s kitchen, talking with one’s servants, is, for Bagehot, an intellectual test. Yet such a meeting no doubt reflects other, more “palpable” measures of comparison: refined versus relatively coarse bodies, the soft textures of the gentleman’s suit and shirt versus the cruder and sturdier fabrics of the footman’s uniform and the housemaid’s apron, the garments of the latter two ­declaring the work that they do in their master’s establishment and their economic dependence on him. The contest of ideas imagined by Bagehot is therefore only one component of a comparative encounter whose binary distinctions illuminate the “muddle” of British class relations. The people on either side of the divide between intelligence and stupidity, as Bagehot constructs it, cannot imagine that they have any community of interests either with those across that divide or, in the case of the servants, any differences from each other. Bagehot assumes that housemaid and footman are indistinguishable elements in one unit; and the gentleman is portrayed as so fundamentally opposed to his employees that he must be speaking what is to them a foreign language.54 For Bagehot, encounters typically put different kinds of men firmly and rightly in their quite different places. Yet if Bagehot were describing an exchange – as he definitely is not – the “accomplished” master visiting his kitchen might learn a thing or two from those working there. In The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin describes in aesthetic terms such an exchange of valuations when he outlines the compositional principle that he calls “the law of interchange,” an effect of one represented object meeting and trading its characteristics with those of another. The first example of this law in The Elements of Drawing is highly unusual because it is not taken from nature. Rather, Ruskin describes a heraldic shield divided left and right into the two colors of its background, on which is depicted the bifurcated figure of an animal, half of it, say, a blue form on white ground and the other half a white form on blue ground. Such a design “enforces the unity of opposite things, by giving to each a portion of the character of the other.” Since, according to Ruskin, the composition of a good picture is an emblem of good human government, he concludes his analysis of this specific effect by noting, “The typical purpose of the law of interchange is, of course, to teach us how opposite natures may be helped and strengthened by receiving each, as far as they can, some impress or reflection, or imparted power, from the other.”55 Ruskin’s language here expresses the extent of the transformations wrought by such an encounter. Almost as if the two sides of the shield have been bent toward each other, they become mirrors “reflect[ing]” each other or, more oddly still, they press upon each other in ways that empower rather than weaken them. When the theories of social relations offered by Bagehot in his examination of the British constitution and by Ruskin in his drawing manual

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21

are asked to encounter each other, an unexpected exchange takes place. Ruskin, a “Tory of the old school,” as he repeatedly labeled himself,56 appears more democratic than Bagehot, the cautious liberal. Ruskin looks at a shield  – a highly traditional image that conveys the superiority of the knight or, later, the aristocrat to the lowly serf or commoner  – and finds in it the image of an ideal crucial to the health of human polities. Ruskin’s law of interchange allows this self-confessed “illiberal” thinker to ­contemplate, at least in artistic terms, the advantages of a kind of cross-class miscegenation by which “opposite natures” can “impart” their “power” to each other. Bagehot cannot imagine such an exchange. Ruskin’s theories unsettle social hierarchies. Bagehot’s do not. Such an outcome is not exactly what one might expect from Ruskin, the author of Time and Tide, a work of the 1860s in which he frequently either condescends to or berates the well-intentioned cork cutter with whom he is corresponding. In this specific meeting of ideas, however, Ruskin the Tory and Bagehot the Whig change places with each other. Proceedi ng t wo by t wo As this example suggests, encounters and exchanges serve throughout this study as guides not only to the content of Victorian representations of everyday life but also to the kind of analysis appropriate to them. Like a metaphor or an analogy, a comparative encounter involves understanding one phenomenon in relation to another – one person in terms of another. Similarly, my approach involves staging what might be labeled analytic encounters, opportunities to gauge the status or significance of one phenomenon in relation to that of its opposite, with the goal of trying to discover whether such a move leads to an analytic exchange, a reversal of conventional expectations about values or priorities. In one sense, setting prints and paintings or words and images against each other,57 creating an encounter between them, is simply a version of the time-honored procedures of art-historical analysis, in which, as it is now practiced in classrooms or at conferences, one digital image joins another on opposite sides of a projection screen. Yet such comparisons are particularly relevant here because they are the analytic counterparts of the kind of social commentary in which Victorians routinely engaged when they debated in the 1860s whether and how to extend the suffrage and, earlier on, when they used images to test whether franchise reform had changed the constitution under which they lived. Moreover, significant as the meetings presented in a picture may be, the imaginative encounters between its spectator and its subjects are often equally meaningful.58 For many Victorian viewers, I think, looking at a grand painting in oil or at a print in Punch or the ILN frequently involved measuring their own qualities against those of the individuals depicted in it and determining their places in the hierarchy that it portrays.

22

Introduction

More specifically, understanding the import of a particular print in Punch or the ILN often depends on an analytic encounter between its formal features and characteristic traditions of British art from history painting to book illustration. Moreover, though the depiction of modern life was not by any means the predominant subject of Victorian painting – classical, biblical, and literary subjects were more ­numerous – many of the ­engravings analyzed in this study portray what the painter William Holman Hunt called “scene[s] of contemporary history.”59 At times the artists working for these newspapers seemed to have set for themselves even higher ambitions, aspiring to depict their “scenes” in ways that would characterize their work as a kind of history painting, the genre that had long enjoyed a place at the top of the hierarchy of subjects thought to be appropriate for the fine arts because it depicts long-past mythic or quasimythic events. The conjunction of high and popular art given prominence in this study was in Victorian culture both honored and undervalued. In The Elements of Drawing, Ruskin offers his readers a piece of stunning advice: if they do not have available to them prints of works by Rembrandt or Dürer, they should study and copy wood engravings from Punch.60 To put in such company John Leech, the specific artist to whom Ruskin refers here, seems an exaggeration even for a writer prone to rhetorical excess. Labeling as art the graphic journalism of the mid-Victorian period still invites objections, though painters during the Victorian period sometimes had their own difficulties in establishing the status of their work as an elevated form of representation. Yet the models of analysis offered by Brian Maidment and Peter W. Sinnema prove the value of treating such prints as something more than mere depositories of factual information about the Victorian period, a judgment often rendered against both modern-life painting and graphic journalism. As Tim Barringer has claimed in the context of his exemplary reading of wood engravings, they are a form of “popular illustration [that] deserves … analysis as rigorous as that routinely applied to works of high art.”61 I accordingly subject prints to the extended, close – often very close – readings that literary critics typically accord lyric poems or that art historians reserve for canonical paintings. Visual culture studies has demonstrated the value of setting fine-art objects in the context of popular visual phenomena, but this study, committed as it is to analyzing its materials in ways suggested by the kind of social interchange capable of upsetting conventional valuations, reverses that approach by seeing the relatively popular images of graphic journalism in the context of the fine art of painting as it was practiced from the 1830s to the 1860s. Like the art of the period, the Victorian artists whose works are central to my argument seem to present themselves as parties to one analytic encounter after another. The principal artists on wood featured in this study, John Leech and John Tenniel, the chief Punch cartoonists of

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the 1840s and 1860s, respectively, could be contrasted solely in terms of the different linear qualities of their wood engravings: the former’s socalled soft line reveals his disinclination for the form of reproductive art that became the chief medium of his career, and the latter’s purportedly cold, hard line reflects his more formal training. Similarly, I contrast the early Victorian painter Sir George Hayter and his now largely ignored The House of Commons, 1833 to his younger colleague John Leech, whose “Substance and Shadow” has become one of the most famous cartoons to appear in Punch before the Victorian mid century. Diffident and largely self-taught, Leech strove throughout his career to confirm his sense of himself, not as a designer of comic wood engravings, but as a painter. By contrast, Hayter, excessively self-assured, had trained at the Royal Academy schools; patronized by the likes of the Duke of Bedford and knighted in 1842, Hayter was appointed by Queen Victoria first to the position of her painter of portraits and history painter and then, a greater honor, to the title of her principal painter in ordinary. It would be difficult, moreover, to analyze Hayter’s work without turning, for comparison, to his contemporary, the history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon; and it would be impossible to gauge the impact of one of Tenniel’s best parodies without treating its object, an RA painting of 1867 by the young painter Edward Poynter, whose work is in turn illuminated by comparison with the murals that Ford Madox Brown was completing in Manchester during the last years of his life. Like Thomas Carlyle and Anthony Trollope, whose writings constitute verbal touchstones that illuminate Victorian practices and attitudes, Brown and his epic canvas Work (1852–65) serve frequently as points of reference. A painting widely praised in its own time for its rendering of what the ILN called the commonplace “actualities of our workaday life” (March 18, 1865: 266), it honors hard physical labor and the men doing that labor. Work also makes “brilliant to the eye” in Bagehot’s terms the street politics of daily life by which people are governed and govern others. Finally, many of my analyses of relatively littleknown graphic texts assume that the reader of them will have in mind visual memories of not only Brown’s painting but also Frith’s panoramic canvases as examples of the mid-Victorian visual conventions that were employed to depict modern-day subjects. Yet all these artists seem most obviously distinct from the true heroes of this study, the largely unidentified engravers whose unheralded and underpaid labor was responsible for the images published by Punch and the ILN. Many historical accounts of nineteenth-century book and magazine trades distinguish between draftsmen  – artists or designers of wood-engraved images – and their engravers. Like discussions of the franchise that oppose individuality to numbers, this distinction reflects conventional valuations of the single, unique work of art and reproduced images distributed in tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, as well as

24

Introduction

the customary privileging of imaginative effort over manual labor. Many factors contribute to the continued crediting of this differentiation. As a form of relief printing, wood engraving in the nineteenth century was considered less creative than forms of intaglio reproduction like etching and mezzotint: because Victorian wood engravers cut around the designs provided to them, revealing raised areas to be inked and then printed, they were called “black line” or “facsimile men,” and their craft was often deemed “mechanical.”62 According to W. J. Linton, who prided himself on practicing the craft of wood engraving as Thomas Bewick had done when he revived it in the late eighteenth century, the work of “facsimile men” was nothing more than “rat-like grawing.” Such views still prevail, reducing the facsimile man to “a mere hand on an assembly line.” Artists at the time, perhaps in hopes of elevating their own status, routinely complained that engravers, their inferiors, marred their imaginative creations.63 Such dissimilar evaluations testify to the similarly impressive expertise of typically unknown engravers. As Peter Sinnema has claimed in the case of the ILN, engraving, not drafting, could have “primacy” in the process centrally responsible for the images presented in an illustrated paper.64 In this instance, then, as in the case of Ruskin and Bagehot, a distinction yields an exchange. Although the second edition of A Treatise on Wood Engraving (1861) explains that those involved in wood engraving “recognis[e] the modern policy of a division of labour” and “confine themselves” either to drawing or to engraving, many such workers in the nineteenth century were trained in both activities.65 In 1847 when the rebuilt chamber for the upper house of Parliament was at long last opened, the account on which most other newspapers based theirs appeared in the ILN under the title “The New House of Lords Drawn and Engraved by Joseph Lionel Williams.” Williams, “our Artist,” as the newspaper in one of its typical formulations calls him, was also a book illustrator.66 Beyond designing and engraving the images in this account, he provided the “notes” from which the ILN’s elaborate verbal descriptions were created (April 17, 1847: 245). Similarly, in the case of Joseph Swain, the chief engraver for Punch, the two kinds of worker met in one person. Trained first by a drawing-master and then by an engraver, Swain eventually went on to run Punch’s engraving department, where, in another instance of the distinctions typical of Victorian society, he executed the features of the figures represented, his assistants their bodies and the backgrounds of the image. He also drew sketches for his paper when there was a shortage of designs for a particular issue, and he gave lessons to the artists who came on staff. Finally, Swain became one of the few engravers who had his work shown at the Royal Academy, presenting there between 1863 and 1869 prints after Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais, Frederick Walker, and the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier. Having risen to the top of his profession, Swain did not experience the very real and increasingly oppressive material

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disadvantages endured by most of the workers involved in the engraving trade.67 Yet, as I often demonstrate in this study, the artists and engravers who can be identified were often involved in the two basic stages in the process of creating images through wood engraving – the right hand knew well what the left hand was doing – and that fact explains why the images in Punch and the ILN are often so visually impressive and politically expressive. While I often adopt the Victorian terminology artist and engraver, I  therefore do so without also accepting the positive and negative associations that have, respectively, attached to those titles; and if I often avoid the formulation “an engraving after Tenniel” in favor of the simpler “Tenniel engraving,” I am not forgetting the engravers crucial to its production, and I identify them by name as often as possible. Nor does my use of masculine pronouns assume that all such workers were men, although they were in the great majority throughout the period that I am treating: the census for 1851 recorded that women constituted just over 1 percent of the 5,584 engravers in Britain.68 The question of how male working-class figures are represented in the pages of Punch and the ILN is necessarily the one most often addressed in this study, but even more than women’s perspectives, those largely absent here are the ideas and experiences of workers themselves. The typically middle-class constructions of working-class character that appeared during parliamentary debates and in the pages of Punch and the ILN were no doubt stereotypes, fantasies that Victorian workers themselves might or might not have cared to recognize as accurate portrayals.69 The focus here, however, remains firmly trained on the views – the images and the perspectives – that artists and engravers offered their largely middle- and upper-class audiences. In a number of different ways, the following chapters make the case for the artistry of both modern-life painting and journalistic prints by seeing them as characteristically Victorian amalgamations of art and politics.70 At the heart of the first chapter, which sets out many of the assumptions of later analyses, are the theories on the politics of visuality propounded by Ruskin and Bagehot, particularly the “laws” of composition used by the former to define the effects of what he calls “Line work.”71 That discussion begins, however, with a fictional recreation of the conjunction of art and politics, an analogy offered by Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn, or the Irish Member (1867–69). Trollope deserves pride of place here because, despite conventional estimates  – rather, underestimations  – of his gifts, he was, along with Bagehot, a remarkably shrewd social and political theorist. I also return to A Map of Society Island as a context for both the thinking of Ruskin and Bagehot and engravings published in the 1860s by the ILN and Punch. The second chapter treats two exhibitions held in 1843, Hayter’s public presentation of The House of Commons, 1833 and the initial display of works of art created under the auspices of the

26

Introduction

Fine Arts Commission and planned as decorations for the new Houses of Parliament, as well as prints in the ILN and Punch that responded more or less directly to those two events. Lasting into the 1860s, the painfully drawn-out process of selling Hayter’s painting and the equally unhappy outcome of the efforts of the FAC to provide fit adornments for the chambers and halls of the Houses of Parliament, the “nerve centre” of British politics and public opinion,72 exemplify a particularly direct, though often deeply dysfunctional commerce between art and politics. The discussions in Chapter 3 turn fully to the 1860s and examine individual images, the prints that Punch and the ILN published as their pictorial responses to the events of July 1866 that quickly became known as the Hyde Park riots. I put these and other images directly and indirectly related to reform in a number of contexts: from the seriality of newspaper production and the subjects typical of the two papers and the design conventions of the various media to a range of social and political subjects, including the threat posed by Fenians in the 1860s and the rise, in the same decade, of the amateur military force known as the volunteers. The final chapter then treats prints from the ILN and Punch that were published just before and after the passage of the Second Reform Act, images that demonstrate how fully by 1867 the different but equally engrained visual traditions of those papers had come to determine their politics. In setting these diverse materials in analogical relation to each other, I have heeded Ruskin’s advice to pursue such an approach with more than a little vigor. In The Elements of Drawing, he encourages his readers to seek out analogies between human institutions and the “elements of pictorial composition”: “You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too far. They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete, that the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the more useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one particular, or in any direction of enquiry.”73 By construing as widely as possible Ruskin’s already capacious concept of “any direction of enquiry,” I identify, not the ideals that were his subject, but some of the visual modes of public debate prominent in the 1840s and 1860s. As this study demonstrates, the conjoining of art and politics central to Ruskin’s theories found its Victorian epitome less often in the fine art of painting than in its humble counterpart, the wood engraving of Victorian illustrated journalism.

Cha pter 1

Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

At almost the exact center of Phineas Finn, The Irish Member (1867–69), Anthony Trollope offers an extended commentary on franchise reform. It takes the form of a letter that the eponymous hero receives from his mentor, Joshua Monk, who sets out what he calls the “true theory” of parliamentary representation by likening it to an art object. In this novel, a fictional account of the parliamentary machinations of the mid 1860s that eventually expanded the electorate, Trollope rewrote events from the recent past and predicted those that had not yet transpired when it was being written.1 In the fall of 1866, when he conceived of the story of an exceptionally attractive and lucky young Irishman who attempts to fulfill his political ambitions in the context of a struggle over electoral reform, Trollope was at the height of his literary career. He often wrote so quickly that his publishers could not keep pace with his output, and that speed allowed him to complete Phineas Finn before the Conservative bill became law, so he was free to prophesy there imaginary victories for the Liberal party. In the novel the secret ballot, not an increase in the size of the electorate, is the measure that forces the Liberal government out of office, but it quickly returns to pass “a Reform Bill, – very generous in its enlargement of the franchise, – but no ballot.”2 Despite such divergences from ensuing actualities, many of the specific points that Monk makes in his letter to Phineas accurately reflect the reform debates of 1866 and 1867, particularly their emphasis on working-class character. Most pertinent here, however, is Monk’s use of art as an analogy to politics, an analogy that identifies the two different domains on the basis of the kinds of lines upon which they depend. By the midpoint of the novel, Phineas, miraculously elected to a seat in Parliament despite the fact that he is Irish and innocent and impecunious, has come to revere Monk, the MP whom the narrator calls “a philosophical Cabinet Minister.” Largely a fictional creation, unlike many of the other characters who are based on living politicians,3 Monk begins his discourse on franchise reform with a modest analogy that equates artistic and political representation: “As a portrait should be like the person portrayed, so should a representative House be like the people whom it represents.” This comparison, which figures the House of Commons as an art 27

28

Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

object, leads to an extended metaphor that contradicts the ­earlier one by ­turning the members of the House of Commons, specifically when they are involved in reforming the franchise, into a single “artist” who paints a “miniature.” Monk cautions against thinking that the task of political portraiture should be undertaken by the unskilled: “let the artist be careful to put in every line of the expression of that ever-moving face. To do this is great work, and the artist must know his trade well.”4 When Gladstone referred in 1866 to divisions “between class and class,” he sounded very much like Trollope’s Monk, perhaps even serving in this instance as a model for that character. Cautioning his parliamentary colleagues to be “upright” in their political artistry, he advised, “Let us understand the lines we draw.”5 Not surprisingly, then, visual images that have as their chief compositional features various kinds of lines  – including lines of men, as well as lines of, within, and around buildings – have the potential to comment on franchise reform. Following the lead of both novelist and politician, this chapter examines the extent to which Victorian theory and practice defined both visual images and electoral laws as phenomena constituted by lines of demarcation. The questions raised by the significance of the linear components of art and politics were often similar. What is the effect of the lines, particularly those of wood engraving, that create the subjects in a picture and thereby separate one thing from another? Where does the line fall between those eligible to vote and those not eligible? The second of these queries might seem amenable to fairly straightforward answers, but the statutes dealing with the suffrage yielded a quite different reality once the newly enfranchised tried actually to vote. As Victorian case law repeatedly proves, the implementation of the First and Second Reform Acts was an endlessly complicated process – often unbelievably so. Yet reading reform debates, particularly as they were recorded in the 1860s in Hansard, makes it clear that recognizing the existence of such complications, even less mastering their details, was well beyond the capacities of most MPs, who often referred almost simplistically to past and potential legislation as if it established clear distinctions. Writing in 1866 in his Studies in Parliament, R. H. Hutton explained why that might have been the case: “political problems are rarely susceptible of much nuance; indeed, if they need it, as they sometimes do, they never get it; for the popular mind and popular bodies which decide political issues agree to ignore all delicate shades of distinction.”6 From such a perspective on the legislative questions of the day, wood engraving would be the graphic medium most likely to offer a via media between incomprehensible nuance and misleading oversimplification. Ruskin’s conception of a line as “the simplest work of art” suggests the usefulness of the “Line work” of engraving to political debate: often the source of significant visual complexity, wood engraving was also an art of simplicity. In his 1872 lectures on the subject of engraving, Ariadne

Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

29

Florentina, Ruskin specifies this point by explaining that it fosters “the habit of abstraction … of deciding what are the essential points in the things you see.” The prints discussed in this chapter are effective because their lines do both what Ruskin requires of the medium and what Hutton sees as the necessity of political debate. What the art critic calls the ability of engraving to “preserve through any number of impressions the distinctness of a well-cut line”7 explains how “the popular mind and [a] popular bod[y]” like Parliament are provided with visual arguments that are easily understood even when they are implicit rather than explicit. By figuring forth the factors that constitute eligibility for the suffrage, the lines of wood engravings allowed their designers to accomplish what politicians at times could not achieve. The Royal Academy of Art might seem a more likely nexus of the Victorian relations between art and politics than wood engraving. The RA was recognized at the time, as one writer put the point in 1866, as a signal instance of “Art-Politics,” legislative procedures affecting “the weal of art generally”; and the academy no doubt functioned in many ways from the 1830s to the 1860s as what one historian has called an “auxiliary political stage.”8 Yet as an example of how those domains intersected during the nineteenth century, the case of the RA, at least in terms of its workings as an institution, is more atypical than exemplary. During those decades, no fewer than six parliamentary committees or royal commissions focused attention on its practices; and the first of these investigations, undertaken by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835–36), “epitomized the attempts to construct a post-1832 ‘Reform’ agenda for public involvement in the visual arts.”9 Interested primarily in arts education and industrial design, members of the committee also examined, in the words of the charge to them, the “Constitution, Management and Effects of Institutions connected with the Arts.” Benjamin Robert Haydon, along with the painter John Martin, testified bitterly to the RA’s pernicious effects, particularly on the high art of history painting; and the committee concluded somewhat petulantly in 1836 that the RA had “many of the privileges of a public body, without bearing the direct burthen of public responsibility.”10 Such a complaint, however, led to no substantive institutional reforms. The testimony of the current president of the Royal Academy, Martin Archer Shee, deftly parried the attacks on his institution by basing his claims for its relative independence on its relation, not to Parliament or to the public, but to its sovereign: because the only benefit that the academy had received, use of the apartments that housed its offices and galleries and studios, came by the “express donation and command of His Majesty,” originally through a grant from George III, the RA simply did not come within the purview of the House of Commons.11 It was therefore a “national institution,” not a “national establishment.” Parliamentary

30

Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

objections to such reasoning kept this issue alive for decades, but Archer Shee might well have had the last word in his 1837 public Letter to Lord John Russell on the Alleged Claim of the Public to be Admitted Gratis to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy; there he impudently asserted, “The Royal Academicians, my Lord, owe much to their sovereign, but nothing to their country.”12 As the following discussions demonstrate, other Victorian artists, including painters and wood engravers and designers, framed different and less dismissive responses to the “Alleged Claim[s]” that “the Public” made on their talents. The first of the images illustrating this point here is A Map of Society Island, the broadside that I discuss briefly in the introduction, and the last are three engravings from the 1860s published in the ILN and Punch. These prints are less separated by decades than they are joined by similar goals. They all deal with the question of the eligibility to vote of workingclass men: the earlier image uses the most emphatic of its lines to visualize what franchise reform had not done; the three later engravings, by constructing politically resonant comparative encounters across the lines that separate their subjects from their viewers, demonstrate what reform ought not to do. Understanding how these prints eschew what are, according to Hutton, “delicate shades of distinction” so that they can visualize, in Ruskin’s words, “the essential points in the things you see” requires a fairly detailed examination of the messy and intricate realities of Victorian electoral law, and that subject provides an introduction to prints published in the first half of the 1860s when franchise reform seemed an oft-raised but intransigently unsuccessful legislative measure. Laws, like images, are representations, visions of how different social groups combine to form the shape of a nation’s constitution; but the statutes that determined who could vote in the central decades were fuzzy approximations rather than razor-sharp distinctions. Preceding this analytic encounter between these specific conjunctions of art and politics are the theories offered by Ruskin, Bagehot, and Trollope, writers whose works frequently encountered each other in the pages of journals such as the Cornhill Magazine and the Fortnightly Review. In such venues the differences between these men were often uncomfortably evident. Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage did as much to make the fortunes of the Cornhill, where its first installment led off the first issue, as Ruskin’s Unto This Last did to jeopardize them. Only months after Bagehot’s first essay of The English Constitution was the leading article in the new Fortnightly, Trollope’s review there of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies so enraged Carlyle that he denounced its author as a man “grown fat” and stupid on his vulgar taste for “the commonplace.” Despite such episodes, the thinking of these three men meet here to reveal why Victorian artists might be better politicians than those who, as Trollope said with some envy, win the honor of affixing the letters MP to their names.13

Art as analogy

31

A rt as a na lo gy As soon as Joshua Monk defines the House of Commons as itself an artist, the apparently simple analogy that he is drawing between art and the politics of franchise reform begins to erase distinctions between past and present and between painter and painted. Explaining how the “nation” is constituted by what one institution, the “House,” imagines it to be, the “philosophical” radical, despite his dedication to the cause of change, confesses himself to be seduced by the beauty of outmoded constitutional arrangements. Changing the art object of his analogy from a portrait miniature to a painting on canvas,14 he eloquently praises former practices of British political art: With us, hitherto, there have been snatches of the countenance of the nation which have been inimitable, – a turn of the eye here and a curl of the lip there, which have seemed to denote a power almost divine. There have been marvels on the canvas so beautiful that one approaches the work of remodelling it with awe. But not only is the picture imperfect, – a thing in snatches, – but with the years it becomes less and still less like its original. The necessity for remodelling it is imperative .… But let us be specially careful to retain as much as possible of those lines which we all acknowledge to be so faithfully representative of our nation. To give a bare numerical majority of the people that power which the numerical majority has in the United States, would not be to achieve representation. The nation as it now exists would not be known by such a portrait; – but neither can it now be known by that which exists.15

Some “lines,” Monk asserts, “faithfully represent … our nation.” Others presumably do not. The current Parliament is a “picture imperfect,  – a thing in snatches, … with the years [becoming] less and still less like its original,” unable to convey the “countenance of the nation.” Here Monk fully registers the appeal of the aesthetic attractions of the constitution created in 1832, much as Bagehot does in The English Constitution when he describes the nature of the British government before the reforms of 1867. Monk’s surprisingly intense nostalgia for such “almost divine” former “marvels on … canvas” turns him momentarily into the voice of conservation, if not conservatism: Parliament must “be specially careful to retain as much as possible of those lines” that, first in 1832 and even in the years before 1867, “we all acknowledge to be so faithfully representative of our nation.” Monk’s hesitation before the prospect of reform reflects the widely felt fear, a fear voiced even by the Liberals who championed an extended franchise, that it would dangerously undermine the power of those already allowed to choose their legislators.16 The unexpectedly nostalgic bent of Monk’s words, almost as if having drawn an analogy from the traditional and sometimes tradition-bound domain of art, moves him to undercut, at least rhetorically, the case for increasingly inclusive forms of political representation. The language of

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Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

art therefore allows Trollope to gauge the extent of his radical’s ­radicalism. Knowing that opponents of any sort of electoral reform demonize it most effectively when they decry its democratic tendencies, its elevation to power of a “bare numerical majority,” Monk avoids any reference to such numbers by making the institution of Parliament both a painter and his subject. Those represented become the face of a single person bodied forth by the brush of a single, highly skilled and presumably welltrained artist capable of capturing in a static work of art the portrait of an “ever-moving face.” Yet Monk’s initial reference to a portrait miniature relegates the work of present-day legislators to the past. Miniature painting was before the nineteenth century a largely aristocratic form; and throughout the long years of its popularity, its typical featuring of one face embodied ideals of individualism. Portrait miniatures had become so outdated by the time that Trollope was writing Phineas Finn – “swept away,” in the words of a contemporary, by the low cost and increasingly effective technology of photography – that the South Kensington Museum in 1865 mounted an exhibition to encourage their preservation.17 Similarly, according to Monk, the 658 members of Parliament become the painter of a countenance whose imagined features – “a turn of the eye here and a curl of the lip there” – conform to Ruskin’s dictum that “all beautiful objects” are “terminated by delicately curved lines.”18 Furthermore, these features evoke the kinds of portraits commissioned in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to portray the proud members of the social elite, grand paintings in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir Thomas Lawrence. From the perspective of the 1860s, Monk looks back to the political art object created in 1832, and it speaks to him of a world of privilege and beauty, described in terms of the curves of the human face. Thus, Monk’s definition of the constitution, like his sense of what counts as art in the Victorian period, tends toward the conventional, even the passé: the members of the House may represent the voters who elect them, but they are not to think of themselves as delegates whose sole duty is to speak for the views of those whom they represent. MPs become paradoxically the creators of their constituents. The evocative power that Monk attributes to a graphic image is explained, oddly enough, by Victorian conceptions of visual processes, particularly those involved in the perception of two-dimensional stimuli. Faith in the veridicality of vision was a central tenet of both Victorian science and everyday common sense,19 and authoritative evidence of the dependability of sight could be found in the most unlikely of examples. Sir David Brewster, one of the period’s foremost authorities on vision, noted in a review article of 1856 that “a painting, picture, or photograph, seen with one eye, is seen more perfectly” than with two eyes; he reasoned that the viewer who lacks bilateral depth perception can see the two dimensions of an image more accurately than those who look at it with

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both eyes. The work of art that is, in his words, “deceiving us” into seeing a dimension not physically present, in effect proves that even partial sightedness issues in trustworthy perceptions.20 What science tells Brewster, art tells Ruskin. Drawing is for the latter a powerful visual technology precisely because it creates an image that is “perfectly like the object seen with one [eye].” The annals of Victorian illustrated journalism offer unexpected, though perhaps coincidental, corroboration of this claim: John Tenniel and George du Maurier, both of whom designed widely celebrated cartoons for Punch, each had vision in only one eye, a physical disability that, according to the theories of one modern cognitive scientist, gives many artists an advantage not enjoyed by their binocularly blessed colleagues.21 In arguably the most famous footnote that he ever wrote, Ruskin asserts in The Elements of Drawing the primacy of “what may be called the innocence of the eye,” the ability to see the physical world as “flat stains of colour” without endowing them with depth and volume. Monocular vision, a “sort of childish perception,” Ruskin claims, is reproduced most faithfully by the “highly accomplished artist” who can see and therefore put on canvas “nothing but flat colours.”22 Paradoxically, then, according to Ruskin, a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional scene does full justice to its actualities. Such perspectives, drawn from both physiology and art criticism, help to elucidate the significance that Victorians attributed to different kinds of lines, two-dimensional forms that might in other contexts seem to be relatively limited in their expressive capacities. In his typical fashion, Ruskin links moral and aesthetic values when he claims, in an essay published early in 1866, “The virtue of Art, as of life, is that no line shall be in vain.”23 The lines in an art object – both those depicted and those that do the depicting – often reflect the peculiarly Victorian conflation of material, aesthetic, and social values that is the hallmark of Ruskin’s thinking. For that reason, phenomena constituted by lines may owe something of their effect on Victorian readers to their similarities to the “dividing” lines that God’s hand was conventionally seen as drawing. One Anglican priest told the schoolboys in his congregation, according to a sermon published in 1859: We have, I think, in England, owing to the freedom of our constitution, and the happy providential blessings which God has heaped upon us, followed the division of mankind which God himself has made, and struck the line between those who are gentlemen, that is, of a higher and superior class, and those who are not, where He himself has struck it. Some men He has made to rule and govern; some to be ruled and governed.

The lines that society draws between class strata, according to this cleric, simply trace over those already inscribed by a divine drawing master. Because the term line could also refer to one’s vocation and one’s lot in

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life – a quotation from the Psalms much favored by Victorians refers to those whose “lines [have] fallen … in pleasant places”24 – the authority of providential dispensation was often brought to bear on political questions whenever the word line was used or whenever a line was portrayed in a picture. When late in his career Ruskin eloquently defined the medium of wood engraving as a form of “incised light,” he was referring to the particular material process of relief printing that produces its images – the part of the wood block actually cut out by the engraver yields white, not black – but he also had in mind the moral and social enlightenment that such images may convey. Similarly, when he praises the ability of an engraving to preserve almost indefinitely the “distinctness of a well-cut line,” he is voicing his understanding that the creation of sharply wrought distinctions was central both to a specific form of reproductive technology and to a wide range of the most characteristic manifestations of Victorian culture. In both the 1830s and the 1860s, “well-cut” lines were as much a matter of political discourse as they were the basis of graphic art. No contemporary sources make that point more forcefully than parliamentary debates about franchise reform. Striving for a sense of simple distinctions, MPs in 1831 in particular used the word line again and again on the floor of the House of Commons whenever the disfranchisement of some boroughs or counties and the enfranchisement of others was the main topic of discussion. In some instances the word appears in the phrase “line of disfranchisement,” but more often it indicates a constituency that does or does not come “within the line,” being used that way at least five times within ten days at the end of July.25 At other times MPs elaborated on the implications of the term in ways that conveyed their contempt for the whole process of reform – the “line” was “most arbitrary and unjust” – or, in its most ornate formulation, the “very elastic” line had a “slip-knot at the end [to] strangle a proper as well as an improper borough.” Speakers also typically noted that such a distinction was a flawed human creation: “It had been said, with reference to the peculiar provisions of the Bill, that the framers of it must have drawn a line somewhere: true, but … that line was drawn most unfairly, though, at the same time, with great ingenuity and adroitness.”26 Since the debates in 1831 and 1832 turned on the question of attaching a loosely construed population test to the representation allotted to a specific district, the term line came to stand for a number: “the line of 2,000 inhabitants,” “the line of 150,000 inhabitants.” Since not even that word used in the singular, with its implication of a graphic realization of a boundary or on a map, could obscure the fact that what was at stake was the relative numerousness of new electors, the test of whether a borough would return one or two or no MPs based on its population was replaced by a measurement based on the number of houses and the amount of taxes paid in an

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electoral district. When the House of Lords stymied the second attempt in 1831 to pass a reform bill, The Times used the basis of Monk’s analogy to thunder, “they have done what they can never undo … the four hundred or so Lords have drawn a line between them and 22 million people.”27 When it came to the franchise, politicians in the 1860s frequently echoed the language of the 1830s. When Gladstone declared his interest in enlarging the electorate, noting that “the present franchise … draws the line between the lower middle class and the upper order of the working class,” he was referring to the supposedly clear distinction between a building that rented for £10 a year and one worth, as Micawber would put it, only £9 19s. When Robert Lowe began to derail reform in March of 1866 by claiming that there were already more than enough enfranchised workers, his statement reiterated, to different purpose, Gladstone’s use of the term line: those proposing reform are “under the delusion … that the working classes [are] excluded from the franchise, and that there [is] a sharp line drawn at the 10l. franchise, above which the working men could not penetrate.” A year later Disraeli, championing a suffrage based on ratepaying rather than on the specific cost of housing, mocked Gladstone’s attempt to reintroduce a monetary qualification by referring to it as “a line, a magical line” and “your precious line.” Not surprisingly, Bagehot used a chronological version of such an image when he concluded that “the Reform Bill of this year,” like that of 1832, “will be a sort of dividing line in English history.”28 Such metaphors recall the long-standing visual traditions of reform debate, of which A Map of Society Island (fig. 0.1) is a striking example.29 Published by Henry Hetherington, most probably in 1832, this broadside was offered at the reduced price of two pence to buyers of the Poor Man’s Guardian, which Hetherington had established to protest stamp taxes on newspapers and magazines. The print parodies both official documents and early illustrated journalism not only by designating its designer F. G. T. as “Geographer to their Majesties, the Rabble,” but also by noting that the image is based on “Observations taken on the spot.” Taking up the bottom half of the page and extending the width of Society Island is a “DESCRIPTION,” a people’s descriptive catalogue of the meanings of the image in which the registers of outrage combine the moral, the political, and the economic. The most resonant feature of the map itself is, as I note in the introduction, its dark “Line of Representation or Reform,” a border defended by a number of “Russell’s Forts” or Whig reform bills. As the text points out, those legislative measures ensure that the wealth in the “Mountains of Wealth” stays where it is: the “Line” of franchise reform combines “the tropic of comfort” and “the boundary of representation.” According to Monk’s analogy in Phineas Finn, the test that acts of political portraiture must pass involves faithfulness to both present realities and past beauties. F. G. T.’s map and its description are marked by

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their fidelity to a vast population living within a territory bounded by the ­dotted “Circle of Misery.” Although A Map of Society Island is a kind of visualized Pilgrim’s Progress, its message could not be more different from that of John Bunyan. A nineteenth-century print depicts the route taken by Christian from the City of Destruction as a curved track that, no matter how many obstacles he passes, circles inevitably toward the Celestial City and salvation in the afterlife.30 A Map of Society Island, by contrast, depicts territory through which it is impossible to journey. A “Russell’s Fort,” a bill to extend the franchise, is, to the “People,” an impassable barrier. No journeys along the “Coast of Privation & Suffering” or labor in the “Mines of uncultivated Intellect” will lead to the promised land of the suffrage. Unlike the stability that Ruskin sees pictured in straight lines, the “Line of Representation or Reform” in this print figures forth an inalterable exclusion from citizenship that might with some justice be opposed by violent revolt. The writer of the accompanying text implies that the lost “Barque of the Constitution” might be recovered if the “people” would only understand the strength afforded them by their numbers. It is impossible to believe that the disproportion of “population and force” between ruled and rulers does not itself incite rebellion: “It is astonishing that these brave and active people [in the Land of Production] can look on the Map, and see how small a corner contains their conquerors, and not rise in a mass and destroy them, or at all events emancipate themselves.” This map of British society accurately represents relative numbers and therefore makes visible both the inequalities between its sections and the compact between its smaller groups: the Land of Production “exceed[s] in a nine-fold degree, both in population and force, the whole of the rest of the island.” Speaking to those living there, the writer advises, “let them keep their eyes on this Chart.” The image that it projects will ensure, if anything can, that the Rabble will at least try to recognize “their inalienable birthright as human beings.” The shape given the nation in A Map of Society Island harks back to earlier visual traditions and looks forward to Ford Madox Brown’s use of a “social pyramid” in Work.31 The landscape format of Brown’s exploration of the everyday politics of the street contains depictions of high and low arrayed in that order. Like the aristocracy at the Peak of Power on the tip of the land mass in A Map, the least numerous and most genteel figures in the painting, the gentleman and the young lady on horseback, are set in the middle distance, but both the effects of perspective and the slope of the street on which they ride make them literally the most elevated human beings in Work; the poor children, who are nearest the picture plane, its most debased. There are more figures spread across the foreground of the painting than in its middle ground, and they are representatives of what the Poor Man’s Guardian calls the “people,” those whose numbers

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create the  wide base of a triangle. The largest single group of figures in Work – the navvies or excavators at its center – anchor this shape, with one  of  them, according to Brown, playing the role of the “hero” of the painting. In both pictures, the clear implication is that the manual labor of the relatively lowly is the unacknowledged basis of the British nation.32 Both these images hark back to earlier instances in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of picturing the constitution as a person, place, or thing – an entity with physical as well as conceptual presence. Puns on the word constitution often yielded images of John Bull’s health as equivalent to that of Britain itself, and numerous objects were also labeled “the constitution” in the visual satires published during those years: a boat, ship, sun, tree, lantern, extinguisher, rock, chest, haystack, and leaking cooking pot.33 Triangles, however, were often the preferred visualizations of the constitution. A Picture of Great Britain in the Year 1793 includes a small pyramid labeled “Stability,” and The Political Pyramid of Our Glorious Constitution in the Year of Grace 1828 contains a series of nested triangles. A particularly creative print titled Radical Tottering Pyramid Inverted (1820) turns upside down the geometrical shape associated by conservatives with civil peace: its base, now at the top of the image, holds figures who carry banners emblazoned with “Liberty” and “Universal Suffrage”; and the apex of the pyramid, now at the bottom of the image, impales the dead body of the king.34 F. G. T. offers A Map of Society Island as a similar reversal of the conventional forms given the constitution by featuring the shape of the body politic as a protest against political oppression. With its comparable composition, Work too may be invoking this visual tradition to ask why the meek do not rise and inherit the earth. U nc e rta i n li nes: the borough f r a nch is e in actio n The bold, dark, straight mark that crosses the island of Britain as it is visualized by the Poor Man’s Guardian represents the exclusion from and inclusion in the suffrage as an inviolable distinction between one place and another. Yet to explore how laws dealing with the borough franchise were actually put into practice is to confront a situation the opposite of clear and definitive. Bagehot provides a more apt image for the actualities of the mid-Victorian suffrage in The English Constitution when he uses the metaphor of a wavering boundary to characterize the “­mischievous” and indecipherable “lines of our constitution.” Because they “were framed in old eras,” they resemble rows of houses unevenly laid out along “the devious tracks of the old green lanes”: “These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle. The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants … and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.”35 Even the “hesitating” or “casual line” of a country lane

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may be too definite an image of a demarcation to convey the workings of electoral law in the mid nineteenth century, but Bagehot’s formulation is appropriate because it conveys the remarkable extent to which the borough franchise both before and after 1832 and 1867 was the result of a form of street politics involving the boundaries between streets as much as the people occupying buildings in them. Money joined location as determining factors. Of what kinds of buildings did potential voters have the use? On what terms? At what cost? All these queries turn on matters of price and value, and their answers reflected material differentiations like those operable during a comparative encounter – in this case, distinctions between premises of larger or smaller size, of higher or lower quality, in more or less expensive neighborhoods. Attempts by artists and politicians to set out what Ruskin calls the “essential” qualities of franchise reform went forward in the context of remarkable disagreements and confusions about the statutes that were already on the books. Recognizing the knotty intricacies of the legal context of images such as A Map of Society Island and prints from the ILN and Punch makes the contradictions in which Monk finds himself involved when he likens politics to art seem positively straightforward by comparison. The rated occupancy suffrage instituted by the First Reform Act, in linking the vote in the boroughs to premises whose “clear yearly Value” was at least £10, seemed to establish an admirable uniformity where chaos had previously reigned. The result was otherwise. In this instance, as in others such as the various factory acts, a newly passed law did not invalidate previous legislation unless it explicitly stated that it was to do so; and the full force of any new measure therefore depended as much on what it carried over from the past as on what it innovated. (Thus parenthetical additions to this discussion of franchise qualifications before 1867 indicate provisions that remained unchanged by the passage of the Second Reform Act.) According to the edition of a standard compendium of case law published in 1865, the definition of the “legal incapacities” that render a man ineligible to vote in a parliamentary election refers to the exclusions created by laws passed before the Great Reform Act. In addition to the obvious prohibition against voting by women – in other words, all those not indicated by the words “every Male person” – earlier statutes excluded aliens, minors, felons, and the insane (though not during any period of lucidity that happened to correspond with the timing of an election), along with the other categories of men such as excise and customs officers, members of police forces, employees of the Post Office, and peers.36 When Gladstone spoke of men “otherwise incapacitated,” he therefore had in mind even men like Anthony Trollope, who was unable to vote until he quit the Post Office shortly after completing Phineas Finn  – a form of disfranchisement to which the novelist vigorously objected, much to the displeasure of a conservatively inclined writer for the ILN (June 17,

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1865: 590). These prohibitions again suggest clear-cut distinctions, but an 1847 collection of decisions by an appeals court makes clear how subtle and simply illogical these discriminations might be. An employee required to live in a £10 house to do his work was not eligible to vote, unlike an employee occupying a similar house as part payment for this work. Men who collected excise or customs duties or duties on salt could not vote, unlike those who dealt with land taxes.37 As these examples suggest, neither new definitions nor old practices led to the most predictable of results. There was nothing clear about “clear yearly Value” on which the franchise was based: it was the annual rent from which had been deducted rates, taxes, charges for furniture or repairs or insurance, or any combination of two or more of these sums.38 Similarly, the franchise requirements for stable occupancy in the First Reform Act depended on a definition of the term house that was paradoxically both capacious and limited. According to cases from both 1847 and 1865, the word indicates almost any kind of structure in which one was able to put one’s property or servants or one’s own body  – rooms in factories, freestanding dairies, and even cow sheds could qualify. Moreover, occupancy could be “constructive” rather than actual: if a man had had for twelve months the power to occupy a specific building worth £10 a year, even if he had not done so, he could vote by virtue of its value. Additionally, however, such a man must have resided for six months within seven miles of the borough in which his premises were located, but even that requirement could lead to disagreements about how to measure those miles and who had the authority to do so. More confusion no doubt arose from the stipulation in the First Reform Act that a polling place in use before 1832 had to serve as the point from which the distance to a “house” was computed.39 As was the case with the definition of “legal incapacities,” the First Reform Act did not discontinue almost all the so-called ancient-right suffrages. The pre-1832 array of different kinds of franchises in the over three hundred boroughs of England and Wales were, according to T. H.  B. Oldfield writing in 1816, the result of “an infinite diversity of peculiar custom,” the cause of “endless misunderstanding and litigation.”40 At that time the eligibility to vote in a borough might be based on one’s identity as a freeman, liveryman (in the case of the city of London), or potwalloper, or on one’s location in a freehold, scot-and-lot, burgagehold, or corporation borough – a dizzying variety of categories, a number of which one twentieth-century historian simply lumped together under the expressive classification of “venal.” From 1832 on, most such forms of the franchise continued to obtain for the lifetimes of those holding them and, in the case of freemen, to their descendents; and these routes to the vote still accounted for about 10 percent of the electorate in 1865. The economic assumptions justifying some of these franchise qualifications were often so

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Art as politics: lines in theory and practice

dissimilar as to seem simply incompatible. A freeman would presumably be a tradesman of some substance, but the term encompassed a wide variety of economic conditions. A novelist writing in the mid 1860s refers to bargees as freemen who are a “very difficult” set of electors; and even after 1832 some boroughs practiced a species of corruption that involved releasing freemen from jail for only as long as it took them to vote.41 A potwalloper borough, by enfranchising every man who had a pot in which to boil or “wall” his food and the requisite fire to do so, mandated a virtual manhood suffrage within its boundaries. Finally, in the more than thirty boroughs that were mainly agricultural in character, voters in the midVictorian decades typically took their cues from those with money and acres, making professional men like doctors and lawyers, not to mention shopkeepers and craftsmen, “upper servants” to wealthy Tories, electors who were obliged to proclaim their votes in accordance with their masters’ wishes.42 After 1832 men who lived in urban boroughs, supposedly beyond the reach of such influence, did or did not qualify for the £10 suffrage based on supposedly arithmetical matters of shillings and pence. Yet distinctions, like the “hesitating line” of Bagehot’s country lane, were sometimes evident on the different sides of a street on which one parish met another. In debates during 1831, Macaulay declared that the franchise “should depend on a pecuniary qualification,” and thirty years later the radical politicians Bright and Mill agreed by asserting that only those men who paid taxes, in one form or another, should be granted the vote.43 Poor rates satisfied such demands. According to legislation passed in the late sixteenth century, occupiers of all pieces of property, not their owners, were responsible for providing aid to the poor or aged or disabled. According to the First Reform Act (as well as the Second), “houses” (or “dwellings” in 1867) had to be “rateable,” deemed eligible for the paying of poor rates, if they were to confer on the men occupying them the right to vote. The line drawn in 1832 at £10, the level at which taxes on houses had been set in 1825, was also the customary figure below which a dwelling would typically not be subject to rating. Because eligibility for the franchise after 1832 (and again after 1867) was determined by one’s payment of rates, it was thoroughly dependent on the ways in which individual parishes dealt with them. Because parishes, not boroughs, set poor rates until 1834 and collected them even after that date,44 a man who enjoyed the suffrage in one parish might therefore, for any number of reasons, lose it if he moved himself or his belongings or his servants to a “house” of comparable value in a neighboring parish in the same borough. Moreover, parishes differed markedly in terms of housing values and income levels and the needs of the impoverished, not to mention the caprice or incompetence and corruptibility of poor-rate collectors or, as they were called after the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, Poor Law Guardians. In London

Uncertain lines: the borough franchise in action

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boroughs where the rents were relatively high, only a small percentage of men, in some cases as low as 3 percent, occupied premises that had an annual value of less than £10. Local customs created yet more inequities. After 1832 some parishes, like St. Marylebone in London, enfranchised even lodgers, depending, according to case law, on who held the key to a dwelling’s front door or how its doors opened into the street.45 In 1860 Bagehot lamented the loss of the various suffrages that the act of 1832 seemed to have eliminated when it attempted to regularize qualifications by imposing a £10 standard – he longed, he said, for the “old Constitution of England,” which for him entailed, in good Whig fashion, the representation of a range of competing interests.46 Yet after the passage of the 1832 act, the suffrage was arguably less uniform than that in the varieties of pre-reform boroughs. Divisions between parishes became lines that separated those with the vote from those without the vote, but they did so in a remarkably haphazard fashion. One particular species of variation borough-to-borough and parish-toparish resulted from the customary practice of excusing poor inhabitants from the responsibility of providing relief for their equally needy neighbors. Tellingly, when the 1832 bill was being debated, another measure was under discussion that would have exempted from liability for poor rates all premises worth less than £12,47 a good indication of how exclusionary ratepaying could be as a requirement for the franchise. The First Reform Act should therefore have drawn a sharp and clear line between men who paid their rates and those who were either too poor or simply unwilling to do so. Yet the application of this test led to complications that befuddled all sorts of authorities, including MPs and election officials, not to mention potential voters. According to an 1865 compendium of case law, “being excused from paying a poor rate on the ground of poverty is no disqualification” for the suffrage. Even accepting relief might not render a man ineligible to vote, though again without much predictable consistency. One kind of parish support for a lunatic would disqualify him; another kind would not. One kind of payment to dependants would disfranchise the man responsible for them; another kind would not. In some but not all cases, a man could lose the vote if he received aid without his “consent or knowledge.”48 When electoral returns explain their precise – undoubtedly falsely precise, but no less revealing – figures, they indicate the results of such practices. The 1866 statistics for Birkenhead gathered just before the passage of the Second Reform Act show that, out of a population estimated at 60,604, there were 4,563 electors, but 6,829 male occupiers of dwellings valued at £10 or more; a detailed footnote explains the discrepancy as the result of the “disqualification of police officers, letter carriers, excise officers, paupers, and persons excused payment of rates on the ground of poverty.” Thus, a man could pay £10 a year or more for his dwelling and presumably still be considered too impoverished to deserve the suffrage. Similarly, in

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Southampton in the same year, out of a ­population put at 54,159, there were 4,189 electors, of whom 2,084 were members of the “working classes,” but the Poor Law Guardians had decided that men in “all houses of the yearly rent of £10,” of which there were 6,554, should be rendered ineligible to vote because “such a vast number of the occupants were excused the payment of the rates that this class of property was exempted from the payment of rates altogether.”49 The men in the “vast” majority were out of luck – or, more precisely, without votes. Nonpayment of rates, however, reigned as a chief disqualifier of potential voters at the Victorian mid century, and simple refusal to hand over these levies was commonplace among men hard pressed for cash. Ford Madox Brown’s diary entries provide just one example of such evasions. Early in 1855, he memorably described his financial difficulties by referring to Benjamin Robert Haydon, the legendarily impecunious history painter, saying, “I am getting a regular Haydon at pawning – so long as I do not become one at cheating my creditors it matters little.” Several months later Brown recorded, “out to pay Rent – about 3 pounds left in pocket. Tax-man called I think for the 4th time for poor rate; sent him about his business.” There were, apparently, fewer penalties for not paying one’s rates than for not keeping up with one’s rent – the tax man not featuring prominently, from Brown’s point of view, among his “creditors.” At this time the artist was living in Finchley, north of London, in a house that he rented for £20 a year and on which he owed rates of 15 shillings a quarter. He was often that year so nearly destitute that he considered emigrating to India or committing suicide as a way to solve his financial problems; in that context cheating the tax man might have seemed a peccadillo.50 Brown’s response to the parish official was typical. According to figures from 1846, as many as 38% of men occupying dwellings valued at £10 and above in Wolverhampton were disfranchised because of nonpayment of rates; in one parish in the city of Gloucester, that number was 100%. Just before the passage of the Second Reform Act, the difference between the number of male occupiers in the parishes of Marylebone and Finsbury and the number of electors was equally striking: in the former, there were almost 24,000 electors, but more than 35,000 men in dwellings that should have conferred eligibility on their occupants; in the latter, approximately the same number of electors, but just under 40,000 men at or above the £10 requirement.51 In both cases, as in 1846, a relatively high proportion of those ineligible to vote were probably in that category because they, like Brown, were “unable to tender their full rates.” Yet whether a man had the right to go to the polls depended not only on where he lived and on how costly his “house” was and if he paid his rates, but also on exactly how he paid them; and examples from the London borough of Finsbury repeatedly make that point. Here my account of the borough franchise, which is, despite numerous simplifications, already

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quite complicated enough, could become endlessly more so.52 One source of confusion was the practice called compounding, which occurred whenever parish vestries chose under the Small Tenement Act to require landlords of dwellings of a certain value, usually a rental of less than £6, to collect rates from their tenants whenever they paid their rent. Where this practice was not allowed, the rate of enfranchisement could be six times that in the parishes where it was customary. Compounding meant that one sum, the rental value of a property, when it included the rates owing on it, could be as little as 10 percent and as much as 50 percent greater than its rateable value – rates being set by the parish and rents by landlords.53 Because the work of the parish collector was done by landlords under this system, they were charged discounted rates on their properties, a reduction usually passed on to the tenant when rent was calculated. Between 1832 and 1867, the practice of compounding caused great disparities between franchise requirements from one parish to another. In 1865 in the parish of Clerkenwell, in the borough of Finsbury, all compounders were deemed eligible, as were, in contravention of the hallmark of the 1832 act, “even occupiers of houses of £8 rental.” More often, however, local laws disadvantaged men with relatively low incomes. In 1865 in Holborn Union, also located in Finsbury, there were 682 “compound houses” at or above the £10 threshold, “but no compounded Occupier” was enfranchised; in St. Mary’s, Islington, another Finsbury parish, “scarcely any, if any” of the 3,829 compound occupiers were voters.54 The effects of local rating acts on the practices involved in compounding made impossible the drawing of any clear lines between voter and non-voter. Not all the parishes of Finsbury in 1865 chose to follow the stipulations of the Small Tenements Act; and of the eight of them that were not ruled by those laws, only two fell under the jurisdiction of the same local act; six others based their rating policies on six different laws passed from the time of George III to that of Victoria. In yet other parishes, local acts rated owners rather than occupiers of houses.55 Customary practices caused seemingly endless forms of differentiation between one electoral entity and another, no doubt confusing and thus discouraging any number of potential voters. Yet, according to the First Reform Act, tenants who paid their rates and their rents in one sum did have the right to vote – but only if they chose to pay their full rates themselves and only if they formally declared their qualification for the suffrage every time a new rate was assessed, up to six times a year. A law was passed in 1851 that limited the number of times that compounders had to claim the vote,56 but both before and after that date, this possibility was not widely known to or understood by parish officials and MPs, let alone by prospective voters. Figures for the metropolitan boroughs in 1859 and 1860 reflect how rarely men fulfilled the requirements that would have enfranchised them: in the parish of Finsbury there were 5,550 compounded houses at £10 and

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above, but only 213 electors from such houses; in Marylebone, 3,666 such houses and only 73 such electors – 4 percent and 2 percent, respectively.57 In addition to such bewildering distinctions was the hurdle of registration. According to a requirement first established by the passage of the 1832 act (and maintained after 1867), only men who had registered to vote could do so, a requirement that cost one shilling annually during the early years of the workings of the First Reform Act. Again ironically, a measure intended to regularize byzantine pre-reform electoral practices created its own monster of mind-numbingly ornate stipulations when it developed the first nationwide form of voter registration.58 This process, like rate-paying, was open to all kinds of local variation and all sorts of chicanery because it was both so hopelessly complex and so unforgivingly rigid. Even after a statute was passed in 1843 to ease some of the deadlines set by the 1832 act, they must have seemed to some men too numerous to satisfy. In each parish in a borough, by July 20 men hoping to vote had to pay the amounts that they had owed on April 6; and two days later rate- and tax-collectors had to notify the overseers of the poor, the local officers who compiled the rate books, which men were in default. By August 1 the overseers had to have compiled an alphabetical list of potential voters, including those enfranchised by virtue of ancient rights (except freemen, who were registered by town clerks). On that date the list was to be posted “on each church and chapel in the parish,” where it would remain for two successive Sundays. By August 25 anyone whose name did not appear on this first list had to “claim” in writing his right to be included by using “Form numbered 4. in … Schedule (I.).” Anyone whose name appeared as a voter in any constituency could also object, in writing, to any of these claimants or to anyone already on any other list. By September 1 separate compilations of those “claiming” and those “objecting” were posted. Between the middle of September and the end of October, courts of specially appointed barristers reviewed and corrected those lists – thus, the term revising barristers – and after 1843 they could require those whose claims or objections had failed to pay the costs of their hearings. All claimants had to appear in court to make a case for their eligibility, and simple errors of transcription – Victorian typos – were grounds for being struck off the register. The resulting amended compilation was copied into a book as the official register for the year starting on the first day of December. Disputes on matters of law, not fact, that could not be resolved by the revising barristers went to the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster, but only if those barristers approved the appeal. In that court, appellants or respondents, as they were called in this stage of the process, again might end up paying costs after having met another set of closely timed deadlines.59 Thus, considerations of money and of time, which proverbially is money, discouraged many men from qualifying to go to the polls. Ironically

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enough, registration depended on the qualities of a man’s ­character in ways that most Victorian legislators would not have grasped: a man would have needed sufficient determination and perseverance, if not stubbornness, successfully to run such bureaucratic gauntlets. Returns from the general election of 1865 reveal that approximately 35 percent of the men who might have qualified to vote in one borough had not done so.60 This high percentage of non-participation was not the result of a simple lack of interest, as was often claimed. Rather, it was the inevitable effect of the often incomprehensible applications of Victorian electoral laws, and any confusion that they created was compounded by the number of supposedly clarifying laws passed between 1832 and 1867 – those of 1848 and 1865, as well as those of 1843 and 1851. From the perspective of all the barriers between a particular £10 occupier and the suffrage, it seems miraculous that any hard-pressed man of either the working or middle classes would even try to cast a vote. Yet it did not take thirty years for the untoward effects of this registration process to become obvious. By 1837 Peel was prophetically concluding, “The battle of the Constitution will be fought out in the registration court.” Russell lamented that registration, whose initiation he had overseen in 1832, rendered “in many respects illusory” the promise of extending the franchise held out by the First Reform Act.61 Representi ng l a b o r No image could convey the complexities of such an electoral system – or its muddle, to use Williams’s word for British class distinctions. A Map of Society Island, with its people reduced to the lines of words like Suffering and Endurance, certainly does not try to offer an account of franchise politics in relation to individual persons, real or fictive. At this point it might seem appropriate to join the followers of Lessing who conclude more rigidly than he did that in some instances images simply cannot do what words can accomplish. Yet Monk’s letter in Phineas Finn suggests the difficulties that words run into when they try to use art to make clear political statements: if not quite the radical conservative that Ruskin frequently boasted of being, the “philosophical” politician of Trollope’s novel seems to be a decidedly conservative radical. More promising as guides to how visual images, rather than verbal evocations of them, might enter into reform debates, I think, are the specific terms in which Bagehot and Ruskin conceptualize the intersections of art and politics. How three prints published in the 1860s by the ILN and Punch can be read as visual arguments in support of the status quo is evident once the visual theories of art critic and political commentator are applied to them. Writing not as politicians  – not even fictional ones  – Bagehot and Ruskin offer perspectives that would seem so opposed to each other as to be incomparable. Bagehot tends to bring politics and art together, as

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he occasionally does in The English Constitution, by using the former as the source of casual and predictable comparisons: the “administration” of government “is an art as painting is an art”; “The human imagination exacts keeping in government as much as in art.” Ruskin much more grandly equates not only the arts of human and divine government but also the work of the graphic artist and the shape of human society when he connects in The Elements of Drawing the “characters,” the formal qualities, in “a piece of painting” to the “characters of man in association with his fellows.” Moreover, in his faith in the educative potential of vision, Ruskin seems more conventional than Bagehot. The older man’s sense of how an image affects its viewers witnesses to his idealistic conviction that people, no matter how “unlearned or thoughtless,” have the capacity to learn to see accurately or, as Brontë more forcefully put the point, learn to have eyes. Bagehot is less charitable: the majority of the population, on whose “stupidity” he often condescendingly remarks, are dolts who “see nothing without a visible symbol.”62 Yet when Bagehot in The English Constitution takes as his subject the workings of government and Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing the workings of art, both men find in the other’s chosen subject the source of the analogy that illuminates his own. That reversal of disciplinary coordinates points toward other similarities between the two men. Ruskin and Bagehot both present themselves as the lone authorities on their subjects: as Bagehot says, “philosophers can see nothing” in the momentous effects of visual perception and graphic representation. Most important, both men stress in their different ways that the lessons of visible forms are at times quite abstruse and indirect. In The Elements of Drawing Ruskin explains that the details of an image will yield up their meanings only after long study and repeated attempts to understand their implications. Analyzing a minor touch in a particular composition, Ruskin concedes that he has articulated “thoughts [that] never occur to us as we glance carelessly at the design”; but, he asserts, “their undercurrent assuredly affects the feelings” and therefore augments the “impression” that the work conveys. Similarly, according to Bagehot, visibility governs because it “guide[s] by an insensible but an omnipotent influence the associations of [the constitution’s] subjects.” To elucidate his comments on the difficulty faced by anyone trying to overturn conventional opinions, he uses the only analogy to the composition of a painting in The English Constitution: “the background of a picture [may look] obvious, easy, just what any one might have painted, but [it] in fact sets the figures in their right position, chastens them, and makes them what they are.”63 What is in the background of an image, Bagehot claims, may define the figures in its foreground. From the perspectives of both writers, therefore, a viewer’s encounter with a picture is like that of the parties to a comparative encounter: both meetings, aesthetic and social, are determinative paradoxically because they are often hardly noticed.

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In most instances, however, it is what first strikes the eye that, ­according to Bagehot, has the greatest political utility. Analyzing the effect of the images created by the activities of the real or supposed leaders of the nation in the first two essays that he wrote for The English Constitution, he famously distinguishes between the dignified and efficient sectors of government by employing an extended metaphor from the art of the stage, not of the canvas. Yet for Bagehot, as much as for Ruskin, what matters is the image created by that art – in this case, a kind of outdoor stage picture. Bagehot imagines government as a grand form of street theatre, in which two different groups of people are riding in first- and second-rate carriages. At the head of this “splendid procession” are members of the monarchy and aristocracy, whose glorious public appearances dazzle those who view them. Behind them, “secreted” in their unremarkable, workaday vehicles, are the men who actually govern. In making his point, Bagehot uses the word theatrical three times, twice italicized, to emphasize the idea that the “apparent rulers of the English nation” act their parts according to a well-crafted script. Every day of their lives, the elite construct an image of themselves, a tableau in the “theatrical show of society,” a “play” in which the “climax” is “the Queen”: “the higher world, as it looks from without, is a stage on which the actors walk their parts much better than the spectators can.”64 As in an art exhibition when viewers measure themselves against the figures in a painting or print, the spectators of the play that is British high society learn to know and to accept their relatively lowly places. According to Monk, the “wonderful spectacle” of past acts of franchise legislation are “marvels so beautiful” that they evoke “awe.” Similarly, for Bagehot governance depends on theatrical events that are dignified because they are “old” and “venerable” – “historical, complex, august” – and they absorb all the attention of the “mass of the English people,” who can then be effectively ruled by the members of Parliament or, in another version of the argument, by a “few nominal electors – the £10 borough renters, and the £50 county renters – who have nothing imposing about them, nothing which would attract the eye or fascinate the fancy.” Although Bagehot contends that Parliament in some of its functions does occasionally play a part that is “stately” and “impressive,” he finds something genuinely ­magical, almost religious, in the paradoxical effects of the “charmed spectacle” of the upper ten thousand, with their wealth, pleasure, pomp, and beauty: it is “mystic in its claims, … occult in mode of action … brilliant to the eye … seen vividly for the moment, and then … seen no more … hidden and unhidden … palpable in its seeming … yet professing to be more than palpable in its results.” Unsurprisingly, then, Bagehot thinks that such a performance “coerce[s]” and “imposes on the many, and guides their fancies as it will”: “Their imagination is bowed down.”65 If Bagehot were to design a map of Society Island, its form might remain the same

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as the one pictured by the cartographer of the Poor Man’s Guardian, but he would envision the multitudes below the “Line of Representation or Reform” literally looking up to and accepting the ascendency of their less numerous betters. According to Bagehot’s theories, the governed accept the authority of their actual governors, the efficient part of the constitution, because of a deferential submission that seems natural, even divinely ordained. In that sense dignified spectacle is the sine qua non of a constitutional monarchy. Ruskin looks, not to the grand ceremonial displays of elite society to make such impressions, but rather to the constituents of “pictorial ­composition” to teach lessons about divine and human governments. When he explains in The Elements of Drawing that the “pursuit of analogies and types” allows a viewer to connect the “noble characters in a piece of ­painting” and “the noble characters” of “man” as a social being, Ruskin goes on to specify: “What grace of manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial composition.” “Line” and “form” correspond, respectively, to “­manner” and “habit.” In more general terms, Ruskin outlines certain principles that define with almost mathematical precision how the arrangement of “line” and “form” in a particular design conveys specific meanings when he proposes in The Elements of Drawing nine “laws” of composition by which both pictures and polities are to be measured: principality teaches the importance of dominance and subordination; repetition, sympathy or repose; continuity, succession and obedience; curvature, order and beauty; radiation (the issuing of lines from a central point), singleness of motive; contrast, distinctiveness of character; interchange, mutual support; consistency, value and strength; and harmony, the goal of all composition, unity.66 Such “laws” provide ways of identifying the excellencies of the engravings after Turner to which Ruskin applies them in The Elements; but to prove the validity of such rules, he also cites the work of a wide range of artists from Dürer and Rembrandt to the chief Punch cartoonists. In addition to these specific design principles, Ruskin earlier defines what he calls “leading or governing lines.” To elucidate the nature of this formal feature, he first uses the example of a sketch of foliage, but he soon is declaring that “there are such lines in everything,” in roof tiles and rivers as well as leaves and trees. He goes on to say that a visible line is responsible for the “vital truth,” the “expression” and “likeness,” of a portrait because it conveys “the past history and present action” of its subject. Ruskin instructs his reader: “Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on

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those, whatever else you miss.” Such “fateful lines” therefore convey in an image of any “thing” its past and present and future, its history, current energies, and potential directions of growth.67 This surprising conjunction of fate and linear form suggests how readily Ruskin sees political lessons in every artistic representation, in a picture of an array of leaves or in one depicting a gathering of men. Were he to turn his analytic eye to A Map of Society Island, Ruskin, like Bagehot, would find in it an acceptable state of affairs. The large capital letters of the word “ARISTOCRACY” would be an instance of principality, a form that visualizes the principle of dominance and subordination. Similarly, the “Line” of the franchise that stretches across the island would be a literally “governing line,” a way of picturing how the relatively lowly are rightly subjected to rule by the relatively high. When Gladstone told his fellow MPs that they and he ought to “understand the lines we draw,” he, like Trollope and Bagehot and Ruskin, was voicing the assumption that political messages can be inscribed in different compositional forms. Although the realities of Victorian electoral law undercut one’s sense of the relevance of Gladstone’s image to the ­legislation that might or might not be passed in the mid 1860s, his reference to those who draw lines applies to the political activities being engaged in by the designers and engravers of illustrated newspapers during those years. Their images could not do justice to the “wavering” or “hesitating” lines that Bagehot identifies as typical of the British constitution, but they do depict the material and economic distinctions upon which the messiness of mid-century franchise qualifications depended. Three specific images from these years underscore how visible lines contributed to debates over reform. Monk’s analogy to painting in Phineas Finn might seem blithely and, for a mature politician, naively unconcerned with the difficulties that many men would face under even the most carefully redrawn constitution, but his choice of a visual analogy as the basis of his analysis points toward the ways in which actual visual images could be more expressive than words. At the end of his letter, Monk explains that some of his colleagues think that the “people” are “wicked, half-barbarous, [and] idle” and that they “should be controlled and not represented.” To counter such a slander, Monk advises that politicians, like Bagehot’s gentleman descending to his kitchen, go “into the houses of artisans” and look “into the breasts of the men” there, men who are actually so “thoughtful, educated, and industrious” that their so-called betters should “submit” themselves to be controlled by them.68 Here Monk offers a character sketch of the kind of men who in his view deserve the vote. In the early years of the 1860s, Punch and the ILN argued against reform through the “governing lines” that they drew around working-class men. How such a message was conveyed in both papers depended in large part on how they typically represented the workers who, with surprising frequency, people their pages.

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The ILN employed what Ruskin calls the “Line work” of its engravings to keep working-class men in line through two different approaches: paradoxically, by erasing them altogether or by portraying them as subjected either to suffering or to the conditions of their work. When Marx, in the first volume of Capital, called commodities “congealed” labor, the materialization of a worker’s skill into what he or she had made,69 he explained the process whereby workers in the ILN were often subsumed into the structures of massive building projects, such as the Great Eastern and the Thames Embankment and the vast exhibition halls that they built in London for the international expositions of 1851 and 1862. When workers are actually pictured in such venues, both their numbers and their size are almost always manageably and unthreateningly small. Arraying workers along lines of demarcation drawn within the prints in the ILN has a similar effect, and the use of this convention is particularly evident in the paper’s recording of the plight of the operatives of Lancashire during the cotton famine, the shortage of raw materials caused by the US Civil War, a famine that had tested factory workers and proved them largely willing to endure the lack of work, food, and clothing that defined their lives month after month, then year after year. The ILN offered engraving after engraving of what it called the “distress” in the “cotton districts” as if it were obsessed with the scenic opportunities that the crisis offered. In the majority of such images, the paper’s artists featured prominently various kinds of linear structures. Thus, because some of the relief offered the textile operatives required that they attend classes to qualify for aid, a number of pictures depict young women sitting in rows during sewing classes or men also arranged on school benches as they are being taught to read (November 29, 1862: 581, 588). More striking still is the page portraying the activities within the Society of Friends’ Soup Kitchen (November 22, 1862: 561), which depicts as its central image “The Maze,” a series of internal fences that organize the workers in horizontal lines across the engraving as they wait with their pails for their portions of the thousand gallons of soup being prepared there each day. Here workers are adapting to the forms and restrictions that come with their status, not as breadwinners, but as bread receivers. The enclosures along which they are made to place themselves therefore act out their inability to pay poor rates and their ineligibility to vote. The most telling of such images, for my purposes at least, is the one that appears on the first page in the first of the two consecutive issues in which the ILN offered its fullest coverage of this long, drawn-out crisis: “The Cotton Famine: Distributing Tickets for Bread, Soup, Meat, Meal, Coal, etc., at the Office of a District Provident Society, Manchester” (fig.  1.1; November 22, 1862: 541). According to the commentary that begins on the page on which this print appears, the varieties of the “­appalling mass of suffering” in the cotton districts “are hidden by their very multitudinousness

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Fig. 1.1  “The Cotton Famine: Distributing Tickets for Bread, Soup, Meat, Meal, Coal, Etc. …,” wood engraving (9¼˝ by 6¾˝), Illustrated London News (November 22, 1862: 541)

from our gaze.” The ILN’s cover image, however, uses its landscape format to include a multitude of destitute workers so that its lines can offer an indirect political commentary on their plight. The result is remarkably reassuring: hungry, unemployed workers queue up in lines against a railing set perpendicular to the table at which they will receive charity in the form of tickets redeemable for the food and fuel that they can no longer earn by working. The provident society referred to in the title of this print either is or is modeled on the District Provident Society of Manchester and Salford, which had been “conducted” since 1833 by local individuals “notable both in Church and State.”70 The ILN’s leader construes the event that it depicts as the giving of charity to those desperate for it by those who can well afford it. “We,” the editors and their readers, attribute to such alms the ability to “remov[e] the barriers of feeling which have separated the employers from the employed” (November 22, 1862: 542). In the print, however, two physical “barriers” define the double encounter pictured in and created by this engraving: the table between those seeking aid and those giving it as

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well as the railing between the subjects of observation here and the viewers, the readers of the ILN. On either side of the table at the left of the image are separated from each other individuals whose clothing, features, and postures emphasize the material differences between them, with the seated men being characterized as the betters of those who stand. Although male workers, and particularly their leaders, are often depicted wearing top hats in high-Victorian representations of them, that sartorial mark of status distinguishes the two officials at the table, whose features define them as relatively genteel. The faces of the two men most prominently placed at the right of the image are sharply differentiated from their counterparts at the left by the contrast between relatively fine and relatively coarse physiognomies, a contrast that is evident in almost any illustrated Victorian novel, from Phiz’s relatively sympathetic depictions of Dickens’s working-class characters in Dombey and Son or Little Dorrit to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s miscreant locksmith of Lady Audley’s Secret.71 In the ILN print the patched tatters on the women’s skirts set them further apart from the tidy attire – jackets, vests, shirts, neckcloths  – worn by the seated men. By mingling together behind an interior fence both men and women, the hat of one of the former balanced against the shawl of one of the latter as they stand against its railing, the designer for the ILN associates working-class men with the vulnerabilities usually seen as a characteristic of women, even or perhaps especially of working-class women. Perhaps more impressive still in this picture  – and it is a feature of many others recording the suffering of workers during the famine  – is the way in which it represents an actual physical barrier between unrepresented observer and represented observed. The railing in the forefront of the engraving draws a line between the applicants for aid and the readers of the ILN who, despite hard times, can still afford to pay five pence for an issue of the paper. Turning this distinction into a visual event, the railing suggests that the observers, the ILN artist and the readers of the  paper, are on one side of it, having a good portion of the floor in the building to themselves, while the workers are crowded together on its far side. Privilege here – as well, presumably, as physical comfort – is a matter of being within a specific enclosure and seeing others outside it. The Ruskinian contrast between the numerous standing people and the seated men as the few individuals in the image is recapitulated in the contrast between the workers in the image and the reader holding the paper in which it appears. The writer of the letterpress emphasizes another distinction created by the “Line work” of this indoor fencing, a contrast between those who can afford to feel sympathy and those who cannot: “if it were possible to look upon [this scene] with callous feelings, the sublime patience of the sufferers would make indifference impossible” (November 22, 1862: 541). Viewers of this print are asked to pity its subjects, and, as the narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch wisely explains, pity is an

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emotion based on distance: in order to pity a person – Casaubon as seen by Dorothea, for instance – one has to hold him or her at arm’s length, a gesture that necessarily implies condescension. Here the workers are seen at the distance that allows them to be pathetic objects of charity and pitying concern, less joined across “barriers of feeling” with the readers of the paper than separated from them. This engraving therefore trains one to see the workers one would encounter every day in precisely these comforting terms: held at more than arm’s length, they are needy, but reassuringly divided by a physical barrier from their betters. The political work being done by the “governing lines” in this image, particularly those of table and fencing, depends therefore on a reversal of the perspective implicit in Bagehot’s model of the relation between the governing and the governed. Like the servants encountered by the gentleman descending into his kitchen, the cotton operatives in this image themselves become a spectacle that, in Ruskin’s terms, images forth proper forms of civic discipline: workers are mastered by a destitution that is being assauged by the paternalistic response to it. Published in 1862 when the interest in franchise reform that had emerged briefly in 1859 and 1860 had dissipated, this representation in the ILN of the cotton famine  – a term that itself reduces workers to the level of the most abject of the Irish in the 1840s – creates interrelated comparative encounters, depicted or imagined, that argue against extending the suffrage to men as abject as these. In addition to such pictures of the suffering experienced by members of the working classes are those in a larger category of workers rendered docile by the conditions of their labor. A little more than a year before the ILN covered the cotton famine, it had published such an image of workers, one that uses similar effects to demonstrate how putting workers on the wrong side of a line is a way of entering reform debates. A ­depiction of the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield places its employees in a number of framed vignettes (fig. 1.2, September 21, 1861: 298). Such a way of presenting a group of images is not characteristic of the layout in the ILN in the 1860s, and it therefore identifies this engraving as an unusually self-conscious art object. The signatures of its creators emphasize this self-characterization: C. J. Durham (“DEL”) was a Royal Academy painter whose specialty in the ILN was industrial images, and W. J. Palmer (“SC”) was a prominent engraver of book illustrations in the 1850s and 1860s, who often rendered full- or double-page engravings for the ILN.72 The style of the individual pictures in this print also attests to its artistic status. It creates the effects of chiaroscuro typical of the paper’s reproductive engravings of old-master paintings; and the curves of its arched frame underscore, in Ruskin’s terms, its claims to beauty. “The various compartments of our Engraving,” as the text calls them (September 21, 1861: 304), almost seem to be paintings set side by side, one above the other, as they might be in a more-than-usually orderly RA exhibition.

Fig. 1.2  W. J. Palmer, “The Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield,” wood engraving after C. J. Durham (14¼˝ by 9½˝), ILN (September 21, 1861: 298)

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Most of these images subordinate the figures of working men to the lines of the machines, with their cranks and shafts, and the architectural forms, the windows and skylights and beams, that organize the labor going on within the factory. Particularly impressive is “The Large Room” in the center of the print. Its men line up along a narrow, diagonally placed table that recedes into the distance, demonstrating a continuity of form in which Ruskin finds a lesson in obedience. The smaller of the operatives therefore seem to stand side by side in a line whose shape is repeated in the shafts and the intersecting lines of window frames above them. These formal features tend to equate the workers portrayed in these scenes with Victorian depictions of prisoners, who are typically, in the words of Caroline Arscott, “organized in huge numbers in lines,”73 although the ILN here reduces those numbers to a representative few figures, no doubt representing others “congealed” in the elements of the built environment around them. Whenever other groupings of working men in this engraving are relatively disorderly, as they are in the depiction of the foundry in the bottom right-hand corner, they must and do attend fully to the hard work that they are doing in dark interiors again dominated by machinery. The only images here that are not distinctly linear in design render rifle-making an oddly picturesque pastoral occupation like boating. The frames around these workers suggest that the ILN is invoking the realms of fine art to compartmentalize them so that they would seem to have no shared interests that will bring them together, no matter how many of them there might be. Finally, repeated uses of landscape format distance these relatively small figures from the picture plane and erect barriers of space between the men in this print and the viewers of them. It would be hard at such a physical remove for the latter to imagine that the former might be qualified to vote. Even four years later Punch was no more ready than the ILN to endorse the cause of franchise reform. On May 20, 1865, the comic paper published a full-page design after Tenniel, “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition” (fig. 1.3; 203), that foreshadows the analogy that Monk sets out in Phineas Finn when he figures all the members of Parliament as a single artist who paints a single portrait of the people. Punch, by contrast, turns four MPs into painters displaying four portraits of workers at a fine-arts exhibition, and it therefore creates an image of the diversity of working-class character. The impetus for this cartoon was, at least in part, the prominence that Gladstone first gave this issue in reform debates. When he surprised his parliamentary colleagues by announcing his commitment to reform in 1864, he famously cast the question in terms of the moral eligibility for the franchise that workers had demonstrated during the cotton famine. Responding to his own question  – “What are the qualities that fit a man for the franchise?” – he cited the example of Lancashire cotton workers, who had exhibited “self-command, self-­control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the

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Fig. 1.3  “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (7˝ by 9½˝), Punch (May 20, 1865: 203)

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law, regard for superiors.” Operatives in the cotton industry had displayed all “these great qualities” during “the profound affliction of the winter of 1862” – a specificity of dating that allowed Gladstone to ignore the fact that in 1863 there had been bread and beer riots as well as strikes against the test work required for the receipt of government relief.74 For Gladstone, unlike the ILN, the legendary good conduct of destitute cotton workers, along with admirable working-class institutions like the Rochdale cooperative system, proved that “a limited portion of the working class,” though not their “enormous masses,” was “worthy and fit to discharge the duties of citizenship.”75 Such men should therefore be granted the vote. What Gladstone concluded so unproblematically and so prematurely was, however, precisely the question at hand. As Trollope’s Monk later points out, one’s political penchants determined whether one imagined workers’ homes inhabited by dissolute wretches who were rightly disfranchised or by educated and self-restrained men more than worthy of the suffrage. In such a debate, Gladstone’s chief opponent was Robert Lowe, the liberal who was largely responsible for scuttling the reform bill of his own party in 1866. Even before that event, however, he was well known for his contempt for the working men who might be enfranchised. The ILN at the beginning of May in 1865 heralded Lowe as a man of “principle” and “courage” whose “masterly and crushing” argument in a recent speech had demolished each of its “target[s],” including “Mr. Gladstone’s theory of moral right, besides all the claptrap and sentimental pleas about insult, exclusion, degradation, and slavery” (May 6: 426). Two weeks later, Punch used its big cut to voice its basic agreement with that assessment. In terms of its design, “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition” is an uncharacteristic use in Punch of a portrait format. Instead of featuring one or two full-length figures in such a composition, the paper offers four framed portraits as if they were hanging on a portion of gallery wall at a parody of a Royal Academy exhibition. The “governing lines” of these frames allow Punch to contain these images of workers while it mocks everyone and every party associated with debates over franchise reform. As the text notes, “THE WORKING-MAN seems to be quite the fashionable subject with the Westminster painters,” who offer “the most extraordinary variety in their pictures of him” (May 20, 1865: 203). The viewers therefore become spectators at an ­exhibition arranged for them by four political artists who, having listened to Gladstone, are being “careful of the lines” that they are drawing. One encounter here is between viewers and objectifications of working-class identity, but because the conceit of this visual joke is that such workers are the artistic creations of MPs, the portraits actually being displayed here are images of the four men who have painted these pictures – a variation of Monk’s construction of the House of Commons as a body that visualizes its own image in the laws that it makes, not the lines of the “ever-moving” face

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of the people. That there might exist similarities or sympathies between these workers and Punch’s readers seems as unlikely as it does in the ILN’s depictions of the cotton famine or the Enfield Small Arms Factory. Or more so. The writer of the letterpress cannot understand why the working-class monsters and freaks in this print are “not at this moment being exhibited … under articles to BARNUM” (202). Debates over franchise reform have presumably turned otherwise respectable MPs into sideshow impresarios and workers into the less-than-fully human curiosities on display. The resulting portraits encounter each other on this page as figures purported by their creators to be “The” one and only “Working-Man.” Yet the incongruity of these juxtaposed depictions allows Punch to ridicule the wild and wildly divergent claims that it finds typical of parliamentary debate. Ruskin’s law of contrast, the compositional element that most clearly manifests character, is very much at work in this engraving. One glance at the cartoon reveals which MPs favored reform and which ones did not. The two portraits at the bottom of the page, numbered 1001 and 1002, those by Edward Horsman and Robert Lowe, respectively, delineate the improvidence and drunkenness that such MPs thought typical of workers, but even those two views conflict with each other since one depicts a man at work – albeit at the counterproductive, republican labor of cutting off the royal beam on which he himself sits, an image that would become important in Carlyle’s diatribe against reform in Shooting Niagara: And After?76 – while the other portrays the idleness of a drunken stupor. The two figures at the top of the cartoon, those by ardent supporters of reform, John Bright and W. E. Forster, are equally incongruous when compared with each other. Punch imagines that Forster, himself a largely self-taught Yorkshire businessman, is indulging in the sentimentalities of self-portraiture in his depiction of the studious worker. Yet the paper is most critical – and most wittily so – of Bright’s transformation of a worker into an angel holding a dainty hammer. Depicting a religious revivalist, an effete ritualist of the High Church movement, the image evokes associations with Pre-Raphaelite art: Bright’s signature is stylized like that of Millais on, for instance, Christ in the House of His Parents.77 Since Bright’s identity as a Quaker was a well-known and often suspect feature of his radical politics, this particular image has Bright turn recreant to his religious beliefs in his ludicrously idealistic misrepresentation of the working man. The encounters between these different images tend paradoxically to reveal unlikely similarities. The saw peeping out behind Bright’s worker identifies him with the misguided worker in the picture below his, while the right hand of the former, holding a cup at a water fountain, is mimicked by the right hand holding a tankard of ale in the image diametrically opposed to it. Such repetitions are, according to Ruskin, the formal equivalents to sympathy. The differences between

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these workers as political ideals or nightmares, therefore, cannot erase the identity they share as manual laborers defined by their tools and their appetites. As if to confirm Punch’s prescience in exhibiting these portraits as early as 1865, a contemporary observer, perhaps even thinking of this engraving, asked anxiously in October of 1866, “Is Bright’s portrait of the lower classes or Lowe’s the better likeness?”78 Agreeing with the former politician would be to argue for reform; with the latter, against it. Yet the political effects of the comparative encounters within this wood engraving are more complicated than such simple answers would suggest because they depend on a number of telling reversals. If the four workers within their frames depict an artistic meeting between specific politicians and the question of working-class character, those workers represent the MPs who have painted them, thus taking the places of the legislators more commonly deemed their representatives. Moreover, by putting each of the four full-length portraits in portrait format, as the entire engraving is, Tenniel is making a joke that undercuts the most obvious of its meanings. These workers are not the kinds of people that Victorian artists usually chose to paint one at a time, not the kinds of faces and forms that flooded the annual RA exhibition year after year. As Monk’s use of the analogy linking politics and art implies, portraits are the purview of individuals, with “the turn of the eye here and the curl of the lip there”; masses of working-class men more appropriately fill the landscape format of the image of a munitions factory in Enfield or charitable establishment in Manchester. Nor were workers likely to be depicted at full length, a convention that for centuries had been reserved for titled subjects and now was being used during the high-Victorian period for only genteel subjects, such as Millais’s John Ruskin (1854) and Frederic Leighton’s Mrs. James Guthrie (c. 1864–65). The humor of the print, its unacknowledged political implication, is that such lowly men as carpenters and drunkards, paradoxically because they are types, are granted in formal terms the kind of distinctive individuality typically accorded their betters. But that is an aesthetic impropriety that also conveys the electoral disqualification of these figures – even Forster’s hard student seems too depressed, if not anguished, to function effectively as an elector. The lines around the canvases here have the effect of the ­fencing and frames depicted in ILN, keeping workers from coming together to act. Making them subjects of portraits, however, gives them temporarily and comically the status of their betters. Punch therefore seems to want to have it both ways: the paper depicts the attempts by political artists as a contradictory process that defines workers simultaneously as both absolutely other and as closer than anyone might expect to those already enfranchised. In the issue for June 10, 1865, the ILN seems to refer directly to “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition”: “Mr. Gladstone is evidently one of those

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‘flattering painters who make it their care to draw men, working men, as they ought to be, not as they are’” (558). Gladstone pointedly was not one of the parliamentary contributors to the Westminster Exhibition curated by Punch. Unlike Lowe and Horsman and Bright and Forster, he was intent on portraying workers who, just “as they are,” deserved in his view not to be subjected to any lines set up between them and the franchise. Similarly, in Phineas Finn, even with its conservative tendencies, Trollope points the way forward, if not toward the goal of American crude clarity, as Monk would have it, then at least toward a suffrage that is “like the people whom it represents” in the same way that any good portrait is “like the person portrayed.” The vagaries comparable to the wanderings of a country lane, in which Bagehot finds an expressive verbal image for “the lines of our constitution,” functioned both before and after 1832 to keep a portrait of the people from being either drawn or redrawn. Yet, as the following chapter demonstrates, both Punch and the ILN tested the need for such artistry when they published images of the real-life conjunctions between art and politics that took place in 1843. In that discussion, the words and images that here link art in an analogical relation to politics appear in the more concrete form of the actions that MPs took when they dealt with art objects, from a painting of members of Parliament to the many works that were planned for the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. It was in this context that the Whig PM Lord Melbourne issued his famous dictum when he had been pressed once too often to provide state support for Haydon’s artistic ambitions: “God help the Minister that meddles with Art!”79 The Royal Academy comes into the story of the events of 1843 as a political force, not, however, through its workings as an institution, but through the images exhibited on its walls. Responding to such paintings, Punch expressed the sympathy with the disfranchised “people” inhabiting Society Island that would mark the politics of its art in 1866 when it supported an extension of the suffrage, and the ILN demonstrated how far it would have to go before it could experience such a political conversion.

Cha pter 2

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London in the summer of 1843 saw the opening and closing of two special exhibitions that demonstrated the close alliance of art and parliamentary politics in the early years of Victoria’s reign: on display in Westminster Hall were the cartoons submitted to the Royal Fine Arts Commission in the first of its competitions for the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster; and in rented space in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, Sir George Hayter was showing publicly for the first time his outsized testament to the triumph of franchise reform, The House of Commons, 1833 (fig.  2.1, 1833–43). Hayter’s “great” painting, as he proudly referred to both its size and its artistic ambitions, is indisputably vast: nearly eleven by eighteen feet and depicting some four hundred politicians, it aspires to provide, also in its creator’s words, “by truth of delineation [the] evidence of [an] actual occurrence,”1 the first gathering, held in St. Stephen’s Chapel in the old palace, of the members of Parliament elected after the passage of the Great Reform Act, as well as the various lords and prelates assembled there with them on February 5, 1833. The Westminster Hall exhibition, which opened on July 3 and closed on September 2, was even more ambitious: it inaugurated an unprecedented attempt by Britain as a modern state to support the so-called high arts, particularly history painting – “the first experiment in this free country of Government patronage,” as one observer described it.2 Contemporary responses to the two exhibitions promised future success. Although Hayter’s depiction of the first meeting of the reformed Parliament, open from April to August of 1843, was less than a popular hit, it did earn respect from the critics. The event sponsored by the FAC, by contrast, enjoyed both critical praise and relatively large crowds: with gross receipts of £2,472, it seemed a prelude to the prospering of the entire enterprise.3 Here on display were two happy marriages of public art and institutional politics – unions in one case issuing in a painting of Parliament, and in the other, in art objects created at the behest of Parliament. Yet these exhibitions also foretold the apparently inevitable dissolution of the kind of alliance embodied by them. Although Hayter began his painting in the year after the passage of the 1832 reform bill, its story belongs, at least in part, to the period of the 1867 act because its fortunes 61

Fig. 2.1  Sir George Hayter, The House of Commons, 1833, oil on canvas (213 ⅜˝ by 136 ¼˝, 1833–43)

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became intertwined with debates in the House of Commons during the late 1850s and early 1860s, when a new measure of franchise reform became a possibility. By 1843 Hayter had labored over his monumental work for ten years, but he would have to wait for another sixteen before its message seemed timely enough for it to become the “national property” that he always thought it deserved to be. With its more than 170 square feet, The House of Commons, 1833 is a work of graphic art executed in such a great deal of space that finding a room large enough to hold it became a decades-long problem. More depressingly, the attempt to spend public funds for monumental public art, of which the 1843 FAC exhibition was a logical first step, became by the mid 1860s a travesty of governmental incompetence and waste. When the commission itself went out of existence in 1863, the only painter who was proceeding with any success on the daunting commissions he had been awarded was doing so at great financial and physical cost to himself; another painter, who had begun more promisingly, would die before he had completed his work, but not before he was humiliated in public for his inability to get on with the job as quickly as his parliamentary patrons expected.4 Most of the paintings in the new Palace of Westminster were done in fresco, a medium unlikely to fare well in the damp interiors of a building located on a bank of the Thames. As soon as they were completed, the murals started flaking off bit by bit, discoloring, decaying, and finally disappearing. Like other, more ordinary marriages, these propitious unions of art and politics in the 1840s revealed, some twenty years on, basic incompatibilities. At the time, however, the 1843 exhibitions excited a good deal of public commentary, including visual responses offered by several images published in the Illustrated London News and Punch, among which is “Substance and Shadow,” one of the best-known cartoons after John Leech, the chief artist working for Punch in the 1840s. Within such images are documented comparative encounters between spectators and works of art on display, and these prints invite other encounters between their subjects and those viewing them, upon both of which their meanings depend. To examine how these engravings define the political stances of the ILN and Punch during, respectively, the first and second years after their founding, I offer here a series of analytic encounters that juxtapose them with a number of other art objects, including the paintings in the current show at the Royal Academy and the reproductions of art objects from the early FAC exhibitions in F. Knight Hunt’s The Book of Art (1846). Added to these juxtapositions are yet others: Sir George Hayter is set against the history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon; and one of Haydon’s designs is in turn paired with an engraved reproduction of an early work by Ford Madox Brown, whose entry into an FAC competition is prominently figured in The Book of Art. All these images involve artistic responses to either parliamentary events or parliamentary initiatives, and they therefore chart the relation

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between Victorian art, principally public art and graphic journalism, and Victorian politics, principally the institutional politics played out on the floor and in the committee rooms of the House of Commons. Taken together, the high art on offer in venues in London and in journalistic prints also reveals the political implications of a variety of subjects and styles current in the 1840s. Among these are the distinctive visual languages of several different genres – history painting in both its traditional and its more innovative forms in the 1840s, the ceremonial group portrait, genre painting, and book illustration. Because all but the last of these genres typically use landscape formats conducive to the depiction of relatively large numbers of human figures, their principal formal features involve the distance from or proximity to the picture plane of the people represented in them and their resulting size. In addition, wood engravings employ distinctive ways of indicating the relative flatness or dimensionality of a figure. Although such styles do not necessarily convey political messages, in the pages of Punch and the ILN they often do. Along with the measures of difference inevitably raised by franchise reform throughout the Victorian period – lines, numbers, and respectability – artists and engravers in the 1840s treated questions specific to the Great Reform Act when they contrasted lord and commoner or the oligarchic and the democratic; and both those binaries were frequently cast in terms of the more general and perennial Victorian favorite, the individual and the group. Finally, when paintings and prints in this decade commented on the nature and shape of the British constitution, they offered their Victorian viewers ways of picturing reform and therefore of defining the nature of the government that obtained after the passage of the First Reform Act – ways of evaluating what it had or had not accomplished and why further reform might or might not be necessary. R eprese n ti n g Parliame n t, 1832–1860

Poli ti cs as the s ub j e ct o f a rt In Trollope’s Phineas Finn, words cast politicians as artists; Sir George Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833 depicts an artist as a politician. Trollope explained in his Autobiography that he wrote the “politics” of Phineas Finn for his “own sake”: “As I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons, I took this method of declaring myself.”5 Years earlier Hayter had gone Trollope one better: his painting – often known in the Victorian period as The First Reformed Parliament or, more descriptively still, as Moving the Address to the Crown on the Opening of the First Reformed Parliament in the House of Commons, 5 February 1833  – includes, among the many figures depicted there, a conspicuous self-portrait. In the right foreground, seated below all the other men in

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the chamber, the creator of the canvas sketches the assembled politicians of his day. According to A Descriptive Catalogue of the Great Historical Picture of the Interior of the British House of Commons, which Hayter published in 1843 when he exhibited the painting, past royal favor and aristocratic patronage encouraged him to undertake, without commission, his depiction of the 1833 gathering of Parliament in the old St. Stephen’s Chapel, the chamber in which members of the lower house had met since the mid sixteenth century. Having received permission to attend sessions in the House of Commons, he often stood on its floor: “Being at all times admitted to the House,” Hayter, as he said, was able to “study the habits and manners of the members.”6 By convincing many of the MPs and peers depicted in the painting to sit individually for oil sketches, Hayter aimed to present recognizable likenesses of those involved in this historic event. Yet he also allowed himself some liberties when he included at least two men who were not in the House of Commons on February 5, 1833. On the right border of the painting is a man who was not an MP, the recently deceased Sir Charles Hamilton, whom Hayter credited with persuading him to undertake the task of painting this “true scene.” There is also no evidence, as far as I know, that Hayter himself was in attendance, but seven plates of details and two lists of names in his Descriptive Catalogue identify almost all the other four hundred figures in the painting, a guide that now makes it possible to see exactly where the recorder of their attendance chose to seat himself. The lowly position in which Hayter places his portrait of the artist as a politician in The House of Commons might be read as an expression of the modesty that he never exhibited in his day-to-day affairs. A number of other figures in the painting seem more prominent: the two small, central groups of members of the House who look at each other as they stand in front of the chamber’s bar or, above them and to the left, the erect figure of Lord Ormelie, the future Marquess of Breadalbane, who literally stands out from among his seated colleagues because he has risen to speak. Also distinguished by pose and gesture, the stretching of his hand toward the assistant clerk to the right, is the legislator beneath Ormelie: Lord John Russell, whose prominence is justified by his having introduced in the early 1830s three reform bills on the floor of the House, the last of which was finally enacted. Yet Hayter ensures the visual prominence of his own likeness by creating a vignette that includes the artist and the two men on either side of him. To the viewer’s left stands the doorkeeper of Commons, who seems to be attending to Hayter’s needs rather than to his more accustomed duties, even though he is holding a sheaf of official papers made recognizable as such by their red seals. Behind Hayter is the figure granted the most expansive gesture of the hundreds depicted in The House of Commons: with his right arm extended over the barrier within which most of the members of Commons sit, his sash crossing

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the broadest chest visible, in an accustomed posture of command, his ­distinctive facial ­features clear in three-quarter profile, stands the Duke of Wellington. Hayter is assured enough of his own importance not only to turn his back on the hero of Waterloo, but also to depict his own form as if it had been granted that hero’s care and patronage: Wellington’s hand is directly above the artist’s head; Wellington’s arm constitutes the top of a human frame that surrounds Hayter’s crouching form. In another sense the entire painting is a self-portrait, representing, as Trollope’s novel does, Hayter’s political allegiances. As the work of a self-described “Whig radical,”7 this image of the Parliament made possible by the act of 1832 tells the story of the triumph of constitutional processes, and he embodies in oil his conviction that an artist can be as politically effective as a member of Parliament: the painter deserves not only to be included in this scene, but also to command a bit of its foreground along with the more plausibly placed Iron Duke. Yet how straightforward is the political message of this painting? In the account offered in his 1843 Descriptive Catalogue, Hayter presents himself not only as the creator of The House of Commons, 1833, but also as one of its first readers; and he interprets its features as an uncomplicated celebration of the achievements of the Great Reform Act. When he referred to his painting in 1845 as “essentially a national document,” he seems to have meant not only that it should become, as he claimed nine years later, “national property,” preferably housed in the National Gallery,8 but also that it accurately and directly conveys the state of the nation at a particularly significant moment in its history. In his analysis of his own work, Hayter uses interchangeably variations of the verbs constitute, compose, and represent to refer to both the subject of the painting (“the newly constituted body of representatives”) and the process of painting it (a “true scene” must be “represented,” and the building “impose[s] limits not to be transgressed in the composition”).9 Such formulations imply, as Ruskin might have argued, that the visual qualities of this picture are analogous to the structure of British government and that they are therefore more constructive than imitative. How one sees that act of construction, therefore, determines in large measure how one reads the political import of the painting. By picturing the legislators gathered in the House of Commons in 1833, Hayter supports the point made by historian J. P. Parry that the debates in the early years of the 1830s focused more on the kind of men who would be elected to a reformed parliament than they did on the kind of men who would do the electing,10 but for Hayter those men derive their meaning more specifically from the way in which they come together. Examining Hayter’s strategies of composition  – literally, his decisions about which men to include in The House of Commons, 1833 and where to place them – identifies his sense of the British constitution as the one that was traditional at the time. The constitution is what the root of the word

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implies: according to a recent and particularly cogent formulation, it is a set of relations: “the actual, current structure of institutions is constitutive of the Constitution itself.” The “classical view” of those relations imagines the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons – “the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic parts” – as three elements that balance each other to make the constitution a stable whole. This view of a “balance of powers,” often associated with Blackstone, dominated much thinking about Britain’s unwritten charter at least until the late 1860s.11 Hayter’s painting, not completed until Victoria had been on the throne for six years, is therefore Victorian in both spirit and chronology. Translating this conception into graphic terms, The House of Commons, 1833 pictures the constitution as an architectural structure that is simultaneously a single and a tripartite form. In doing so, it draws on the graphic conventions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political prints that emphasize the three constituent parts of the object being depicted, most often labeling them King, Lords, Commons. Pyramids similar in shape to the body of land in A Map of Society Island are joined by an impressive variety of other tripartite objects: “The Old Oak of the Constitution” has three substantial branches; alternatively, a tripod is formed by poles (“Tria junta in uno”). Most popular, however, were built structures whose three-part forms stand for the nature of the constitution, especially three-columned temples or single classical columns. In an image from 1797, William Pitt appears as a skeleton who, Sampson-like, is pulling down a triumphal arch with its royal seal denoting the king and its columns identified as commons and lords. Thirty-two years later Wellington and Peel and assorted radicals are seen laying siege to a similar temple.12 So conventional were such visualizations that politicians on the floor of the House invoked verbal versions of them, Russell speaking in the early 1820s about the need to defend “the beautiful temple” of the government.13 According to Hayter, such traditional structures are not in danger. Rather, they have found their current, updated form in an actual chamber, St. Stephen’s Chapel. Architectural elements and their disposition in The House of Commons identify that chamber as one in which William IV and his lords and his commons come together to represent the constituent parts of the constitution. According to the foremost Victorian authority on the constitution, the sovereign “is always supposed to be present in the High Court of Parliament,”14 and Hayter makes sure that the viewer of his painting does not forget that fact. The presence of the king is implied by the event being depicted, moving the address in reply to the monarch whose speech opens Parliament every year. He is also symbolically present in the royal coat of arms over the speaker’s chair. On either side of the house are arrayed commoners and lords, Whigs to the left, Tories to the right – in Hayter’s words, “supporters and opposers of the bill for the Reform.” Hard-won concord, along with grandeur, now reigns: “The occasion represented is

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one on which the members of parliament have usually been unanimous, as opposition to an Address by the Crown rarely occurs, and it was one which would surely fill the House, as all the greatest men of the country were called on by their rank, their power, and intellect, to be present.” Such “greatest” men include a good number of peers who stand before the bar, as the artist explains in his Descriptive Catalogue, where they are “­frequently to be seen during debates.”15 As Bagehot notes, Parliament is capable of offering a spectacular display, and here the legislature is captured at one of its most “stately” and “impressive” moments. Hayter arranges the men on the floor of the house within the landscape format of the picture to emphasize its principal human features, row after row of commoners, many of whom, including Gladstone and a good number of radicals, were taking their places as MPs for the first time in 1833. According to Ruskin, the repetition of their forms and the continuities linking their rows are able to communicate a lesson about the sympathy and peaceful succession that characterize this government. Yet the array of figures stretching horizontally and relatively close to the picture plane ensures that peers like the Duke of Richmond on the left and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the right are necessarily more prominent than the minor figures in the deep background, MPs such as the Whigs John N. Fazakerley and William B. Brodie on the left and the Tories Thomas Greene and Anthony Lefroy on the right, four commoners whose names can be known only because Hayter’s descriptive catalogue provides an illustrated guide to their identities. With its commoners to the back and lords to the front, the painting seems to offer a conventional triangular spatialization of hierarchy. Hayter’s distribution of other men in this scene, however, raises questions about such a conclusion. The figures at the center of the foreground of The House of Commons are all MPs, but they stand unaccountably before the bar, as if they were lords condescending to visit the lower house. In addition, although figures of lords frame commoners on the left and right of the composition, Hayter unsettles any effect of apparent segregation by having his friend Hamilton stand just behind the Earl of Jersey. In the middle of the group of peers on the left, almost all of whom are included because they are members of the current government, are two MPs who are not similarly distinguished, the Marquess of Tavistock and the historian T. B. Macaulay. Placing Tavistock among the peers makes some sense – in a few years he would become the seventh Duke of Bedford, and his father was arguably the most important of Hayter’s aristocratic patrons – but similar explanations for the historian are not forthcoming, although Macaulay’s definitive and memorable speech in favor of reform might justify his counterfactual elevation to the peerage here. This combination of lords and commoners is particularly telling. The House of Lords in 1831 and 1832 had famously stood against franchise reform. By 1833 the Duke of Wellington, the most distinguished “opposer” of reform, whose obduracy

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had moved protestors to break the windows of his London residence, still seems so imperturbably magnificent or perhaps arrogant that he can turn his back on the proceedings in the House. Yet, according to Hayter’s depiction, Wellington has deigned to be present, and some of his lordly colleagues are willing to mingle with those elected as the result of the passage of the 1832 act. Changing the constitution has altered the relation of lords to commons and presumably, according to Hayter the self-described “Whig radical,” the relation of both those groups to the symbolically present king. Such a redistribution of bodies and attitudes, democratic and leveling in its effects, might well seem as momentous an achievement as the literal redistribution of seats accomplished by the Great Reform Act. The House of Commons, 1833 therefore comments on the question that was vigorously debated in the years directly after the passage of the First Reform Act and that has remained the source of contention: what exactly was the effect of the Great Reform Act? At the time reformers could exult, according to the Birmingham Union, in the destruction of the “sordid and remorseless oligarchy … [that] so long has been fattening on the plunder of industry, and drinking … the life-blood of the poor.” In the last decades of the twentieth century, most historians agreed that such hopes for the triumph of democracy, even in more restrained terms, were largely defeated: not only did the passage of the act not diminish the power of the aristocratic oligarchy; but it also led, in the view of a scholar like Peter Mandler, to a resurgence of the landed elite. More recently the interpretive pendulum seems to be swinging back yet again to claims about the measure’s “democritization” of the country.16 Opinions voiced by working-class characters in the two novels that George Eliot set in the era of the First Reform Act neatly encapsulate these two extremes: in Felix Holt (1866) a trade-union man concludes that the act is “nothing but a trick – it’s nothing but swearing-in special constables to keep the aristocrats safe in their monopoly”; by contrast, in Middlemarch (1871–72) the prospect of reform further intoxicates a drunken tenant farmer with the hope that “the Rinform” will set all landlords “a-scuttlin.”17 Current analysis of the act puts in doubt the view of the labor organizer of Felix Holt rather than that of Eliot’s befuddled agriculturalist; and Hayter’s visual celebration of a tripartite constitution in which lords are pictured only because they had entered the chamber of the commons, who are by definition their inferiors, would suggest that the besotted farmer of Middlemarch knows whereof he speaks. Other features of the painting comment on party politics in the years after the passage of the Great Reform Act. In his 1843 account of The House of Commons, 1833, Hayter prided himself on its being “devoid of political bias,”18 on its not conveying any merely partisan political statement. Yet the oddities of its linear perspective seem to convey a message flattering to the Whigs. The painting charts a middle way between two

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earlier depictions of parliamentary gatherings in St. Stephen’s Chapel, Peter Tillemans’s The House of Commons in Session (c. 1710), which sets the three windows and the speaker’s chair at the exact center of the canvas, and Karl Anton Hickel’s The House of Commons 1793–94 (1793–95), which places all three windows in the chamber to the right of the center of the canvas. Hayter’s windows are only slightly to the right of center, and the middle of the open floor between the opposing groups of Whigs and Tories is at exactly the midpoint of the picture plane. Canting the perspective in this direction, Hayter creates a number of different vanishing points: the top and bottom of the galleries, each of the rows of men, and the two edges of the unoccupied floor between them all come together at different heights below and to the right of the central window. The effect of this inconsistent shifting of perspective tells a political story: the Tories seem to occupy a part of the House that is smaller than that taken up by the Whigs, and that impression reflects the reality of the political situation. Because members of the Whig government are in attendance, many, if not all, of its aristocratic officers have assembled in St. Stephen’s Chapel, so there are almost twice as many peers on the left side of the painting as there are Tory noblemen on the right. This spatial arrangement accurately reflects the results of the election held in December of 1832, when the Whigs won a large majority of the seats in the House,19 and Hayter grants that party the enlarged space that its recent victories at the polls have made appropriate. Moreover, although he places his own figure below the Tories, his posture has him turning toward the Whigs. At one point in his long and frustrating attempt to find a buyer for The House of Commons, 1833, Hayter explained that he had striven for political neutrality in his painting by asking an equal number of Tories and Whigs to sit for their portraits; otherwise, his “great picture” would have been a “one sided failure.”20 The message that its perspective sends, however, is more “one sided” than not: the Whigs have won, and the Tories seem physically and therefore politically diminished as a consequence. Hayter’s catalogue copy suggests that although he ignored the import of the perspective of his painting, he was quite self-consciously aware of many of the “difficulties” that he faced in composing The House of Commons, including a lack of chiaroscuro, “the architectural monotony” of the chamber, and the inevitable sameness of the clothing of the MPs whom he was representing. Moreover, the occasion, which conventionally involves only “unanimous” responses from the assembled legislators, is marked more by “tameness” than by “strong feeling” or “excited expression.” Such uniformity, unrelieved by drama, Hayter almost directly admits, might simply be boring. Considering his acute understanding of all these “unyielding materials,”21 one might wonder why he chose this subject at all if it were not for his habitual interest in the main chance. Yet had he decided to treat in his representation of reform a more inherently

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Fig. 2.2  Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Reform Banquet, Held in the Guildhall, City of London, 11 July 1832, oil on canvas (122˝ by 96˝, 1832–34)

engaging event from a political narrative that included more than its fair share of panic and violence and conflict – even the less threatening, but still exciting, moment when the 1832 bill passed in either Commons or Lords, for instance – it would have been difficult to visualize the ideal of a constitution that balances against each other its three constituent parts. A look at Benjamin Robert Haydon’s comparable documentary painting of 1832–34, The Reform Banquet, Held in the Guildhall, City of London, 11 July 1832 (fig. 2.2), demonstrates how much Hayter’s attempts to achieve that goal cost him and how insistently, even stubbornly, he refused to depict a scene for whose aesthetic or historic appeal a visual case might be more easily made. Haydon was much more loyal than Hayter was to traditional definitions of history painting as the grand, universalizing depiction of remote, often mythic events. Haydon’s unfortunate Marcus Curtius Leaping into the Gulf (1836–42), which was showing at the British Institution while Hayter’s The House of Commons was on display in 1843, reveals that

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propensity: its depiction of a Roman hero resolutely hurtling himself and his terrified horse toward death so that the rider can save his nation is perhaps the self-portrait, among the many that Haydon painted, that best reflects his identification of his art with apparently doomed ideals. While Hayter could posit in the last, resounding sentence of the commentary in his Descriptive Catalogue that “to be the painter of the history of his own time may well be the highest ambition of an artist,” Haydon famously disdained such a role.22 He had often been forced, however, to submit to the pressure of circumstances, principally the indebtedness frequently exacerbated by his uncompromising faith in his own supreme artistic destiny; and he became, like Hayter, an artist who recorded in oil events of the present and recent past, turning out copy after copy, for instance, of his widely sought-after portrait of Napoleon in attempts to avert one financial crisis after another. Haydon by 1843 had been campaigning for over thirty years, as many noblemen including Lord Melbourne well knew, to have lofty depictions of scenes from classical history, preferably his own paintings, installed on the walls of the House of Lords. Not surprisingly, then, when he first saw Hayter’s The House of Commons, Haydon recorded in his diary his contempt for it as one of the “bastard ‘High Art Works’” that the public, he hoped, would soon learn to reject. What is not generally recognized about this oft-quoted denunciation is that Haydon was referring not only to Hayter’s painting but also to two of his own works, his “Quaker Picture,” Meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840 (1840–41), and The Reform Banquet.23 High art can be legitimate only if it finds its subjects in more elevated and more distant events than those of the debased present. Yet Haydon on three occasions had demonstrated his interest in the passage of the first Reform Act, the chief contemporary political ­milestone of his times. He painted the appealing genre piece Waiting for the Times, the Morning after the Debate on Reform, 8 October 1831 (1831), which represents the anticipation created by the fate of the reform bill in the House of Lords by contrasting the postures of two men sitting in a coffeehouse, one reading the newspaper, the other eager to read it. Haydon also made an oil sketch, Meeting of the Unions on Newhall Hill, Birmingham (1832), which depicts one of the great public demonstrations in support of franchise reform, an image in which he conveys the excitement of the moment by including in its almost kinetic composition a variety of figures, crowd and speakers and horsemen. Haydon’s The Reform Banquet attempts to carry over into its much larger and more complicated form some of the qualities of these earlier paintings. As the portrayal of many eminent politicians in the act of celebrating the passage of the 1832 act, it inevitably shares its chief compositional feature, its rows of men, with Hayter’s The House of Commons. Haydon’s painting also includes a portrait of himself standing to the side and sketching the scene before him, as he actually had

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done on July 11, 1832. Yet the differences between the two paintings make it clear that Haydon recognized the need to emphasize the drama of the event that had been, he thought, a “glittering enchantment” that treated its witnesses to a “magnificent vision.”24 Haydon’s banqueting men fill a bit less than the bottom half of a canvas that is not as insistently rectangular as Hayter’s; and they are seated in two diagonal rows intersecting another diagonal formed by the head table and its occupants. Earl Grey, who commissioned the painting, stands at the center of the image and watches a procession of figures, servants and officials as they approach between two of the tables. In the left background of the painting are standing its smallest figures, a group of peers who are dwarfed by the politicians and serving men in the foreground. Unlike Hayter, who claimed to have embraced nonpartisanship in his recreation of an historic event, Haydon displayed no such tact: the largest figures in the painting are the Whigs seated at the first table. Yet pro- and contra-art were perhaps the parties about which Haydon cared most, and the personages whom he miniaturized and marginalized when he placed them in a corner of the Guildhall were the Tories who did not sit for him for sketches of their portraits – “those Noblemen who were invited but did not come” – and their location therefore punishes them for their lack of commitment to his artistic goals – a bit of personal animus that excited a good deal of journalistic scorn when the painting was exhibited.25 More successfully, the plentiful and highly differentiated objects and light sources in this scene attempt to bring it to life and convey, in Bagehot’s terms, its status as a spectacle “brilliant to the eye.” The hall seems to be animated by the reflective effects of gas candelabra and mirrors, as well as by its elaborate décor and the lavish settings on the dining tables: crests, banners, flags, bunting, suits of armor, arms, livery, great silver ceremonial platters, centerpieces of pineapples and flowers, glasses, decanters, china, and trays. Haydon depicts fewer figures in The Reform Banquet than there are in Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833, but even if that were not the case, Haydon’s arrangement of several of the men so close to the picture plane that only their busts are visible would ensure that the focus is more often on specific figures than on a mass of men in row after serried row. The painting may be, in the words of one of Haydon’s mid-twentieth-century biographers, “an artistic monstrosity,” an “absurd and grotesque jumble,” despite the “merit” of its “individual heads,”26 but its absurdities do testify to its creator’s attempts to enliven his record of a ceremonial occasion that he had found anything but “monotonous.” Moreover, the prominence that The Reform Banquet gives both to its Whig politicians and to its serving men may suggest that, for Haydon, the act of 1832 had created a constitution that includes those who are represented as well as those who represent them.

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Apparently more important to Hayter in The House of Commons are, by contrast, the many men who have come together as a single visual image of a three-part constitution. Yet the painting also sets against each other the competing claims for predominance of its numbers and units, of the many men in Parliament and Parliament itself as a single body composed of individuals, through its balancing of symmetry and variety. The two sides of the House with their matching rows of seated men, the two galleries, the three alcoves on either side filled with standing MPs, the mirroring of the same number of chandeliers and supporting posts near the side walls of the chamber – all these elements of the reassuringly uniform architecture of St. Stephen’s Chapel are arrayed in relation to single and triple features, the desk and the speaker and the ornate central chandelier, the three windows and the three clerks. Minor touches emphasize the kind of consistencies that are for Ruskin ways of conveying strength. The only two men wearing sashes, Earl Grey and the Duke of Wellington, strike comparable poses on the left and right. Both ranks of seated MPs include a man who is leaning forward, more intently following the proceedings than many of his colleagues: the Whig Lord John Russell extends his arm to hand a paper to one of the clerks; and the Irish radical Daniel O’Connell, accurately portrayed as seated with the Tories,27 is registering his dissent, an action that Hayter ignores in his 1843 account of the unanimity depicted in the painting. The green curtains that the artist added to the canvas by 1854, which took the place of the actual drapery that had previously framed the image, emphasize the effect of regularity, turning the event into a staged tableaux or a massive version of a cabinet painting. Such visual qualities stress the unity that emerges from the “monotony of forms in the House” in the two senses of the word house as both an architectural space and a body of men. Yet the long years that Hayter spent cajoling one MP after another to take the time to sit for his likeness reveal that he hoped to honor the inviolable individuality of each of the hundreds of legislators pictured in The House of Commons. To that end symmetry is varied wherever possible through a series of contrasts, the formal feature that, again according to Ruskin, reveals the distinctiveness of character. Most notably, the red of the court uniform worn by Lord Ormelie stands out from the blacks and browns of the coats of his colleagues. Also distinguishing the figures in the painting are accessories donned or carried, such as hats and gloves and, most obviously, the portfolio and pencil that announce Hayter’s profession. The many here have become a unit, numbers of men further unified by the “proper gilt frame” that Hayter had also added to the painting by 1854,28 but those men have not ceded their distinctive identities to the whole that they now compose. Such is – or, at least, according to one reading, such is – the effect of seeing Hayter’s epic painting of the reformed Parliament. Yet the size of the image, as well as its ambition in terms of the numbers that it attempts

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to contain, tends to undercut the status of the individual among the many and the political message of the painting. If one stands at any distance at all from The House of Commons, it is difficult, if not impossible, to grant its figures the individuality that their sittings to Hayter seemed to have promised them. The seven engravings of the various parts of the painting included in the Descriptive Catalogue convey the differences between one face and another much more effectively than does the painting itself. The muted and unvarying color scheme of The House of Commons further emphasizes a dull uniformity. The brownish red of the chamber walls and the black, tan, brown, and gray of the members’ clothing are relatively unrelieved, even when they are set off by red highlights or by the green of the curtains, both of which are also muted. Here Ruskin’s ideal of composition as a process that creates a vital visual and political unity becomes a dead oneness. The same shapes and colors, particularly the pink tones of the faces of the members, recur so often that they contribute to the sense that one is beholding a mind-numbing multitude of figures. Moreover, the relative visual monotony of the painting communicates a political quiescence that makes it hard to imagine that this body of men, the products of reform, can ever become active and energetic agents of further change. Finally, the size of Hayter’s painting literally makes it difficult to see it as a coherent referendum on the franchise reform that had already taken place. (Not surprisingly, none of the many viewers whom I have observed looking at The House of Commons in the National Portrait Gallery, where it now hangs, seemed interested in spending any time at a distance from the painting in an attempt to comprehend it as a whole.) Most important, Hayter’s picture presents the 1833 Parliament as a bastion of the nobility and the gentry. Hayter creates a verbal version of such an impression when, in the lists of his Descriptive Catalogue, he prefaces the names of more than one hundred of the MPs with the titles “Lord” and “Viscount” and “Marquis” and “Sir.” Oddly enough, the massing of these legislators as one body turns lord and commoner into indistinguishable constituents of a group of men who enjoy generally equivalent status and privilege, but the effect is less to lower the peers to the level of the commoners, even though the former are standing in the latter’s chamber, than it is to emphasize the relative status of all the men privileged enough to be gathered there. The House of Commons seems to depict less a tripartite constitution than a unitary ruling oligarchy, even if O’Connell, the only dissenting figure, stands out from his fellows. Because the men of the highest social status are closest to the picture plane, it is easier to imagine the relatively indistinct men behind as their equals, as if they were peers receding endlessly into the distance, than it is to register the great social gulf between, say, Earl Grey and, at the other end of the hall, the Whig foot soldier, John N. Fazakerley. So obscured are the men in the background that they cannot, as Bagehot would say, “make” the ones

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in the foreground “what they are.” In that sense the painting illuminates Williams’s ideas about the “wonderful muddle” of the British class system, which makes it difficult for members of different classes to know whose interests they share. In terms of clothing alone, any dissimilarities between those worn by lord and commoner here, even between the grandest duke and a doorkeeper, would seem slight if such garments were compared to the attire of a beggar or even of an artisan on the London streets. By making this fact visible, The House of Commons, 1833 seems to define the constitution in terms of its exclusions, as an instrument of the undiminished power accorded privilege after 1832. The picture, then, is a graphic representation of political representation in one of its less-than-democratic incarnations: those who stand in for the people make it hard to imagine the people, much less see them, as having a place in St. Stephen’s Chapel. If, for Hayter, the constitution is a particular, present-day chamber, not a classical temple with three columns, its shape still embodies elitist values. Thus, the painting offers less a celebration of the triumph of franchise reform than a reason to lament its inadequacies. Prai si ng and peddli ng a n image o f re f o r m The conceptual achievement of Hayter’s painting was often registered by his contemporaries when The House of Commons, 1833, finally complete except for the addition of its painted draperies, was shared with the public. To many of them, at least, it was a surprisingly cogent and widely adaptable picture of reform. In choosing the specific location for the display of The House of Commons, 1833, Hayter might have been thinking of Haydon’s sensationally successful earlier exhibition in 1820 at the Egyptian Hall of Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem: not only did Haydon profit from the ticket sales, with thirty thousand people paying a shilling apiece to see the painting, but the words of awed praise reportedly uttered by the actress Sarah Siddons marked the acme of his career.29 Yet the dubious associations of the Egyptian Hall made it a venue that posed obvious problems, and Haydon’s later decisions to exhibit works there, particularly his Anti-Slavery Society Convention in 1841, may actually have hurt his reputation as a master of high art. Along with its role in the display of paintings, particularly large paintings, including some of John Martin’s flamboyant images of destruction and apocalypse, which Ruskin derided as mere popular art – that is, as not art at all – the Egyptian Hall was “London’s most famous hall of miscellaneous entertainment,” including artifacts and casts of objects from the ancient and the new worlds, panoramas, marvels like the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, strong men, German Lilliputians, nautch girls, and clairvoyants.30 Yet Haydon’s 1834 exhibition of The Reform Banquet in the Great Room in St. James’s Street should have provided a more specific warning about the dangers of

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mixing politics and art: both a financial and a critical failure, it lost £230 and gained only excoriating responses from contemporary journals. The Tory Fraser’s Magazine found in Haydon’s unalloyed enthusiasm for the achievements of his Whig patron, Earl Grey, a political justification for one of the nastiest ad-hominem attacks in the records of nineteenth-century criticism: Haydon was, according to Fraser’s, among other unpalatable things, “a piece of high beef ” and his painting, “a nasty bit of bread,” the two together constituting a “dirt sandwich.” Nine years later Hayter’s The House of Commons encountered no such verbal bile, eliciting a kindlier, even respectful response from the press, though not a heavier purse for its creator.31 Accounts of Hayter’s 1843 exhibition, particularly the one published in the ILN, prove that, at least for several summer months, The House of Commons, 1833 was read as an artistically effective testimony to the glories of franchise reform. Among the papers taking notice of the exhibition, only Punch seemed unimpressed. In a belated response, the paper’s eponymous humorist called Hayter an “artist” who “in the consciousness of his own power” had put on “an exhibition of his own, unshackled by rules of societies or academies” (September 30, 1843: 137). The Athenaeum and The Times, however, were moved to praise, the Athenaeum so much so that it declared that Hayter had nothing to fear from comparisons of his work with that of the French history painters who had decorated Versailles or even masters like Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard, while The Times called The House of Commons “this great work, for a great work it is in many respects.” Both papers remark on the artist’s “industry,” the work’s “faithful” depiction of an historical event, and the “difficulties of the subject,” at points seeming to be citing passages from Hayter’s Descriptive Catalogue. Most tellingly, these reviews comment on the relation between monotony and variety, between impressions of numbers of men and separate individuals; and they do so in ways that identify in Hayter’s depiction of the reformed Parliament a pleasing balance between these alternatives. For the Athenaeum “the mathematical angularity of a composition in which four rows of heads necessarily form a prominent object, is happily varied,” even though “a certain pinched thinness of face” characterizes too many of the men in the picture. The Times goes on at length about the ways in which Hayter has achieved a unity of effect without sacrificing the interest created by variety. If the “long lines of heads” had been “broken into separate groups” to achieve the “abruptness and variety” of the “picturesque,” the composition would not have been sufficiently coherent. Yet Hayter, according to the reviewer for The Times, has achieved the higher goal of “fidelity of representation” while he “avoided monotony” through his handling of “light and shadow … which relieves the picture from the dullness of dingy colours.” Looking at The House of Commons, 1833, the writers for these two papers see primarily the “happy”

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way in which men recognizable for their individuality, “pinched” faces aside, have come together in a “composition” that “as a whole,” in the words of The Times, is “fine.”32 Franchise reform has therefore done an admirable job of reconstituting the nation. Such, at least according to these accounts, is the political statement made by Hayter’s painting. Yet, as the opening paragraph in The Times review makes clear, the first day of the “private view” of The House of Commons, 1833 was as much a political event as it was the occasion for unveiling a political point of view, an event that turned the often dodgy exhibition venue of the Egyptian Hall into a reincarnation of St. Stephen’s Chapel, which had been destroyed nine years earlier: “The attendance of the Members of both Houses of Parliament was very numerous, indeed the room during the whole of the morning exhibited a complete reunion of politicians, Lords and Commons, Whigs, Conservatives, and people of all parties.” In the context of the subject of the painting, “a complete reunion of politicians” identifies this event as a gathering together of the men who had been in Parliament ten years before. In fifteen closely printed lines, The Times, after dutifully noting the presence of the Prince Consort and his attendants, identifies a number of legislators depicted in the painting: present were the Duke of Wellington and the Archbishop of Canterbury, along with such politicians from the early 1830s as Lord John Russell, Lord Duncannon, Lord Grimston, Lord Marcus Hall, Lord Clive, and Lord Monteagle.33 The Egyptian Hall has been transformed by this company into a recreated image of the constitution, which now brings together in the flesh royalty, lords, and commoners. More specifically, in attending the exhibition, politicians who had faced each other from different sides of the political spectrum and in different houses during the debates of 1831 and 1832 were confronting each other once again, but now they were, significantly, also encountering their own likenesses. One wonders if these men arrayed themselves to the left and right of The House of Commons as they strove to inspect their own portraits, reduplicating in their physical relation to the painting the encounters between Whigs and Tories that Hayter depicts in the painting. Whether such an exact mirroring of art and life took place, The Times makes clear its understanding that the “great picture” is notable for its combined aesthetic and political significance. Its portrayal of a past event is more than timely: in the bodies of the men attending its exhibition, it is actually alive. By comparison with even the adulatory remarks in The Times and the Athenaeum, the enthusiasm of the Illustrated London News for Hayter’s “very extraordinary picture” goes beyond the excessive. Not content with the claim that The Times makes for the political implications of the “­private view” of The House of Commons, the ILN casts every viewing of it as an event that inevitably glorifies the nation. “An honour to British art,” this painting will immortalize its creator by “secur[ing] to his memory

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the grateful tribute of many who will read in this great picture all that the illustrations of art can impart to narrative, and all that painting can do for contemporary history.” Seeing Hayter’s canvas thus becomes a requirement for those visiting Britain because it offers “a more vivid and intelligible notion of an English House of Commons than they could obtain by reading volumes.” Similarly, British subjects have “almost a duty” to view this “very extraordinary” representation of the constitution under which they live. According to the writer in the ILN, the greatest challenges that the artist faced were compositional, all of them involving the linearity of both the human and the architectural forms in the scene: the “rows of straight lines, formed by the peculiar style of the unpictorial apartment” of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Noting the effect of “radiation,” the formal feature that Ruskin would later praise in The Elements of Drawing as emblematic of “healthy human actions … spring[ing] … from some single heart motive,”34 the ILN finds appealing the impression created by the “long lines of heads [that] diverg[e] almost from a point like the radii of a ­circle.” Hayter’s “genius” is thus more than a match for the difficulties he faces, and in conquering them, he creates a “perspective” on the event that the ILN, echoing The Times, declares is ultimately “fine.” Finally, like The Times and the Athenaeum, the ILN finds in The House of Commons a visualized political lesson about how properly to handle the competing claims of units and numbers. All the instantly recognizable “portraits” are such “correct representations” that they “stand before the beholders as in actual life,” but Hayter has managed to ensure that no one figure is “more palpably conspicuous” than the imperatives of historical accuracy require (May 27, 1843: 374). Separate figures join “long lines of heads” in an image that celebrates a political victory that has not reduced uniqueness to an undifferentiated mass. Yet the engravings that accompany the ILN’s review take that point ­farther by casting this picture of reform as an uncontested triumph of individuality over numbers, thereby providing the kind of understanding or “intelligence,” as the writer of the letterpress concedes, that words cannot convey. On one page of the article called “Sir George Hayter’s Great Picture,” there appear five wood engravings, the first a reproduction of the painting itself and then four enlarged details, one of Charles Manners Sutton, who was in 1833 the Speaker of the House, another of a particularly beneficent-looking Archbishop of Canterbury, another of Sir Francis Burdett, and finally a combined portrait of Wellington, Lord Aberdeen, and Lord Lyndhurst as they appear together on the right side of The House of Commons. The largest of these images, that of the entire painting, which the ILN calls the “First Assembling of the First Reformed Parliament, 1833” (fig. 2.3), subtly alters the form of Hayter’s painting and the political statement that it makes. Because it depicts, accurately one presumes, the curtains with which The House of Commons was surrounded

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Fig. 2.3  “First Assembling of the First Reformed Parliament, 1833,” wood engraving after Sir George Hayter (6⅜˝ by 5½˝), Illustrated London News (May 27, 1843: 373)

when it was shown in the Egyptian Hall rather than its later painted drapery, the engraving changes the proportions of the original. The broader width, as well as vastly greater size, of the canvas allows Hayter to try to convey the individuality of many hundreds of figures; but in the print only the forefront of the chamber holds identifiably human forms, a series of lines in the background merely indicating the presence of the bodies there. In some passages of the engraving that are evidently the work of a tint tool, the evenly spaced lines that form the ceiling and walls and floor seem to be repeated in the shadowy, tiny figures of the men to the rear of the chamber. Yet any such erasure of individuality is more than offset by the details of The House of Commons published along with the “First Assembling.” The five figures, two separately and three together, of those deemed important enough to appear in these details are approximately seven or eight times larger than they are in the engraving after

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the painting. Prominent men, most impressively the Tories Aberdeen and Lyndhurst and Wellington, have come forward on this page of the ILN to declare their difference from the anonymous and unrecognizable masses of MPs from whom they literally stand out. Such a distinction, however, would be evident even if the ILN had published no details. Because the contrast between light and dark is often starker in wood engraving than in oil painting and because such a distinction is particularly true of this reproduction of The House of Commons, 1833 and its original, the politicians “below the bar,” Wellington and the archbishop but also his Whig counterparts on the other side of the chamber, are relatively more dominant in the print than they are in the canvas. The specific men whose images the ILN thought deserving of enlargement reflect the political situation that obtained in 1843 rather than that of 1833. By the time that Hayter was exhibiting The House of Commons, its partisan political message had become outmoded, but instead of making that obsolescence visible, the images in the ILN reconstruct the perspective of the painting to bring it up to date, thereby suggesting indirectly that Hayter’s graphic rendition of the constitution with its faith in the power of its tripartite unity still has something to say in the context of a new political reality. The party in charge when the painting was exhibited in 1843 was no longer the one that had triumphed in 1832: the Whigs had been replaced by the Tories, and the ILN details chart that passing of political power. Outnumbered in these images by his four conservative rivals is Burdett, a Whig perhaps chosen for depiction as a detail because he had outgrown his earlier radical politics. The inclusion of the Tory speaker, Charles Manners Sutton, seems even more pointed: in 1833 the Whigs, whose election victories should have made them invincible, had admitted their weakness when they asked Manners Sutton to remain in office so that he could keep order among the many newly elected members of their own party. Finally and most obviously, the group portrait of three leading Tories witnesses visually to the ascendency of their party in power in 1843. The handling of perspective in “The First Assembling” also comments on the current political situation. When Karl Anton Hickel in the mid eighteenth century sketched in oil the painting that was to have been called The Opposition, a companion piece to his The House of Commons, he simply reversed the effect of the perspective in the first painting so that “one angled to the Government side … the other towards the Opposition.”35 In 1843 the ILN made a similar, though more moderate, alteration: the designer for the paper shifted the perspective in Hayter’s painting so that the windows and the central chandelier are more aligned in the print with the midpoint of the image than they are in the original, an effect emphasized by placing slightly to the left the large royal seal at the top of the draperies. By opening out the diagonal rows of men on the right side of the

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chamber, “The First Assembling” creates the impression that the Tories fill a more nearly equal part of the space in St. Stephen’s Chapel than they do in Hayter’s The House of Commons. The reform bill that passed in 1832 has become in 1843, as the ILN sees it, a constitution in which the Tory elites more effectively dominate the political scene than they had a decade earlier. By 1843 the expectation that reform would lead to a profound shift away from conservative interests, an expectation buoyed by the great number of radicals who had prevailed in the election of December 1832, had been largely disappointed. This is the lesson that “all foreigners” and “Englishmen” have a “duty” to see. An analytic encounter between Hayter’s oversized painting and the small black-and-white prints in the ILN therefore yields an exchange: in 1843 wood engravings, a medium too often taken to have merely documentary value, made the painting dependent on them for any significance it might still have had, now that it had proved unable to predict accurately even the short-term effects of the First Reform Act. In another sense, however, Hayter’s painting was a work before, not behind, its time, though the designer and the engravers for the ILN could hardly have been expected to know how prescient of further reforms the later fortunes of The House of Commons would become.36 After exhibiting the painting, the “worthy, trouble-some” painter, as Victoria called him, begged one prime minister after another to support the purchase of this “national document.” From the Tories he felt he could expect little sympathy; he later explained that the timing of his exhibition was not auspicious, “the great party of Reformers … no longer in the majority in 1843 when my picture was finished.”37 Hayter thought he would have to wait until the Whigs were back in power. Yet no good came in 1846 of their return to office and the accession to the position of prime minister of Lord John Russell, the politician most frequently associated with franchise reform. At the time the government sponsored no measure to buy the picture, although by 1850 it had been installed in the tea room of the House of Commons. There, as a modern art historian notes, it met with “little enthusiasm,” perhaps because, during the early and middle years of the 1850s, there was so slight an interest in the cause to whose earlier triumph it witnessed: a war in the Crimea and a rebellion in India made further extensions of the franchise seem irrelevant. In 1854 the artist was appealing to Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer, arguing that The House of Commons, 1833 was “a wonderful production, which must eventually become national property.”38 The route by which it eventually did enter a state collection involved byzantine complications, the nature of which reveals the disinclination of politicians in the late 1850s to authorize the funds needed to buy an art work depicting a political subject. Such an outlay became justifiable only as a matter of obvious political expediency.

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Like the passage of franchise reform in 1867, the purchase of  Hayter’s The  House of Commons was an event ironically ­engineered  by  the  Conservatives, as the Tories now in office were commonly called. Through a  series of apparently unusual machinations, they finally saw fit in 1858 to buy the epic painting; and they did so, I think, as a way of issuing an unambiguous, if indirect, political statement. When Disraeli came into office as chancellor of the exchequer in February of that year, a small select committee, whose members included Lord John Russell, apparently recommended the purchase of Hayter’s work; and according to a brief notice in The Times of August 11, 1858, the Conservative government acted on that recommendation.39 Why Russell would have been interested in this outcome is no mystery: The House of Commons commemorates what was to that point and what would remain the finest hour in his ultimately sixty-five-year-long parliamentary career. Disraeli’s motivations might seem harder to fathom. Yet a year earlier he had admitted that his party was a “corpse” whose only hope of reanimation lay in sponsoring franchise reform,40 and his willingness to make “national property” of a grandiose portrayal of Whig legislation perhaps foretold his introduction later that year of a measure offering a moderate extension of the franchise. Commenting in 1859 on this turn of events, a Liberal MP surmised that Disraeli “no doubt thought how desirable it was to impress on the country the necessity for occasional Parliamentary Reform, and influenced by such feeling, consulted the wishes of a large number of the House of Commons that the picture should be purchased.” Late in 1858 Disraeli offered the painting to the newly established National Portrait Gallery, whose trustees accepted it with thanks, though they pointed out that the present location of the museum in what was formerly a private house would make it impossible to display there such an enormous work of art.41 Even then, however, its purchase was not a done deal. In 1859, The House of Commons became the focus of heatedly partisan exchanges whose inconsistencies rivaled those of current parliamentary debates over the franchise. In June of that year, with the Liberals back in office, the members of the House of Commons on August 3, 1859, took up a motion granting Hayter the £2,000 that he had presumably been promised the previous year. Richard Spooner, a Conservative MP who had represented Northern Warwickshire since 1847, objected angrily and repeatedly to “the most unconstitutional manner” in which the purchase of the painting had been approved. As a Liberal member quickly pointed out, Spooner’s “own political friends,” the Conservatives, had engineered the sale. “That does not matter,” Spooner retorted. Gladstone, again ­chancellor of the exchequer, was unable to explain how the work had come to be “purchased” but not “paid for,” although he did try to justify the actions of the previous government by pointing out “the intrinsic value of the picture, as representing a most important era in our Parliamentary

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history.” Spooner would have none of it. He announced that he planned to vote against paying for the painting, not least because “it was the wrong time to put up such a monument when the first Reformed House of Commons was condemned, and especially as precedent would render necessary a similar picture after the next Reform Bill.” Beyond Spooner’s irritated though amusing fear that the nation would be awash in paintings honoring various franchise reforms, most telling is his willingness to disown the art object that his party had presumably bought now that the Conservatives were out of power. The debate ended with a whimper when one member pointed out that Hayter had already been paid “out of the Civil Contingencies” previously approved by Disraeli,42 but not before the discussion had thoroughly demonstrated that, like the extension of the franchise in 1866 and 1867, the nationalization of The House of Commons was embraced or denigrated by the members of one party or the other – depending at any given moment on what its members thought they could gain by supporting or denouncing its purchase. Lord Palmerston, the current prime minister, shared with Queen Victoria his disgust with the whole mess when he tried to explain the intricacies of the debate to her. Like the Duke of Wellington, who had dismissed The House of Commons, 1833 as an array of badly painted hats, Palmerston, who was hostile to any extensions of the franchise, called it “an indifferent work of art, and a Collection of bad Likenesses.” Yet even he found “remarkable” how quickly the members of the House of Commons altered their positions because the party that had authorized its purchase was not now in power. In any case, as the Art Journal was able to announce in 1859, Hayter’s painting had become, in answer to its creator’s hopes, a “national property,” fittingly installed by 1860 in a committee room of the House of Commons.43 Other events in the 1840s and 1850s make evident why it had taken so long to reach this outcome. When one MP noted during the debate of August 1859 that “there was abundance of space on the walls of [the] House” for the 170 square feet of Hayter’s painting, he was pointing to another reason to oppose the purchase of a work of art, particularly one already hanging on a wall in the new Palace of Westminster: by then it had become evident that the Fine Arts Commission had failed to decorate as grandly or as quickly as had been hoped the new buildings housing Parliament, despite its having sponsored in Westminster Hall a much larger and more popular and more profitable exhibition than the one mounted contemporaneously by Hayter. Like Lord Melbourne when he was being hounded by Haydon in the 1830s, Spooner at the end of July 1859 warned his fellow politicians to stay away from art: “As to promoting art, it was much better left alone.”44 The long aftermath of the process inaugurated by the first FAC exhibition, including the visual responses to it published in Punch and the ILN, explains why his colleagues might have thought that he had a point.

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Publi c art o n view When the Houses of Parliament burned down in October of 1834, sparing little more than the ancient and magnificent Westminster Hall, the need to rebuild seemed to offer the perfect opportunity to support and therefore encourage the arts of architecture, interior design, and painting. Haydon, shortly after the calamity, had prevailed upon Lord Morpeth to present to the committee charged with choosing an architect the artist’s petition “that spaces be left in the new building for the decoration of the Houses by painting.” Even before that time, Haydon had complained bitterly about the tapestries in the House of Lords, telling Lord Grey that the chamber should be filled with “fit ornament[s] for a British senate-house,” paintings that would speak to “national triumphs” and “the superiority of the British Constitution.”45 Now the time for such a project seemed finally to have arrived. As a result of a public competition held in 1835, Charles Barry was given the commission to erect a massive edifice in late Gothic perpendicular style, a building with interiors ultimately and largely designed by A. W. N. Pugin. Although Ruskin would later denounce the national “Houses of Talk” as “the absurdest and emptiest … filigree,” the new Palace of Westminster became for others what a writer for Blackwood’s in 1836 had hoped it would be, a structure “worthy of being the palace of the constitution,” specifically the constitution that had recently made “so great an improvement on the old English government.”46 No longer a collection of spaces accreted over the course of centuries, the new building would reflect in its form the coherently organized and forward-looking impulses of a democratically inclined government. Although nominally the queen’s property – “Our Palace at Westminster, wherein Our Parliament is wont to assemble” – it was the site of a “constitutional union,” the location of a “combination” of commons and lords and throne, the unity “characteristic of the English constitution.” The works of fine art created to grace the chambers and hallways of the reborn palace were to be as purpose-painted as the structure holding them was to be purpose-built. Thus, when the Prince Consort was sketching out an early plan for the subjects of those decorations, he envisioned a series of pictures illustrating the “History of the Constitution” that would end with “the Passing of the Reform Bill.”47 Commentators at the time, Haydon not least among them, noted how similarly democratic was to be the process of choosing artists to undertake the decorations at Westminster: open contests, come who may, the best men winning the prizes on offer. But that plan and any illusions about it lasted no more than a few years. The initial prospects, however, were encouraging. In 1841 a parliamentary select committee on the fine arts was appointed, its stated remit .

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focusing solely on the question whether “the Rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament” might promote “the FINE ARTS of this Country.” Its report, published late that year, reveals that the discussions of the committee were often intently focused on the “moral elevation of the People,” which was thought to be an inevitable effect of the educative power of visual representations of grand subjects. History painting was the art most likely to ensure such a result in “so eminently national a building.” The committee also outlined two alternative ways in which to identify the artists to be awarded contracts to paint in the new palace: “by competition,” to be judged by a “competent tribunal,” or “by selection,” based on an artist’s “known and established reputation.”48 These options parallel the ways in which MPs were chosen to represent their constituents in the House of Commons: on one hand, a contest between candidates at the polls, an at least apparently democratic process in which those who think themselves fit for office put themselves forward to be chosen or rejected by those of their “competent” peers who have been given the right to make that determination; and on the other hand, nomination to a seat in a pocket borough by the landowner who controlled it. Despite the eradication of rotten boroughs by the reform act of 1832, Phineas Finn comments on the persistence of pocket boroughs well into the 1860s: even though the hero of the novel deplores “close borough nominations,” he accepts a seat in the House of Commons from the earl who determines its disposition.49 What was still the case in the 1860s was even more so in the 1840s. Like men hoping for places in the House of Commons, artists trying to find work in the new building might be chosen, according to the report of the 1841 committee, through a contest or by nomination. The select committee, however, did not have time to choose between those alternatives. Forced to cut short its work by the dissolution of Parliament, it recommended that its task be entrusted to a royal ­commission, which was duly appointed later that year. It was led by Prince Albert, with Charles Eastlake, the only artist invited to participate, serving in a non-voting position as its secretary. The Royal Commission on the Fine Arts, for all the “royal” in its title and the royalty at its head, was a parliamentary body, created at the behest of the ministry in the House of Commons and answerable to it, to the government’s officials at the Treasury, and to its Lords Commissioners of the Works. Although its only stated charge, as the artist Richard Redgrave and his brother Samuel Redgrave acidly pointed out, involved the collection of evidence, the FAC quickly transformed itself from a commission of inquiry into an administrative commission with the power to implement Parliament’s intentions by dispensing a small annual budget.50 In effect the FAC became more like the Poor Law Commission with its regulations and its cadre of inspectors than it was like the deliberative committee of 1841. Once the commission determined in 1842 that fresco paintings would decorate the Houses  of

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Parliament, it delayed the awarding of contracts so that a competition, whose entries would be displayed in 1843, could gauge the abilities of British artists to work in that medium. There was no reason to hurry in handing out contracts, the commissioners reasoned, because the plaster in the building needed years to dry before it would be ready for painting. The first contest, announced in 1842, therefore required those entering it to submit chalk or charcoal “Cartoons” or full-sized designs for frescos of at least ten feet and not more than fifteen in the longer of their dimensions, and they were also told to take their subjects from either British history or the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton.51 Since all entries would be submitted anonymously, the artists vying for premiums in 1843 might well have felt themselves in positions analogous to that of a candidate for election to the House of Commons as he faced a judgment at the polls: the prize would be won by the most talented and the best prepared. There would be no artistic equivalent of nomination boroughs here. Over the course of its lifetime between 1842 and 1863, the FAC sponsored four painting competitions and issued thirteen reports, but even the first two of its accounts of its doings make clear that such hopes had been badly misplaced. The contests were to be judged by a committee of six men, three of whom were artists, representatives, if arguably ill-chosen representatives, of their peers; but the members of the commission held tightly in their gift the awarding of contracts. Not only, then, were there two forms of prizes to be won, premiums and contracts, but they often did not go to the same artist. In the competition announced for 1845, for instance, six painters, chosen from among those who had exhibited in 1844, when no premiums were given, were “commissioned” by the FAC to submit “cartoons, coloured sketches, and specimens of Fresco-painting,” but the members of the commission announced that they were “not binding [themselves ultimately] to employ such artists finally.” To emphasize this message, the commission further stipulated that the competition of 1845 would be open to any other painters interested in bidding for “premiums of public money,” for which the chosen six were not eligible.52 Three of those six had not won any of the major premiums in 1843; and the three winners of the “general competition” of 1845, whose entries were specifically designed for the House of Lords, won none of the commissions for the six spaces to be filled there. In the event, the first artist commissioned was William Dyce, who had not competed in 1843, and he had submitted in 1845 only one of the three kinds of samples that all the nominated entrants were expected to proffer. Eventually, three other artists would be chosen to work in the House of Lords, but Richard Redgrave and William Cave Thomas, among the so-called “commissioned” of 1845, were out of luck.53 Other anomalies inevitably followed. Parliament refused to allow the FAC to exceed its annual budget of £4,000 so that it could pay Edwin Landseer the virtually nominal fee that he had patriotically agreed to accept for one

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of the three paintings for which he was commissioned – not a wise ­decision on the part of these MPs since the work in question was the iconic image later to be called The Monarch of the Glen. Such outcomes were enough to make even those painters who were offered contracts lament what had become, in C. W. Cope’s words, “the fresco ordeal.” To an observer at the time, the political message was clear: nothing less than an attack on the artists’ “civil rights,” the process disfranchised artists because they had “no voice in the election” of those who judged them.54 Although the 1842 announcement for the first competition denied that its choice of subjects implied “any particular scheme for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament,” by 1847 the FAC had assumed responsibility for deciding not only who would paint the walls of the new palace but also what would be painted there. A subcommittee headed by Prince Albert and consisting of five aristocrats and four commoners was charged by the full commission to develop a plan for the “harmony and unity” of the subjects to be represented in the entire building. In seven closely printed pages of its report, the subcommittee set out hundreds of “specific” subjects that it had determined must appear in the seventeen major locations of the palace. Commissioned artists were not free to choose the incidents by which they would depict, for instance, a heroic death; rather, they were required to represent “The Executioner tying Wishart’s book round the neck of Montrose.”55 The members of the FAC went about granting commissions for the decoration of the building that was to house Parliament as if they were grandees dispensing seats in it. As the title character of Phineas Finn learns to his pain, an MP serving in a pocket borough is not free to vote according to the dictates of his conscience; nor was a painter engaged by the FAC free to follow his aesthetic inclinations. The composition of this royal commission made such an outcome seem inevitable: sixteen of its original twenty-three members, like so many of the politicians pictured in Hayter’s The House of Commons, were gentry and nobility, baronets or aristocrats distinguished by their titles. In Victoria’s charge to the commission, which was reprinted at the head of each of its reports, the phrases “Our Right Trusty and Right Entirely-beloved Cousin” and “Well-Beloved Councillor” appear so often that they begin to seem like parodic versions of Homeric epithets. Precisely because many members of the FAC were accustomed to the privilege of dispensing the parliamentary seats in their districts, their decisions, I think, reveal the limited effect of the franchise reforms of 1832: the way that the FAC conducted its business was business as usual. In the summer of 1843, although there was not yet much reason to doubt that a process reflecting the political realities of a reformed government would prevail, the responses of Punch and the ILN to the first FAC exhibition were, in their distinctively different ways, prophetic of the actual outcome. In ways surprising only from hindsight, both papers were

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not very interested in this first “competition in Cartoons,” even though it was a great popular success, attracting perhaps as many as one million viewers over the course of the summer.56 Punch found in it matter for jokes on some half-dozen occasions, and the ILN devoted to it a prominently placed but single engraving and approximately the same amount of letterpress as it gave Hayter’s exhibition in the Egyptian Hall. Perhaps the most widely felt and enduring effect of the display in Westminster Hall, beyond even the now-renovated paintings themselves, was its role as the occasion for Punch’s well-known redefinition of the word cartoon. At the end of the last page of the number for July 1, 1843, the paper proudly declares, “PUNCH has the benevolence to announce, that in an early Number of the present Volume he will astonish the Parliamentary Committee by the publication of several exquisite designs, to be called PUNCH’S CARTOONS!” (10)  – a declaration that transformed the word, previously used to indicate a full-sized design for an art object, often a tapestry, into its current principal meaning as a humorous image in black and white.57 In 1843 Punch used that word for a series of six big cuts or fullpage wood engravings, a series that concluded without notice as soon as the Westminster Hall exhibition closed and in which only one image even indirectly deals with that event. (By contrast, in 1847 the paper offered in quick succession one parody after another to lambast what had become the almost annual FAC competition.) In its initial, limited commentary, Punch focused on what mattered most about the exhibition. In honor of its closing, the paper announced its own contest for the “Decoration of the Houses of Parliament” in which all varieties of interior décor could be entered, “Specimens of hat-pegs, each peg to have some historical event hung upon it. Specimens of keyholes, each keyhole to present a glimpse of some great national incident” (September 2, 1843: 102). One would not be able to look through a keyhole in the palace without seeing a history painting, the art form that was to become a new source of national pride. If all had gone according to plan, such would have been the case in terms not only of the subjects depicted by the artists competing in 1843 but also of the medium that they were to adopt: fresco paintings portraying scenes from British history and literature would communicate a specifically British ideal of government in what was asserted to be, by long tradition, a specifically British medium. In the deliberations of the 1835 select committee on the arts, fresco painting had been favored as the form that would best establish an English school of art,58 but the report of the 1841 committee on the decoration of Parliament provided a specific historical rationale for this choice. Much of the recent commentary on the workings of the Fine Arts Commission turns on the extent to which it found models for the forms of its patronage and for the kind of art it supported in precedents set by the French or by the Germans, with Prince Albert playing the role of, respectively, either Louis Phillippe or

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Ludwig I of Bavaria.59 Yet the FAC shied away from acknowledging the example set by the French, who had established themselves as predecessors in the field of state-sponsored art in the decoration of Versailles and in the establishment of a national museum. Nor did the committee cite the French artist Paul Delaroche, who had earlier made his fame by devoting himself to the depiction of subjects from British history and who had in the 1830s found at least one buyer among the titled members of the FAC.60 Although the report of the 1841 committee did identify buildings in Munich as models of fresco paintings, it quickly went on to quote at length from Eastlake’s appendix, which pointed to the precedent set by the thirteenth-century “relics” of painting still extant in the ruins of the old Palace of Westminster. Even though they were either obscured from view or damaged, these supposed frescos were, according to Eastlake, fully the equal of the Florentine art of the same period. The committee therefore urged the renewal six hundred years later “of the same style of decoration on the same spot.” British artists could surely become masters of that medium since English painters had employed it so successfully in the time of Henry III.61 The chauvinism of this view of art history has some logic, if not facts, to support it. Because both the 1841 select committee and the FAC had as their goal the fostering of British art in the future, they chose to turn, paradoxically, to what they thought of as a distant and distinctively English past, just as Charles Barry had done when he designed the building, in the words of a contemporary, so that it would be “adapted to the Gothic origin and time-worn buttresses of our constitution.” Such a motive led inevitably beyond British shores to Germany, specifically to the German countries that were seen to share with England its Saxon heritage and, more specifically still, to the German painters working in Rome who had become known as the Nazarenes.62 In contrast to the painterly qualities of French high art and the sensuousness and virtuoso coloring associated with British oil painting, the “German manner” of fresco painting, as it was called during the “craze” for it that developed in the 1840s, was markedly linear, intellectual, and revivalist in spirit. As it had been practiced in Rome and later through Ludwig’s commissions in Munich, that manner looked back to medieval forms, and it conveyed heroic subjects with a notable simplicity of composition, often bringing its subjects close to the picture plane and setting left and right against each other in what Holman Hunt called a “German balance of composition.”63 Moreover, fresco painting, according to the artist and commentator George Foggo, was a democratic form that had flourished in Italy under “free municipal institutions,” its simplicity standing in opposition to the “softer and more luscious style” encouraged by the aristocrats of Venice. Significantly, however, the “Gothic” identity of the German antiquarian art of the present linked it to the period of history when the British constitution had first enshrined the ideal of individual

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liberties; in that sense a Germanic style seemed home-grown and therefore deeply patriotic. Even Haydon, wed as he was to eighteenth-century traditions and styles, used a political analogy in 1842 to predict that fresco painting would “reform at once the careless, dashing, slovenliness of habit so common in oil practice.”64 Despite their relatively limited responses to the 1843 exhibition in Westminster Hall, the ILN and Punch each published an engraving that seems, in a more or less positive fashion, to respond to the German manner as it was understood and defined by the FAC. Setting up an analytic encounter between the monumental designs of the entries in the first of its competitions and the apparently ephemeral images in these weekly newspapers makes more sense than might at first be apparent. The qualities that the FAC attributed to fresco painting associate it more with the wood engraving of mid-century Victorian graphic journalism than with paintings in oil or watercolor. The murals in the Palace of Westminster would be able to engender nationalistic pride and enlightenment only if they could be understood by all those who saw them, and fresco paintings could teach visual lessons because they were, to use an analogy to text, so easily read. The report of the select committee and many of those issued by the royal commission stress the fact that fresco, rather like the medieval stained-glass windows thought to convey clear narratives to illiterate peasants, is a medium that can present quickly comprehended meanings to a popular audience too ignorant and untrained to be able to appreciate the subtleties of works in oil. The more “limited methods” of fresco painting therefore yield images that are “clear, distinct, and effective at a distance.” Moreover, as Eastlake explained in an appendix to the FAC’s second report, “the larger the dimensions of the figures … the more abstract must be the representation” since it is reduced to its “expressive essentials.” In almost every comment on this subject, such “simplicity” is understood, not surprisingly, to result from the composition of a work, rather than from its coloring or shading.65 All such pronouncements apply not only to fresco painting, but also to newspaper prints. Ruskin’s theories justify making such a correlation. For him woodengraved images have a “peculiar didactic value” because the “abstraction” achieved by “a line-master” directs a viewer’s attention to the “essential particulars” of a subject. In The Cestus of Aglaia (1865–66), he cautions that wood engraving should not pretend to achieve the fineness characteristic of work incised in metal. Rather, its practitioners should understand that it has its own particular strengths: “the real power of wood-cutting [wood engraving] is, with little labour, to express in clear delineation the most impressive essential qualities of form and light and shade, in objects which owe their interest not to grace, but to power and character … used rightly, on its own ground, it is the most purely intellectual of all Art … entirely abstract, thoughtful, and passionate.”66 The German manner and wood engraving, as it was practiced by the illustrated press, whether to

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illuminate a book67 or to convey contemporary events in a newspaper, would therefore seem to have much in common because they both depend for their effects on simple and bold compositions. Tellingly, the last words of the FAC announcement of the 1843 competition present as its final and presumably most important criterion “a style of composition less dependent on chiaro-scuro than on effective arrangement.” That distinction between the subtleties of oil and prominence of composition in fresco was still so memorable in 1847 that Punch parodied this contest between styles in a well-known engraving after Richard Doyle by contrasting a medieval design with its “Flat Style” to an image from the “Fuseli-Michael-Angelesque School.”68 Some twenty years later in “The Working-Man” (fig. 1.3) when Punch stages a “Royal Westminster Exhibition” that looks back to the work of the FAC as well as the RA, that opposition appears again: Bright’s carpenter, in another form of the joke about his creator’s religion, demonstrates the outline style of the Nazarenes, while Horsman’s version of the same figure creates the illusions of dimensionality found in reproductions of old-master paintings. The examples of such divergent conventions that are, however, more pertinent here were published in F. Knight Hunt’s The Book of Art (1846), a compendium of the entry rules, excerpted official reports, and lists of entrants in the first three FAC competitions. The prints in this lavishly illustrated volume translate to the medium of engraving the difference between the qualities typical of oil and those of fresco. That distinction is particularly evident in two of its illustrations, one print after an 1843 cartoon by Benjamin Robert Haydon and another after a design from 1845 by Ford Madox Brown.69 As Haydon prepared for the competition of 1843, he felt certain that his status as a practitioner of the elevated manner of eighteenth-century history painting would win him a prize. Because the entries were anonymous, however, his failure to secure even one of the smallest premiums made clear to him that his time had passed. Attending the exhibition, he was generous enough to admit, “I  was astonished at the power displayed,” and acute enough when praising his own efforts to recognize that artistic tastes had radically changed: “My own [cartoons] looked grand, like the effusions of a master, soft and natural, but not hard and definite.”70 Despite his failures as a competitor, Haydon’s work was given prominence in The Book of Art, where it serves as one term in a visual contest between the “soft” and modeled forms of old-master painting and the “hard” effects of the German manner. Presented in an engraving style traditionally used to reproduce oil paintings, the print after one of Haydon’s 1843 cartoons, here called “The Curse” (fig.  2.4), is composed of biblical figures given an illusion of dimensionality. Other images in Knight Hunt’s collection, such as the engravings after W. C. Thomas’s St. Augustine Preaching and J. C. Anderson’s The Plague of London, demonstrate the impact of the newer

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Fig. 2.4  “The Curse,” wood engraving after Benjamin Robert Haydon (8½˝ by 7⅜˝), The Book of Art (1846)

style in the 1843 competition. Yet the illustration in The Book of Art that most clearly  reveals the impress  of  the German manner is an engraving after the cartoon that Ford Madox Brown submitted in the 1845 competition, An Abstract Representation of Justice (fig. 2.5) – ironically, given its stylistic affiliations, “the only bit of Fresco” in the show that was, according to Haydon, “fit to look at.”71 The contrast between these two prints results primarily from the styles of engraving that they use to indicate volume, and Ruskin’s commentary on such differences helps to define the basic options. Signaling in The Elements of Drawing his dislike of the German manner as practiced by Moritz Retzsch, Ruskin declares that “all merely outlined drawings are bad”: “There is no exception to this law. A good artist habitually sees masses, not edges.”72 Although Ruskin might have excused from these

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Fig. 2.5  “An Abstract Representation of Justice,” wood engraving after Ford Madox Brown (4⅝˝ by 8˝), The Book of Art (1846)

strictures Brown’s Justice because it is a design for an art object rather than a completed work, its style is remarkably like that of Retzsch’s book illustrations. In the rendering of it in The Book of Art, Brown’s design is so uncompromisingly flat and starkly linear that it is extremely difficult to tell where one body ends and where another begins – much as it is when one

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examines the figures who populate the ditch and the trench depicted in his later Work. Comparing this print with the watercolor study for the painting that would have been based on this design suggests that those responsible for its engraving in The Book of Art have greatly exaggerated only one of its distinctive features.73 Brown depicts a comparative encounter between “power and weakness,” according to his catalogue copy: an impoverished widow faces the “perverse and powerful Baron” who has wronged her; and they, with the woman’s two children, dominate the forefront of the engraving because they are outlined more boldly than anyone else in it. The two rows of figures who are seated above and behind them – Justice herself and four personifications of her attributes as well as the “Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal” and the barons who serve Justice74 – are not differentiated from each other in such stylistic terms. They are all created by outlines of a similar intensity, although the use of aerial perspective might seem in order since Justice is above and presumably farther away from the viewer than are the men who stand before her throne. The engraving has made Brown’s design seem dizzyingly cluttered; but its excessive dependence on the “hard and definite” qualities of outlining, relieved by a very few indications of volume in the garments of the figures, announces its stylistic allegiances. The representation of justice in this print is so “abstract,” in both Eastlake’s and Ruskin’s senses of that term, that it would seem to epitomize the commissioners’ conceptions of the virtues of fresco painting, despite the failure of Brown’s cartoon to win a premium. Whereas Brown participated in a competition that required that he use an arch-shaped version of portrait format for his design since it was meant to decorate one of the niches in the House of Lords, the rules of the contest that Haydon entered allowed him to remain loyal to the horizontal orientation and rectilinear shape typical of history painting. In “The Curse,” as in the images of paintings so often published in the ILN, tint is created by parallel and sometimes subtly waving parallel lines. The unnamed engraver of Haydon’s painting seems to have followed Ruskin’s advice avant la lettre: the artist designing for engraving “make[s] his lines as valuable as possible” by curving them to conform to the shape and “roundness” of the object being represented.75 Jesus, Adam and Eve, angel, and serpent are all massive forms whose contours are produced by lines that bend to suggest shapes and volumes. Boundaries around parts of bodies are indicated by lines only when the difference between one tint and another cannot mark their borders. Thus, the right side of Adam’s chest to the viewer’s left is distinguished from the white of his upper arm by a black line, but the slightly darkened area of his left shoulder emerges from its contrast to the darker background behind, by what A Treatise on Wood Engraving calls “white outline,” often the first cut made by the engraver.76 The ineptitudes of this image specifically in terms of its composition, the chief desideratum of the FAC, are enough, it has to be admitted, to explain

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the disinclination of the judges to award Haydon’s entry a premium,77 but his ruefully acknowledged tendency to paint in a style that is “soft and natural,” indicated in the print “The Curse” by a highly traditional form of engraving, was perhaps more damning. The

ILN

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The contest of styles evident in the engravings in The Book of Art also manifests itself within the only image of the 1843 competition that the ILN published, “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall” (fig. 2.6; July 8, 1843: 17). This print may depict the one-day private view of the show that took place before it was opened to the paying public, an exclusive, by-invitation-only gathering that, as the commentary of Mrs. S. C. Hall in the Art Union makes clear, brought together “a titled and well-born multitude.”78 Yet even if the engraving represents the people in Westminster Hall on one of the later, less prestigious days of the exhibition, the event and its participants are presented as the opposite of common. The text that accompanies the engraving, like the ILN’s praise for Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833, is extravagantly enthusiastic. The “principal works” of this “grandest” of exhibitions are “nobly conceived and magnificently treated.” The letterpress, staging a revealing encounter between word and image, concludes that the show offers “unanswerable evidence that the country of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Milton, need not fear the artistic supremacy of that land which glories in the names of Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle.” The anonymous designer of this engraving similarly celebrates the grandeur of Westminster Hall, as well as the great number of full-scale cartoons displayed in it. Typical of many such images in the ILN, “Exhibition of the Cartoons” asks its viewers to divide their attention between the people in a building and the structure itself. Light and shade indicate the massive forms of the vault of the roof of the hall; and the arches, each one smaller and darker than the last, recede into its great expanse. The roughly parallel lines that depict such architectural features seem to be the product of a hand-held tint tool rather than a ruling machine: the most even of them, those on the windows in the rear of the hall, are broken in places, and those on the arches indicate shade without conforming to their curves, thereby using what Ruskin identifies as the procedure of a “master.” If a competition between old and new styles is taking place in “Exhibition of the Cartoons,” that print declines to identify a winner. The depiction of the well-dressed spectators at this exhibition illustrates this point. These figures, especially those in the foreground, have sharply outlined forms recalling the flat linearity of the German manner. This impression is heightened by the fact that their bodies are longer and thinner than those in the cartoons above and behind them. The singularity of the ILN’s approach here is emphasized when comparing this print to an engraving in The Book of

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Fig. 2.6  “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall,” wood engraving (9½˝ by 6⅞˝), ILN (July 8, 1843: 17)

Art signed by the prominent wood engraver Samuel Sly, “Exhibition of Cartoons in Westminster Hall, 1844,” which depicts both the members of the audience and painted characters in the pictures as having similarly proportioned bodies.79 By contrast, the illusion of the three-dimensionality of the people in the row of spectators closest to the viewer of the engraving, evident principally in the contours of the ladies’ skirts, results from lines that do follow the outlines of the shapes being depicted, in the manner of Haydon’s “The Curse.” This mingling of the different features of competing styles – styles that among the entrants in the 1843 competition clearly distinguished one cartoon from another – suggests perhaps that the designer of this engraving in the ILN was less interested in commenting on such alternatives than in achieving quite other effects. Putting this print in the context of the ­conventions of painting on which its designer drew reveals what those effects might be. The ILN engraving “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall” takes some of its compositional qualities from two specific kinds of images, the ceremonial group portrait and genre painting, just as they drew some

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of their energy in the Victorian period from the images that appeared in the ILN.80 Typified in the nineteenth century by Hayter’s The House of Commons and Haydon’s The Reform Banquet, the group portrait traces its lineage back to the seventeenth century in Holland, but by the eighteenth century it had developed into its own tradition in Britain: in accordance with the documentary intent that such images share with the ILN’s 1843 depiction of Westminster Hall, this official or quasi-official form of art typically includes large numbers of people set within an imposing architectural structure. The genre is perhaps epitomized by one of the grand murals that James Barry painted in the 1770s and 1780s for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, The Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts. The impressiveness of Barry’s image is augmented by the architectural features, including the dome of St. Paul’s, that surround the scene. The mural brings together real and imagined personages: those in the former group, the Prince of Wales and various members of the Society of Arts, are more characteristic of the distinguished people usually found in such “official group portraits”;81 and those in the latter are equally characteristic of the anonymous, but typical, figures featured in genre painting, which began to flourish in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Grand ceremonial records such as Henry Courtney Selous’s The Opening Ceremony of the Great Exhibition, 1 May 1851 (1851–52), David Roberts’s The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition, 1 May, 1851 (1852), and Frith’s The Marriage of the Prince of Wales, 10 March 1863 (1865), like Hayter’s earlier The Trial of Queen Caroline and The Marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 10 February 1840 (1842), are instances of what Haydon called “bastard ‘High Art’” because they treat contemporary ceremonial events as if they are worthy of the elevated seriousness of history painting. Yet such often enormous paintings signal the importance of an event by including the great numbers of people typically witnessing it. The formal imperatives of a ceremonial group portrait create the conditions for particularly telling comparative encounters between its viewers and its subjects. Because such a painting involves the representation of many people in an imposing building – the Crystal Palace in Selous’s and Roberts’s paintings and St. George’s Chapel in Frith’s – its human figures must be distanced from the picture plane and therefore miniaturized if they are to populate even the largest canvas, The House of Commons, 1833 being one of the largest. The greater the number of people to be included, the smaller they must be – an explanation of the compositional distinctions between Selous’s depiction of the opening of the Great Exhibition and the much greater number of participants in Roberts’s view of the same event. When viewers stand before such a painting, comparing themselves to those in it, their own necessarily life-size proportions indicate their own lack of social distinction. Only the most elite people are among those invited to an event so significant that it requires an official record in

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paint, although mistakes did occur, as was the case with Selous’s inclusion of a richly garbed but relatively lowly Chinese man at the opening of the Great Exhibition. Those present for a private viewing of an art exhibition, like that attended by the Prince Consort and the Duke of Wellington for the showing of Hayter’s painting of the reformed Parliament, could look at a group portrait and not feel the force of that distinction, but most other viewers present on other, less exclusive days might experience its impress. Often elegant costumes (uniforms for the men, lavish dresses for the ladies) also make the comparison of the viewer and viewed yield an uncompromising sense of the insuperable social distance between them, as would have been the case, I think, when a reader of the ILN looked at the relative luxuriousness of the attire of the spectators in “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall.” Physically distancing the viewer of the print from its figures creates a similar effect. Commemorative group portraits rarely display a characteristic feature shared by the German manner and the monumental history paintings  – frontality or the “trick of bringing the main action of the picture almost out of the canvas, directly towards the onlooker,” as Delaroche does in The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834).82 Frontality is a compositional choice typical of images involving a limited number of relatively large figures, but in a group portrait, being small and removed from the picture plane are qualities that signify wealth and refinement and social stature. Such effects no doubt depend on context. The similar formal features of the ILN’s 1843 “Exhibition” and its later pictures of workers at the Enfield Small Arms Factory (fig. 1.2) convey opposite impressions of their subjects. Moreover, the full-length depiction of an aristocrat by an artist like Reynolds or Gainsborough or of Victoria by Hayter uses size to represent rank. Yet depicting a large number of elegant spectators in its representation of the 1843 FAC exhibition allows the ILN to ensure its own status as a purveyor of images of so-called high art and so-called high society. Such a conclusion is confirmed by the second kind of painting whose conventions are evident in “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall”: genre painting, a form epitomized earlier in the century by David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo (1822). Generating exceptional interest when displayed at the Royal Academy, Wilkie’s painting portrays everyday life on the occasion of an historic event. The same might be said of “Exhibition of the Cartoons.” In this context the engraving marks the halfway point not only between the group portrait and genre painting, but also between the group portrait that honors the ceremonies of state and mid-century panoramic paintings of everyday life on its own terms – Wilkie minus Waterloo. In 1843 the ILN was exploring how the conventions of group portraiture could be adapted to the more nearly quotidian scenes of modern life. Like W. M. Thackeray or Charles Dickens in the narrative social panoramas of Vanity Fair (1847)

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or Bleak House (1853), respectively, the ILN and mid-Victorian painters were moving in the direction of epic images of the commonplace; and the ILN provided conventions, such as the composing of smaller groups of figures within a larger mass of people, for artists who were discovering the aesthetic potential and popularity of such scenes. Most notably, Frith’s major social panoramas, most expansively in Derby Day, offered group portraits largely peopled by fictional figures typical of a range of social classes rather than by the identifiable historical personages of Haydon’s or Hayter’s official-portrait canvases. Once again the distance between viewer and viewed is crucial. Haydon composed his well-respected genre scene Punch and Judy, or Life in London (1829) as if it were a history painting with “large scale” figures relatively close to the picture plane.83 Significantly, however, Frith’s compositions set a greater number of figures farther away than Haydon’s uniformly commonplace personages but also much closer to the viewer than does the ILN in its image of the spectators at the 1843 exhibition. Despite its debt to genre painting, then, the most distinctive feature of the figures in “Exhibition of the Cartoons” is their thoroughgoing gentility, a quality that aligns the image more closely with a picture of the coronation of the queen than with either Haydon’s street scene or Frith’s panoramas. That the ILN in its early years needed to use every weapon in its graphic armory to establish its genteel status is evident whenever the paper makes anxious references to Punch, its major rival for readers who wanted their news and entertainment conveyed by both word and image. Writers and artists for the ILN seemed at first to have had trouble distinguishing the characteristic beat of one paper from that of the other. Many of its visual or verbal commentaries on subjects like Jenny Lind and Ethiopian singers might easily have been mistaken for facetiae in The London Charivari. The first issue of the ILN included cartoons depicting political candidates and “categories of cant,” while the second boasted of its commitment to treat issues like the poor laws, factory legislation, and the conditions of mine labor.84 Accordingly, an early illustration signed by John Gilbert depicts a “Charity Dinner” complete with figures who recall the visualized social criticism of Punch and George Cruikshank’s illustrations to Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39) – fat beadles to whom emaciated boys hold up their empty bowls (June 3, 1843: 383). In its first year, the ILN also printed images that had originally appeared in its rival’s pages when it reviewed Punch’s Letters to His Son by Douglas Jerrold and reproduced from it six comic engravings, calling their source that “well-known periodical,” “our sarcastic friend” (April 15, 1843: 262). The back-and-forth commerce between the two newspapers that was characteristic of their early years originated more often in the ILN than in Punch, the latter simply assuming that it had no need to defend its territory from encroachment by an upstart.85 The stylish way in which the ILN depicted the 1843 FAC

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exhibition in Westminster Hall would have provided a sharp distinction between it and the paper with whose methods and evident success it was attempting to compete. Punch, true to its early, radical inclinations, took quite another approach to the doings of the FAC. Its most direct visual response to the Westminster Hall exhibition was “Substance and Shadow,” an engraving after a design by John Leech (fig. 2.7; July 13, 1843: 23). The print poses a graphic challenge to that event by presenting its own entry into the FAC competition that had opened just ten days earlier. The best known of the six engravings that the paper published in its series of “Punch’s CARTOONS,” this image depicts a group of paupers surrounded by contemporary paintings. Appearing a week earlier than the “Exhibition of the Cartoons” in the ILN, it is only slightly larger than that engraving. Both are prominently placed  – the ILN’s on the bottom half of its front page, Punch’s on its third page as the first of the two big cuts in that issue as well as the first in its series. There the similarities end. Leech’s design appeared only a few months after the publication of Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle’s fulmination against what he labeled the Condition of England, the deprivations and misery exacerbated by government programs that maintained the high price of bread and the low level of poor relief  – all the ills, in short, faced by those struggling to survive in the decade that came to be called the Hungry Forties. Punch’s visual response to the FAC, which validates Carlyle’s most biting criticisms, could hardly be more unlike the scene depicted in the ILN’s print. Moreover, “Substance and Shadow” in no way reflects the Nazarenes’ commitment to boldly outlined forms, and that fact differentiates Leech’s style from that of his younger colleague John Tenniel, whose “rigorous drawing manner” in his later political cartoons in Punch is attributable at least in part to his participation in the 1845 FAC competition.86 Leech found his métier, not in the delineation of the heroic and abstract, but in the sympathetic portrayal of middle-class experience, though his work was perhaps most prized in his day for its numerous depictions of sporting life, particularly through the figure of the amateur equestrian Mr. Briggs. Having studied with an artist in France and having taken lessons in steel engraving from George Cruikshank, whose line he found “too harsh” for his own purposes, Leech learned engraving from the craftsman J. Orrin Smith and designed images for reproduction in lithography  – media whose “softer and more intimate” forms and “chalk lines,” respectively, were suited to his famously gentle sense of humor.87 Punch, the paper with which he was associated almost from its beginnings to his death in 1864, offered Leech the chance to work in the relatively congenial medium of wood engraving, even though he often despaired over its low status compared to that accorded oil painting. Small wonder, then, that Leech would find the German manner of bold, incisive lines little to his taste.

Fig. 2.7  “Substance and Shadow,” wood engraving after John Leech (9½˝ by 7½˝), Punch (July 13, 1843: 23)

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Yet the brief commentary on “Substance and Shadow” provided by Punch clarifies its topical reference to the display of the grand images in Westminster Hall, even though it actually depicts the 1843 annual exhibition at the Royal Academy.88 The government is expected to relieve human want, even though the chancellor of the exchequer, for whom Punch pretends to feel sympathy, has to find ways to pay a stipend to the Duke of Cumberland, supply the Duchess of Mecklenburg Strelitz with pin-money, and provide shelter for the horses in the royal stables. Not to fear, Punch announces. The “Ministers” have solved the problem of the competing claims on “the Treasury money-box”: “They have considerately determined that as they cannot afford to give hungry nakedness the substance which it covets, at least it shall have the shadow. The poor ask for bread, and the philanthropy of the State accords  – an exhibition” (July 13, 1843: 22). Worse than the injunction “Let them eat cake,” which at least recognizes that the people are hungry, the British government says, “Let them eat art.” That this image comments on the Westminster Hall exhibition is therefore made clear, not only by its label, “CARTOON, No. I,” but also by the fact that two weeks after the exhibition opened, it was made free of charge to the public. The fee of one shilling, however, was still in force on Saturdays; and as Richard Altick points out, Saturday afternoon was the only time when workers would have been able to visit the exhibition,89 so the open-admission policy was cynically intended to have an exclusionary effect similar to the practices of the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition and of the Egyptian Hall showing of Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833, entry to see both of which during the summer of 1843 cost a shilling. The letterpress accompanying “CARTOON, No. I” further witnesses to the topicality of Punch’s image through its references to the “income” of Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland – a son of George III and Victoria’s uncle – and the “pin-money” of one of Cumberland’s nieces, the Duchess of Mecklenburg Strelitz. Cumberland, as the member of the royal family who had inherited the title of King of Hanover in 1837, was seen as a particularly unacceptable drain on public monies. When Leech’s design appeared, the members of the House of Commons, backed up by the press, were decrying the fact that this “independent foreign Sovereign,” as The Times described him, was on the public dole to the extent of £21,000 a year. For yet other reasons Cumberland made himself a topic of conversation during the summer of 1843: while visiting London, he gave away in marriage to the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz his niece Augusta, daughter of the Duke of Cambridge, another of the sons of George III, this one making himself unpopular by demanding that Parliament vote his daughter, the new duchess, an annuity of £2,000 in honor of her nuptials. Punch seethed with anger at these “Royal Pensioners,” whom it attacked on numerous occasions during these months.90 At the age of seventy-two,

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Cumberland seemed even more egregiously unworthy of public support than his niece: undoubtedly a reprobate and perhaps a murderer, he had suspended the constitution of Hanover shortly after becoming its king. Until the birth of Victoria’s first child, he had been next in line to the throne – a situation that made contemporaries speak of the nation’s great “danger” (not to mention what his accession would have meant to later scholars who would have been fated to write about the Ernestian age). In 1843 Cumberland was no longer at risk of being stoned by the populace, as the Duke of Wellington had predicted when he warned the royal scion to leave London quietly when William IV died in 1837; but during his 1843 visit Cumberland had further offended British sensibilities by claiming some of the royal jewels as Hanoverian property.91 In choosing Cumberland and Augusta as the objects of its well-merited scorn, Punch was focusing on figures of grotesquely unearned privilege whom the cartoon’s original audience would have easily recognized. “Substance and Shadow” is often identified as one of the most ­effective, because most trenchant, of Punch’s early graphic ­representations of the divide between what Disraeli first called the “two nations” of England, the rich and the poor. Resembling Haydon’s “The Curse” more than Madox Brown’s “Justice” as they are reproduced in The Book of Art, this wood engraving features the modeling effects of light and shade to body forth the contours of both the figures in the paintings on the walls and the emaciated forms of the destitute who look at them. Unlike the “Exhibition” ­published by the ILN, this image indicates relative distance, not by increasing shade, but by a lightening of the lines representing the shapes in the paintings elevated above their spectators: the dark forms of the poor stand out against those of the people and objects and animals depicted in the frames behind them. Yet the lines creating the images in some of the paintings – among them, the portrait of the noble figure to the left and of the clergyman in the bottom right, as well as the dog high above in the center of the main wall – are similar in width and shade to those of the poor standing beneath them. Typical of Leech’s “free” style, as Ruskin characterizes its “zigzags or crossed or curiously broken lines,” “Substance and Shadow” seems more the product of the graver than of the tint tool. Moreover, the ILN remarked that the wood engravings that Leech did later that year as book illustrations displayed the “delicacy of fine etchings,”92 and that characterization could as justly pertain to this print. Its relatively “free” or loose lines, like those in the upper left corner of the image, frequently indicate shade as if they were drawn by a pencil looping one line back and forth rather than by a graver. Roughly parallel, perpendicular lines suggest both the walls on which the paintings hang and the shadows falling on them. More complicated cross-hatching of horizontal, diagonal, and perpendicular lines forms the impoverished spectators at this exhibition. Not only are these figures darker than the images at which they look. The

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self-conscious artistry of their forms, as if they were drawn by the hand of a “master” rather than by the reproductive technology of a tint machine, declares the aesthetic status of Leech’s design as surely as does its placement as the first in a series of pseudo-FAC cartoons. Yet other qualities make it difficult to determine how to read the title of the engraving, which was no doubt agreed upon by Leech and his colleagues around the Punch table when they decided upon the subject of that week’s big cut. In 1832 the Poor Man’s Guardian had used the phrase in a straightforward way to decry Whig plans for parliamentary reform as an attempt to “give the shadow to preserve the substance”;93 but when one looks at the Punch cartoon, it is difficult to determine which forms are “substance,” which “shadow.” As the letterpress makes clear, the “shadow” of the title in one sense refers simply to the art displayed on the walls of this exhibition: since the poor cannot have what they “covet,” the “substance” of bread, they can have its pale imitation, its “shadow,” a point emphasized by the prominence in the paintings of food stuffs, fruit, and a dead rabbit, as well as by, just above the man wearing the largest hat of the visitors at this exhibition, a scene of ceremonial dining, the kind of image that the ILN often published. The figures of the indigent, however, are themselves both “shadows” since they lack the substantial bodies of the better-fed people and pets above them and “substance,” even if they are hungry, because their bodies are substantial enough to cast shadows and to keep the light from falling on the paintings in front of them. Those within the frames around their portraits, however, are even more obviously people of “substance”: the food and the pets depicted with them, like the chubby face of the clergyman and the jowly man in the bottom row to the left, witness to their affluence. Having literally more mass in their bodies, even though they are two-dimensional images on a wall, such figures seem more substantial than the real people who stare confusedly at them or who, like the children in the foreground, are simply too reduced by want to have enough energy to look at works of art. Part of the effectiveness of “Substance and Shadow” results from Leech’s clever mirroring of the images of rich and poor in a series of comparative encounters that set the latter against the painted figures of the former. On  the right, the young woman whose face is seen in profile stands in front of the similarly oriented visage of a saint. Just to her left the barearmed and atypically portly woman among the viewers and the curls on the side of her face mimic the more luxurious hair and ample face of the cleric at whom she looks – a similarity that comments on the gentleman’s presumably feminine vanity. (My students invariably think that he actually is a woman.) To the left, a lame old man – a former soldier wounded in a battle long past?  – peers up at the three-quarter portrait of a smiling nobleman whose sash and military uniform bespeak his status, the plumed hat at the end of his right arm corresponding to the crutch of the

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pauper. The children in this wood engraving, however, are the bearers of its most potent lessons. Almost half of the exhibition-goers in “Substance and Shadow” are young, from the babe in arms at the left to the adolescent boys to the left and right. In a direct encounter, the barefoot boy on the left of the image, sporting an oversized coat that seems to be a handme-down, looks at his more prosperous other who is riding a hobby horse: the painted boy is so young, perhaps six or seven, that he is still wearing a full-skirted tunic; and his fancy, befeathered hat contrasts to the real boy’s tousled hair. Perhaps the most touching comparative encounter takes place between the figure of the tiny boy to the right front of the image and the dog prancing next to his mistress in the full-length portrait of her at which the boy looks, his back to the viewer of the engraving and his head held up as he looks high above him. The dog’s diminutive head, erect above his plump body, contrasts to the boy’s large cap and narrow frame, but the most telling detail linking the two figures, human and canine, is the width of their legs: the boy’s naked appendages, more like sticks than limbs, are hardly larger than those of the pampered pooch above him. If it is difficult to tell shadow from substance in this engraving, if the imitation of life that art provides here is not, as conventionally understood, the pale reflection of life, it is not hard to tell which beings lead a dog’s life. The cartoon includes images of two dogs, one on a cushion and one observed by the small boy, and both reside with the privileged few. In these contests between art objects and “hungry nakedness,” the prize for animation may go to the represented people and their pets rather than to their supposedly flesh-and-blood viewers. Like the ILN’s “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall,” “Substance and Shadow” belongs to a long-established tradition: pictures of exhibitions and, more precisely, to those that document the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. The depiction of people in the act of looking at images is a staple of early nineteenth-century caricatures by such artists as Rowlandson and Cruikshank; but oil paintings of such scenes are perhaps even more prevalent.94 Since its earliest years, the Royal Academy had provided an obvious occasion for both comic and serious renditions of its shows, one of the most effective of which is a later example, Frith’s Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883), in which a similarity of gesture humorously makes an odd couple of Anthony Trollope and Oscar Wilde. The ILN also specialized in such pictures from nearly the moment of its founding. In 1843 the paper reported on the current RA exhibition in four issues from May 13 to June 17, providing, according to its proud boast, the most extensive, as well as the first, illustrated coverage, “by drawings made on the spot,” that any journal had ever accorded the event (June 17: 416). Comparing the paintings in “Substance and Shadow” with those described and depicted in the ILN’s representations of the RA’s offerings suggests that Punch, flexing its satirical muscles, expected many

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of its readers to get the visual joke involved in according more prominence to a customary attraction of the season than to the first opening of Westminster Hall as a government-sponsored art gallery. More important, an analytical encounter between the responses of the two papers to the RA exhibition of 1843 clarifies the differences between their distinctive early styles as it also provides a commentary on their early depictions of explicitly political subjects. In one sense Punch and the ILN seem to agree about the art objects on display at the Royal Academy in 1843. Comparable to Punch’s obvious distaste for the artificialities of the subjects depicted in the paintings in “Substance and Shadow” are the elaborate and faintly Carlylean ­declarations in the ILN that the exhibition is a “very decided disappointment,” “little islands of genius amid seas of common-place,” a “wide ocean of portraiture … with as much tailoring and millinery and as little flesh and blood as ever were gathered within gilt framing” (May 13, 1843: 328). Most notable, however, is the great variety of the kinds of paintings described in the ILN that are left out of Punch’s image of the exhibition: Leech puts on its recreated walls no painful subjects made palatable by sentiment, no scenes of illness or death or mourning, no images of the queen (the ILN describes three), no historical subjects or illustrations of literature, no landscapes, no depictions of exotic climes or peasant life or mythic and religious subjects – Punch, in short, omits many of the sorts of paintings that the ILN spends a great deal of time describing and evaluating. To make his criticism of the government as sharp as possible, Leech alters what the viewer typically sees at an RA exhibition so that the trivialities of high life, like a concern for the royal stables and a countess’s pinmoney, seem even more irrelevant to the realities of poverty than would, for instance, the 1843 RA painting whose depiction of “heart-breaking sorrows” the ILN describes last (June 17: 416), Richard Redgrave’s The Poor Teacher. Both the letterpress of the ILN coverage and its chief visual image of the exhibition, “The Great Room of the Royal Academy” (fig. 2.8; May 20, 1843: 338) reveal how closely Leech models “Substance and Shadow” on the contemporaneous event in Trafalgar Square. Some of the descriptions in the ILN of the many portraits of ladies at the RA seem to pertain as well to the paintings in the Punch image, but the ILN’s disgust with a particular picture makes clear the source of Leech’s inspiration for the chubby-cheeked cleric to the right in “Substance and Shadow”: on May 27, the ILN, despite the gratitude that it later expresses to Sir Martin Archer Shee, PRA, for the permission that gave its staff access to this event, severely criticizes his Portrait of the Rev. Sir Henry Dukenfield, Bart., Vicar of St. Martin’s, whose “well-dressed hair” and “fresh curls,” the features more typical of the “smartness of a beau” than of “the gravities of clerical expression,” the paper finds to be “most offensive to good taste”

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Fig. 2.8  “The Great Room of the Royal Academy,” wood engraving (9¼˝ by 6¼˝), ILN (May 20, 1843: 338)

(May 27, 1843: 354). Other correspondences between the paintings that the two papers recreate serve only to demonstrate the differences between Leech and the ILN artist. The aristocratic portrait on the left in the Punch cartoon reproduces, with a reversal of the direction of the sash, the larger, but more distant painting of the same figure to the left on the back wall in the ILN’s “The Great Room.” But the fact that the elite gentleman in Punch’s version of the painting is closer to the viewer than he is in the ILN print makes it possible to see the foolish, even feeble smirk on his face as he is being intently examined by the old man who stands in front of him. In the Punch cartoon this painting seems to symbolize, even if it does not directly represent, the Duke of Cumberland, whose miniature Portrait of His Majesty the King of Hanover by William Bone was exhibited at the RA in 1843. Evoked here as well might be yet another but more popular son of George III, the Duke of Sussex, whose death had delayed by a week the opening of the RA exhibition in 1843 and whose likeness, Portrait of H. R. H. the Duke of Sussex by Louis Schmidt, appeared, along with Victoria’s, in the Great Room.95 Leech’s adaptation of a painting by Edwin Landseer, Portrait of the Hon. Ashley Ponsonby,96 is more inventive and extensive than any other in the

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RA show; and the engraving after it that the ILN printed in its final issue covering the Royal Academy exhibition helps make that point (fig. 2.9; June 17, 1843: 415). The writer of the first notice of that event in the ILN heaps extravagant praise on this painting: Landseer’s pictures are indeed glorious copies from the natural world. Look at the child-portrait … the noble boy, with his sweet ingenuous face, mounted on that living pony, and as bright and animated as all the other forms of life around. Look at the dogs, the game, every object that has had blood within its veins, and outward denotements of beauty – and see how they are painted, how they speak! (May 13: 328)

Conveying in the style of its engraving “how” its subject is “painted,” the ILN print employs the paper’s characteristic methods for reproducing works of art: it attempts to mimic the effects of oil by filling almost the entire frame with lines made either by graver or by tint tool. The reader of the ILN is never told what the “objects” in Landseer’s painting actually say when they “speak,” but Leech seems to understand its message. He turns this image of coddled luxury, with all its accoutrements of dogs and dead rabbits, into a commentary on the difference between those who have and those who have not by distributing the features of Landseer’s painting throughout several of the images on the walls in “Substance and Shadow.” Ashley Ponsonby on his pony, the rich and more-than-ample folds of his tunic over his trousers announcing his youth, provides the model for the boy on his hobby horse in the cartoon: they are oriented in the same direction, their faces in the same three-quarter profile. Ponsonby’s two dogs reappear in the canines represented in the Punch image, and the smaller one in Landseer’s painting has the short legs and round body of the dog who stands near its mistress in Leech’s design. Even the two rabbits that are strapped upside down on Ponsonby’s saddle reappear in Punch’s print: their features seem to be conjoined in the image of the dead rabbit that is directly above the boy on the hobby horse. Upside down like both rabbits in the painting, the item of dead game in Punch has the ears of the rabbit to the right in the Landseer and the pathetically extended front paws of the one to the left. In another turn on the title “Shadow and Substance,” “every object” that has substance, “every object that has had blood within its veins,” whether rabbit or pony or dog, paradoxically but effectively, stands for the bloodless, genteel members of the government who do not care what happens to the shadow-like poor. Punch attempts to move its viewers to outrage over the inadequacies of parliamentary responses to widespread hunger by placing the relatively few members of the audience in “Substance and Shadow” much nearer the picture plane than does the ILN in its depiction of more numerous attendants in “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall.” That proximity no doubt results at least in part from the correspondences

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Fig. 2.9  “Portrait of the Hon. Ashley Ponsonby,” wood engraving after Edwin Landseer (5½˝ by 6⅜ ˝), ILN (June 17, 1843: 415)

between Leech’s work for Punch and the conventions of book illustration in the 1830s and 1840s. Unlike the goal of conveying a sense of extensive space and large crowds that typically requires the ILN to portray ­relatively small but numerous figures, Punch often shares with illustrations of fiction the practice of depicting a small number of figures in relatively confined spaces, such as parlors and rooms in inns. The etchings done by George Cruikshank for Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist and the steel engravings by Hablot K. Browne or “Phiz” for Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) are repeatedly composed in this fashion. Many

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of the wood engravings after Phiz and George Cattermole in The  Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) are particularly pertinent here because their horizontal orientation and oval forms, eye-shaped openings onto a fictional world, resemble the format of “Substance and Shadow”: Quilp and his abused wife, Nell and her grandfather, Miss Monflathers, an audience in the cheap seats at Astley’s, all approach the picture plane as if to draw together the characters in the story and its readers. Leech himself left a visual record of the close connection between “Substance and Shadow” and book illustration. Before beginning to work for Punch, he had provided images to embellish three texts by Percival Leigh; and one of them, Portraits of Children of the Mobility (1841), a parody of volumes depicting the offspring of aristocratic families, contains a lithograph in which appear versions of two of the children in “Substance and Shadow” – the boy in the oversized jacket and the girl who, alone among the sixteen figures in the wood engraving, seems to be looking out at the reader.97 This direct connection between Leech’s work for Punch and as a book illustrator continued into the fall of 1843. Just months after the publication of “Substance and Shadow,” he provided designs for the illustrations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, recreating in one of its four wood engravings – the prints that the ILN later likened to etching – two of the destitute figures from Portraits of Children of the Mobility, once again the girl who reappeared in “Substance and Shadow” as well as a boy hanging onto her cloak. In Dickens’s tale these children become the figures called Want and Ignorance – “yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” These “­monsters … horrible and dread,” terrifying images of neglect that emerge from behind the robe of the Spirit of Christmas Present, warn Scrooge that society’s “factious purposes,” if unaltered, will turn these “perversion[s] of humanity” into humankind’s “Doom.” In this illustration, imaging forth a vertically rather than a horizontally oriented oval, proximity is the quality that makes these less-than-human creatures with their allegorical names so disturbing, first to Scrooge, who stands near them, even though he has “started back, appalled,” and then by proxy to the reader of A Christmas Carol. Both Dickens and Leech are challenging the members of their audiences to see what is right in front of them – on the pages that they read and on the streets that they walk. The text of the tale explicitly claims that proximity is the feature that conveys its lessons. When Scrooge finds himself too close for comfort to the apparition of Christmas Past, the narrator compares their physical closeness to that which characterizes his own relation to the reader: Scrooge is as near the ghost as the narrator is “to you,” the reader, “as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”98 Such propinquity is emphasized by the narrator’s use of first- and second-person pronouns; and if Scrooge is successfully doing his job as the reader’s surrogate, that

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familiarity will invite a powerful emotional response. In your face, as the narrator of A Christmas Carol would say, if he were inclined to be so rude. This quality of proximity – or, to use the art-historical term, ­frontality – characterizes grander forms than those of the early Victorian book trade, and in this sense Leech’s “Substance and Shadow” responds in both form and content to the 1843 FAC competition. His print resembles not only many of the cartoons entered into that contest but also the murals in the Houses of Parliament that, in the words of William Vaughan, are “frontal designs in which the most meaningful parts of the picture [are] brought firmly to the foreground.”99 There is a vast difference between the subjects of Leech’s design and those that ultimately decorated the House of Lords – that is the point of Punch’s cartoon  – but many of the fresco paintings there contain architectural features that, like the two walls of paintings in “Substance and Shadow,” move toward the viewer the figures positioned in front of them, including William Dyce’s The Baptism of King Ethelbert (1846), Daniel Maclise’s The Spirit of Justice (1849), and two frescos by Charles West Cope, Edward III Conferring the Order of the Garter on the Black Prince (1848) and Prince Henry Acknowledging the Authority of Chief Justice Gascoigne (1849). Brown’s “Justice,” like his later Work in its adoption of the form of history painting, shares this compositional feature. Tellingly, of the eleven cartoons that won premiums in 1843, all of which were reproduced as lithographs by the three Linnell brothers in a lavish elephant folio titled The Prize Cartoons, eight share frontality as their principal compositional quality; and in each of these designs, objects as dissimilar as thrones and trees place a small group of characters near the picture plane. Admittedly, this stylistic choice, as it appears in different media, ­characterizes two different traditions, German mural art and book illustration. Their similarly deployed conventions have clearly differentiated goals: the fresco places its figures close to the picture plane to ensure that their shapes are large enough to be seen by a viewer who necessarily stands at a physical distance from it, and an engraving in a book often attempts to decrease the social or even ontological distance between its subjects and its readers. For Victorians, breaking down or ignoring the distinction between fiction and reality, often by identifying imaginatively with a narrative’s characters as beings like themselves, provided one of the major pleasures and benefits of reading novels. In the case of “Substance and Shadow,” the resulting pity for and fellow feeling with the poor should lead to anger at governmental indifference. Yet this shared formal feature, identifying as it does the big cut in Punch with the Westminster Hall cartoons, creates the possibility for an exchange, one whose import is made clear – in the final comparison of this chapter – by the differences between its effects and those of the visual practices typical of the ILN. While the ILN adopts one feature characteristic of German history painting, Punch gives over the composition of “Substance and Shadow” to a

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more comprehensive feature of Nazarene art as it was interpreted by many of the entrants in the 1843 FAC competition. As the ILN’s image of “The Great Room” proves, the designer of “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall” turned away from the model that it had itself provided in its visual coverage of that year’s RA exhibition only six weeks earlier. With its mildly comic depictions of a socially varied group of viewers, “The Great Room” aligns itself with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century caricatures, particularly the etching “All Cockney-land at the Royal Academy” from George Cruikshank’s first and widely popular Comic Almanack (1835): two of the figures in the ILN’s print, the gazing child in the center and the bending man to the left, recall the amusing poses and gestures of the similar and similarly placed figures in Cruikshank’s work. Positioned closer to the picture plane and therefore the viewer than those in “Exhibition of the Cartoons,” the motley bunch of “The Great Room” could never be mistaken for the figures in a ceremonial group portrait, and any two or three of them might easily be found in an illustration in a Dickens novel. More pertinent, they would be at home in the pages of Punch, thereby providing additional evidence that the ILN might have been using its visual response to the 1843 exhibition to differentiate it from its rival. In making such a graphic argument for its own relatively genteel and refined status, however, the ILN rejects the possibility that it might make a political argument about the FAC. Yet, by virtue of its frontality, the politically engaged print in Punch, a visual representation so limited in size that one can hold it in one’s hand, resembles, more thoroughly than the ILN’s engraving does, a form of painting so spatially expansive that it can cover a wall or fill a niche in the most impressive of public buildings. If one tries to imagine that the dimensions of both “Substance and Shadow” and “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall” were enlarged to the ten- or fifteen-foot size of the designs in the 1843 competition, the one that would deserve the honor of being placed among the cartoons solely on the basis of the qualities of its composition would have to be the engraving after Leech. In this complicated reversal of identifications, a fictive exhibition at the Royal Academy, standing in for the images in the Westminster Hall competition, becomes, by virtue of its composition even more than on the strength of its title, a history painting claiming its rightful place as “CARTOON, No. I.” The exhibition authorized by the Fine Arts Commission, established to further the goals of and answerable to Parliament, has not only occasioned one of Punch’s most caustic cartoons, an image that proves how little government priorities have changed since 1832; it has also given the paper an opportunity to use the FAC’s stylistic preferences against it. By usurping the grandeur of history painting in its representation of dirty, tired, maimed, and hungry members of what was widely called the “residuum,” Punch

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criticizes Parliament not only for appropriations that contribute to the upkeep of German royalty but also for its support of a royal ­commission that ignores the destitute inhabitants of a country that is, in Carlyle’s words from the first paragraph of Past and Present, “dying of inanition.” By the 1860s the close relation between high art and parliamentary politics that characterized the 1830s and 1840s had come to seem quaintly old fashioned – a fact that explains the nostalgic ring of Monk’s use of art as an analogy for franchise reform in Phineas Finn. Grand depictions in oil of current political events were typically products of that earlier time, few though they were even then. Those who now visit the Houses of Parliament to view the restored frescos there or go to the National Portrait Gallery and admire the state in which Hayter’s The House of Commons, 1833 now hangs, dominating the room called “The Road to Reform” and placed on the wall diagonally across from Haydon’s Anti-Slavery Society Convention, would have difficulty imagining the disrepute into which by 1859 had fallen both the project of decorating the new Palace of Westminster and the process of making Hayter’s canvas a piece of public property. In that sense, if Hayter’s painting was ahead of its time, predicting reforms that would happen in the mid 1860s, it was also behind its times: when it was purchased, The House of Commons exemplified a kind of monumental art no longer thought worthy of state patronage. When John Phillip, an artist one generation younger than Hayter, produced a comparable painting, The House of Commons in 1860 (RA 1863), it was a much smaller affair, with many fewer, hard-to-identify figures. This “picture not of the House, but of a section of the House,” according to the London Review, represents a commonplace debate. Most important, Phillip’s painting serves private rather than public purposes: it was commissioned by the Speaker of the House, Evelyn Denison, to adorn his residence; and the artist’s “flattering pencil” therefore puts Denison in the center of the composition.100 By the time that Phillip’s The House of Commons was being painted, the FAC was actually canceling the contracts that it had previously awarded, and the sponsorship of new works of art largely reverted to voluntary associations of private individuals.101 Government support for the upkeep and even extension of galleries, the purchase of existing works, commissions for the occasional commemorative statue, government schools of art – such funding still seemed an appropriate distribution of the nation’s monies – but making art happen by contracting and paying for it did not. As one MP said in 1858, “The more completely art was separated from the State, the more original would be its conceptions and the greater its progress.”102 In 1854 Ford Madox Brown foretold this outcome when he wrote in his diary that Britain was progressing in all arenas “except such branches of art as are especially government reared, such as … High art.” In those endeavors, “the Aristocracy of [the] Country presses with Torpedo influence.”103 The franchise reform of 1832 had not, as “Substance and Shadow” testifies,

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done much to change the fate of suitors for government favor, whether they were the poor of London or an impecunious artist with great ambitions. Similarly, whatever Haydon would have made in the 1860s of the decay of the paintings in the new palace housing Parliament, his own demise in 1846 is as closely linked to the early efforts of the FAC as the sale of Hayter’s painting was to the prospects for electoral reform. The story of Haydon’s death by his own hand has been frequently told: whether he was moved to suicide by the failure of his final exhibition, this one again held in the Egyptian Hall where it was decisively upstaged by the appearance there of Barnum’s General Tom Thumb, is not clear. Beyond doubt, however, is the fact that Haydon was thinking in his last years and months about the FAC. His final show consisted of two pictures “in a Series of Six Designs, Originally Made for the Old House of Lords, 1812, and Laid before Every Minister from that Time to the Present,” as Haydon said in the title of his descriptive catalogue; and their subjects identify the FAC as a candidate for the proximate cause of his death. The proof copy of his catalogue makes that point directly: a passage added by hand at its conclusion berates Eastlake for not having approached the Royal Commission to ask if its “proceedings,” specifically its dealings with Haydon, have been “just or unjust” – a question clearly answered in the printed text of the pamphlet when he fulminates against the “allegoric childishness” and “medieval inanity” of the art sponsored by the FAC. Official approval of the German manner had doomed his chances for patronage. As he lamented, “The artist … has been hardly treated.”104 It was, however, perhaps a good thing that Haydon did not live to see another, more minor indignity that awaited his work when the collector who owned Waiting for the Times hung on the wall under it an engraving after John Leech, “Waiting for ‘The Railway Times,’” a parody in which a coal-heaver, anxious to invest in railway shares, waits grumpily for a servant to give over that paper.105 Humiliating as that conjunction would have been to Haydon, it neatly sets two media, painting and illustrated journalism, against each other in a comparative encounter that makes the former the unlikely inferior of the latter, Leech’s visual joke being given in this instance the last word. In the 1860s the works of public art that mattered were not the history paintings in the structure that housed Parliament; they were the images in the pages of the ILN and Punch. Commercially successful enough not to require government support, had it been available for such purposes, too minor and well-behaved to tempt government control, the two papers were able to use the relatively small dimensions of the visual representations in their pages to offer continuous and extensive commentaries on the doings in Parliament, as well as on everyday life. Bringing together art and politics – creating political statements through analogies that link the two realms, as Trollope does in Phineas Finn, and using art as the medium for such statements, as Hayter does in The House of Commons, 1833 – had become

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by the decade of the Second Reform Act a major journalistic technique of both Punch and the ILN: by then wood engravings in these two newspapers were undertaking arguably more relevant political work than any that had been done by the frescos painted on the walls of the new Palace of Westminster.

Chapter 3

Redrawing the franchise in the 1860s: lines around the constitution

On August 4, 1866, the Illustrated London News printed “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” its most threatening visual image of the popular agitation that took place as Parliament moved toward franchise reform in the mid 1860s (fig. 3.1; 117). This unsigned wood engraving depicts one version of the events that quickly became known as the Hyde Park riots: demonstrators attack the frail fence around the park, from which a scattered and smaller group of police are attempting to exclude them. On the same day Punch published “No Rough-ianism,” a big cut or full-page cartoon after a design by John Tenniel (fig. 3.2; 51). Here a British “Working-Man,” identified as a carpenter by his paper cap, represents the kind of artisan whom the reform bill of 1866 would have enfranchised had it been passed. Collaring a shabbily dressed and crudely armed rough, the kind of disreputable member of the lower classes associated with electioneering violence, the Working-Man declares, “Look here, you vagabond! Right or wrong, we won’t have your help!” As commentaries on the disturbances that began on July 23, “No Rough-ianism” and “The Mob” seem to come to opposite conclusions about the dangers facing Britain. By distinguishing a respectable worker from his dissolute and unruly opponent, the cartoon in Punch prophesies that the enfranchisement of the former will vanquish the latter. The ILN image of chaotic invasion, with its massed figures and dark forms, points to no such hope. Accepting such readings at face value, however, is made difficult by the status of these two engravings as both representations of and participants in specific comparative encounters, the meetings central to both the living and the recording of high-Victorian experience. In “No Rough-ianism” Punch depicts the encounter of a stereotypical artisan and a stereotypical rowdy; in “The Mob” the ILN pictures police and populace coming face to face. By picturing such meetings, as my analysis in the previous chapter suggests, the ILN and Punch also encourage their readers to envision their own relations to the figures in these prints: the person looking at “No Rough-ianism” is presumably as much the Working-Man’s better as the latter is the Rough’s, but the viewer of “The Mob” is invited to identify with the police as upholders of the peace. When these papers create such analogies, they typically invoke the counters of culturally constructed difference 117

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Fig. 3.1  “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” (9½˝ by 6¾˝), ILN (August 4, 1866: 117)

that mattered most in high-Victorian society: inclusion, ­exclusion; order, disorder; respectability, disrepute; individuality, collectivity; physicality, intellect; strength, weakness. These qualities become most politically relevant in the pages of Punch and the ILN when their engravings portray encounters that involve workers. Punch evaluates what such men offer a reshaped constitution whenever the paper contemplates its fictive personage, the “Working-Man.” The ILN similarly, if more indirectly, pictures reform whenever it reports on the activities of the nation’s recently revived amateur army, primarily because the issues central to both the high-­Victorian volunteer force and franchise reform – who is ­encouraged to join and who is granted the vote, respectively – turn on the problem of numbers. In such instances, formal considerations involving size and proximity and orientation again link the composition of an image to the constitution of the polity.

Redrawing the franchise in the 1860s

Fig. 3.2  “No Rough-ianism,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (7¼˝ by 9¾˝), Punch (August 4, 1866: 51)

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Punch and the ILN feature in this chapter in terms of both their ­individual issues and the series comprising those issues. In the summer of 1867, the ILN self-consciously announced, “So ends the chronicle of the Reform Bill” (July 20, 1867: 59), while earlier Punch had proclaimed its intention to “pursue … the Reform narrative, postponing underplots” for the sake of clarity (June 8, 1867: 237). By conceiving of their reports on franchise reform as stories told over time, treating the items in their pages as if they were installments in ongoing, complex narratives comparable to those of Victorian novels, these papers attempt both to create and to reflect public opinion through the effects of what Michael Warner specifically calls the “reflexivity” of serial publication: “private readings of circulating texts” create “a public” that “see[s] the world” in a particular way. Warner stresses that this process, pace Bagehot, involves less “rational-critical dialogue” than the “poetic-expressive” capacities of shared discourse.1 The impressiveness of the poetically resonant messages conveyed by the journalistic images in the ILN and Punch often had its source in wellestablished graphic conventions. By the mid 1860s, after over twenty years in existence, the two papers had developed quite different but consistent house styles; and these practices, involving the design of both individual prints and their layout, had become conventions with which their readers would have been familiar.2 Accordingly, each picture in Punch and the ILN takes its meanings from its relation to comparable images or to topics traced across successive issues or even volumes of the newspaper in which it appears. Only by closely analyzing the topical contexts and the formal features of an individual print, along with the series to which it contributes, is it possible to recognize the political work that it does. Such analysis, I argue, provides a way of understanding the central mystery that still surrounds the passing of the Second Reform Act: why did a bill that found so little favor with anyone in either Commons or Lords pass with apparent inevitability? Traditional attempts to identity the causes of its passage have nominated plenty of candidates for that honor, including economic conditions, Gladstone’s role in 1866, and the machinations of the man whom Carlyle called “a superlative Hebrew Conjuror”;3 but none of these forces quite explains what seemed at the time an unaccountable outcome. Witnesses to the event were more baffled than subsequent historians have been. Before the fact Bagehot frankly confessed his bewilderment: referring to the Reform Act of 1832, he asked in the title of an essay in The Economist, “Why Has the ‘Settlement’ of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?” and he noted that “though three-fourths or more of the House of Commons hate” Disraeli’s measure, “by a sort of fate it will become law.” Ruskin, looking back on the 1867 act, invoked a less grand version of Bagehot’s language: its passage was “more or less accidental.” The narrator of Trollope’s Phineas Finn credits the press with having fomented the “excitement” that workers feel about reform, but he also wonders

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why those who find the idea “odious” nonetheless support it: “there was no strong throb through the country, making men feel that safety was to be had by Reform, and could not be had without Reform.”4 How, then, could either such a lack of interest or outright aversion have issued in the success of the 1867 bill? Why, less than a year after the events in Hyde Park and months before the measure prevailed in the House of Commons, did franchise reform seem to have been accepted as a fait accompli? By casting the answer to those questions in terms of the state of public opinion revealed by the iconography of reform and of the topics associated with it in ILN and Punch, this chapter explores attitudes analogous to those examined by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, charting the relations between franchise reform and the circumstances of and ideas about workers, women, and empire. My perspective also draws on James Vernon’s Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867, which often focuses on the visual as well as the narrative constructions of parliamentary questions.5 The approach that I take here, however, attempts both to reverse and to refine the explanation that still prevails among most historians: according to such accounts, the 1867 bill succeeded because “class collaboration” developed during the mid-Victorian period and because many members of the working-classes either had or were thought to have adopted middle-class standards of respectability, self-discipline, and self-improvement.6 The argument that emerges from the pages of Punch and the ILN involves a version of the former thesis and an inversion of the latter: from the late 1850s to the passage of Disraeli’s bill in 1867, many of the engravings in these papers identified “class collaboration” as a relatively widespread acknowledgment that workers embodied positive values quite distinct from the moral virtues of self-restraint and self-help. The analyses here assume the validity of Bagehot’s conception of the political usefulness of visibility, but they draw repeatedly on the nine laws of composition that Ruskin sets out in The Elements of Drawing. The law of contrast, for instance, immediately points out the individuality of the figures in Punch’s “No Rough-ianism,” and the law of principality poses the problem of identifying who or what dominates the ILN’s depiction of “The Mob.” The use of the word art in the nineteenth century as a synonym for practice authorizes the ways in which Ruskin draws analogies between forms of composition and political values, both of which make up “the arts of mankind.” In the often messy and mundane practicalities of parliamentary politics in the 1860s, such theories make evident other kinds of connections – between subjects as diverse as Fenian “outrages” and soldiers of the line, volunteering and voting, respectable artisans and wellmuscled gentlemen. Brian Maidment has demonstrated that “the weekly illustrated press” had the “power … to forge grand social narratives out of

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minor news reports, however unrelated the text and images may seem to be,”7 and such a formulation explains how Punch and the ILN construct their “Reform narrative” and “chronicle of the Reform Bill” from “minor” and “unrelated” materials. The “grand” story that each paper told involved the emerging shape of the British constitution. In the 1830s Hayter had defined that immaterial charter as a structure of relationships made visible in the old chamber of the House of Commons. Thirty years later wood engravings in the ILN and Punch picture the constitution as a territory that either opens its boundaries to include those who enter it or guards against such entry. In “No Rough-ianism” and “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” that space takes the form of Hyde Park. Along with the placement of those two prints in the issues that contained them, the mid-Victorian conventions employed by artists when they rendered in oil or ink the peaceful, rather than the riotous, activities characteristic of that park are the first subjects in this chapter. In particular, pictures that feature the physical barriers around and within the boundaries of Hyde Park make visible, as Brown’s Work does, high-Victorian conceptions of social organization. In the pages of Punch and the ILN, during July 1866, they also envision how franchise reform might redraw the lines around the British constitution. C onte x ts of place and placement

The poli ti cal di mensi o n s o f a ph y s ica l s ite As every reader of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy knows, the meeting called by the Reform League for July 23, 1866, turned unruly when perhaps as many as two hundred thousand people found the gates of Hyde Park closed against them. As either the effect of a planned response to the confrontation or the unintended consequence of the pressure of the crowds, the park railings gave way. In the conflict that followed, property was damaged, hundreds of participants injured, and, according to some reports, one policeman killed; troops were called in to restore order, and it took three days to clear the park of those whom the government had intended to exclude from it. The Reform League, a largely working-class organization dedicated to an extension of the franchise, had scheduled the gathering at Hyde Park to demonstrate the widespread disenchantment with the new Conservative ministry of Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli that had taken office after the failure of the 1866 reform bill and the resulting dissolution of the Liberal government of Earl Russell and W. E. Gladstone. Although the clarity of hindsight allows historians to dismiss the events in Hyde Park as an inconsequential “political comedy,” many Victorian observers saw the invasion of the park as a genuine ­crisis, even “something like civil war,” as the Daily Telegraph called it.8 To

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inhabitants of London, members of Parliament, and writers for the press, that event indicated the potential for violence among the working classes, whose members constituted more than four-fifths of the population. Even Trollope was exercised enough by the riots to portray in Phineas Finn a comparable physical fray in front of the Palace of Westminster. A year or two later, memories of the upset were still so vivid that it was often given credit for the passing of the Second Reform Act. According to the Quarterly Review, reform was achieved by “the mobs who beat down the palings of Hyde Park.”9 Attributing such power to these disturbances made sense to those who had witnessed or read about them because they evoked all the fears about working-class numbers that are implicit in Victorian debates about population, sanitation, trade unionism, and, not least, the franchise. Yet the riots that took place in Hyde Park in July of 1866 were also something of a godsend to those debating the question of electoral reform because they embodied, by materializing in particular space, the issue of who would or would not be allowed to vote. Calls for an extension of the franchise frequently cast such a measure as a need to expand “the pale of the Constitution,” the presumably well-enclosed area that separated and protected electors from the numerous disfranchised men outside its borders. The “Line of Representation or Reform” that cuts across A Map of Society Island becomes, some thirty years later, a barrier encircling threatened territory that similarly includes some people and excludes others. Since the word pale means both a fence and the area enclosed by a fence, a violated Hyde Park stood for trespass into an arena of constitutional rights. Pale is a medieval term for the boundaries within which the English were safe against the uncivilized Irish whose land they were occupying. Although one MP in 1866 objected that it was “inapplicable” to reformers because it referred to a “class” in Ireland who were “liable to be shot,” the colonial history of the word pale may account for some of its force. As early as 1848, the radical MP Bright asked his colleagues in Parliament to extend “the pale of the constitution of which they boasted so much. The 800,000 electors of the country formed a kind of garrison, but it was surrounded by 5,000,000 persons, who required to be admitted within its bounds.”10 By depicting potential voters as invaders of a fatally undermanned military stronghold, Bright was evoking fears of workingclass violence in a year when they were at their height. Almost two decades later in May of 1864 when Gladstone unexpectedly announced his commitment to franchise reform, he turned Bright’s military metaphor into the promise of peaceful accommodation. Calling for “not a wholesale, but a sensible and considerable” enlargement of the electorate, Gladstone concluded, “I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal ­unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the

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pale of the Constitution,” a visual image that he specified by also referring in that speech to the “portals of the Constitution.” Although Gladstone continued to describe reforming as “drawing a line,” the words in which he equated the suffrage and a pale were soon taken up by the Reform League and printed as its slogan on its membership cards.11 In the ditty that accompanies “No Rough-ianism,” the “British Working-Man” also links territory and voting rights:    If Reform is what we need,    We’re accustomed to proceed In the reglar way of speech and resolution;    Not by breakin down Park rails    For to get, through them there pales, Let within the pale of England’s Constitution. (August 4, 1866: 50)

The rhyming of “rails” and “pales” enforces the pun that became, for both comic and serious purposes, central to many debates over an extension of the suffrage. Whether a message about the constitution was written in the broken railings of the park, however, was not a question: God himself, as one MP explained, had sent the Conservative government “a warning that if they shut the gates against constitutional Reform the people will pull down the constitutional palings.”12 The cogency of the message conveyed by the riots depended very much upon the identity of the specific park whose boundaries had been breached. Crown property, Hyde Park had been open to the public since the early seventeenth century, becoming a site on which to celebrate both national prowess and popular rights. Most prominently in recent years, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been located there, a fact deemed so significant that it was indicated on the maps in guidebooks to London long after the Crystal Palace had been dismantled and removed. Much earlier uses to which Hyde Park had been put were still alive either in practice or in memory. At least since the seventeenth century, English soldiers and militia had been reviewed there.13 The park also stood for the state violence of public executions: the Marble Arch, moved to one of its corners in 1851, still stands near the site of Tyburn tree, where thieves, traitors, and victims of royal displeasure had been hanged from the medieval period until 1783. More important, the park was so closely associated with the popular rights of public assembly and free speech that disorder often broke out when those rights were challenged. Although the park was to be entered only by the sovereign’s invitation, control over its boundaries was difficult to maintain. Custom dating back some two hundred years, according to the Daily Telegraph, had made the park the people’s own; and a placard calling for the demonstration that led to the 1866 riots put the point bluntly: one hundred thousand costermongers were “wanted” so that they could ride their donkeys along Rotten Row to test whether Hyde Park “belongs

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to a class or the entire people.”14 Earlier the park had been the scene of violence when, for instance, on repeated occasions in 1862 crowds of perhaps one hundred thousand onlookers watched as secularist Garibaldians fought with Irish Roman Catholics; and a conflict over a Sunday-closing bill in 1855, depicted by the ILN in a full-page engraving after John Leech (July 7, 1855: 12), led Marx, ever optimistic, to believe that “the English Revolution began in Hyde Park yesterday.” The leaders of the Reform League in 1866 therefore chose Hyde Park as a rallying point specifically to connect the right to vote to the rights of public speech and public assembly.15 In drawing lines to depict the results of that meeting, Punch and the ILN therefore invoke a variety of politically charged, time-honored associations. Yet the feature of Hyde Park that most often compelled the imaginations of Victorian painters was its function as a site of the politics of everyday life. The ILN was so taken with one such image that it published in 1862 a two-page print called “Rotten-Row,” which was engraved by William Thomas after a painting of the same name, then being displayed at the Royal Academy, by his older brother and teacher, G. H. Thomas (fig. 3.3; May 17: 502–3).16 As this image reveals, Hyde Park by mid ­century was the place in London thought to epitomize the class differences that were defined by variations of manner, dress, and behavior. Thus it often provided the setting for comparative encounters, for meetings between the members of different classes graphically identified as such. Although Charles Knight lamented in 1864 that Hyde Park was no longer on Sundays the elite preserve of “fashion,” having been turned over to crowds of “vulgar pedestrians,”17 Rotten Row during the season kept up its reputation as the place to see members of the upper ten thousand, along with such figures as Leech and Tenniel, who met once a week to ride there together. In 1867 Punch offered a remarkably explicit commentary on the social divisions recognized by visitors to the park when it had a working man explain that Hyde Park constitutes a “paradise” in which the “sumptuous throng” and the “struggling classes” come together specifically to “compare” their physical attributes and their fates (June 15: 241). The ILN would have agreed. Calling the site “our truly national promenade,” the writer of the letterpress accompanying “Rotten-Row” lists the extraordinary range of people of genuine or “affected” fashion gathered there – from, among the more than twenty types cited, the “haut ton” of the West End to the “demi-monde” of Brompton, from baronets to tailors (May 17, 1862: 516). Thomas’s engraving emphasizes the lines across which people in Hyde Park routinely “compare” each other by making its most prominent feature the railing, the pale, that separates a mixed-class group of pedestrians from the more homogeneously genteel people riding across from them. The engraving style of this high-art reproduction mirrors that contrast

Fig. 3.3  William Thomas, “Rotten-Row,” wood engraving after G. H. Thomas (two pages, 20½˝ by 14½˝), ILN (May 17, 1862: 502–3)

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with its opposition of the linear to the curved, of the intersecting forms of trees and railing, along with the portion of the sky no doubt created by a hand-held tint tool and the sketchily bordered clouds and groupings of human figures made by a graver. Although the print reproduces the Frithlike social panorama of the painting with its landscape format and range of recognizable types, the elegantly elongated forms of the ladies on horseback recall the genteel figures in the ILN’s image of the 1843 exhibition in Westminster Hall. As insistently as the print, the text describing it focuses on the contrasts between those on horseback and those on foot: The artist has added still more general interest to his picture by the groups he has introduced inside the nearer rails – the plebeian side and the rails over which hardly anybody “you know” dreams of leaning – the “navvy” sitting down smoking his pipe after his hard day’s work, the children, laughing, screaming, or going through a course of gymnastics, with an abandonment in striking contrast with the solemnity of the old gentleman, the youth who has read himself to sleep, the Life Guardsman, and other male and female pariahs and outcasts, among which must be noted particularly the seedy “swell,” with folded arms, glaring so malignantly at the scene. What has he done or left undone to bring apparently the ban of exclusion and social excommunication upon him?

This description of the “seedy ‘swell’” assumes, apparently without any evidence, that he is an “outcast.” Not answering the question raised by this figure  – what has he done to deserve this “ban”?  – the writer concludes, “the moral of the picture (for it has a moral, and a good one, too) speaks for itself ” (May 17, 1862: 516), perhaps implying that the lesson about social exclusion evident on the “plebeian side” of these palings is so obvious as not to need articulation. Whatever its “moral,” Thomas’s image of Rotten Row epitomizes midVictorian graphic conventions by depicting barriers within, not around Hyde Park. John Ritchie’s A Summer Day in Hyde Park, exhibited at the British Institution in 1858, places horizontally across the painting the railings on either side of Rotten Row, a demarcation further emphasized by a bench placed along them. Similarly, William McConnell’s engraving “Four O’Clock P.M.: The Park” in George Augustus Sala’s Twice Round the Clock (1859) portrays a diagonal railing like that depicted in the ILN’s “RottenRow.” Although McConnell offers a fantastical topography that collapses distances in the park so that the crowd in Rotten Row can be supervised by the massive statue of Wellington that at the time topped Decimus Burton’s triple arch at Hyde Park Corner, the designer conveys the same message as the one in the ILN’s “Rotten-Row.” Similarly, Sala uses his prose to record social distinctions: describing himself “leaning over the wooden rails” and envying the youth and prosperity of an eighteen-year-old riding past him, Sala listens as a “grim town Diogenes” confidently discriminates “real ladies” from the “dashing delightful creatures [who] have covered themselves with shame.”18 The spectacle of Rotten Row seems to evoke, as

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if by nature, categorizations of such widely opposed types, as it does here between virtuous and fallen women. The visual appeal of these three highVictorian images is based on large numbers of people aggregated within the park, seen from the perspective of an observer also located within its boundaries. As the texts accompanying both the engraving of Thomas’s painting and McConnell’s print suggest, Hyde Park stands, above all, for exclusion and exclusivity: the viewer is assumed to be among the relatively genteel who ride or walk within the park so that they can either observe those just like them or look down upon those beneath them. As the ILN puts the point, “you,” the viewer of this scene, know “hardly anyone” on the “plebeian side” of the fencing. In this context the image of the Hyde Park riots published by the ILN would seem genuinely frightening; that in Punch, pointedly reassuring. “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane” transforms the conventional way in which artists portray people enjoying their leisure in the park: canceling out the effect of previous images of the peaceful coexistence typical of everyday life, it turns the spectator away from the nowirrelevant fencing within the park and toward external railings that are giving way. Because the men in “The Mob” are larger than comparable figures in Rotten-Row and A Summer Day in Hyde Park, the menace depicted in the print comes closer to the viewer than do the non-violent encounters of the painting. Yet “No Rough-ianism” rejects more directly than does “The Mob” the model provided by Ritchie and the Thomas brothers and McConnell. In eschewing images of crowds of people gathered inside Hyde Park and depicting instead the relatively massive and isolated figures of the Working-Man and Rough on a sidewalk along its external border, “No Rough-ianism” pictures barriers that effectively exclude. As the Working-Man of the accompanying verse directly says, it is “not by breakin down Park rails / For to get, through them there pales” that he hopes to be “let within the pale of England’s Constitution.” According to Punch, there is no need to worry: the boundaries around citizenship are being well patrolled by a self-disciplining artisan. Li nes wi thin a n is s ue The lessons that “The Mob” and “No Rough-ianism” offer when they are seen in isolation, with the former unsettling its viewers and the latter calming their justifiable fears, are reversed once those engravings are read in relation to the heterogeneity of the images that fill the issues in which they appeared. By 1866 Punch and the ILN had created readerships that expected of them particular kinds and numbers of prints and articles. The signature graphic of the ILN is the crowd scene or landscape, often apprehended from a “Bird’s-Eye View,” as the paper entitles a depiction of the Crystal Palace in 1851 (June 14: 566–67). The visual trademark of Punch

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is its portrayal of a meeting of usually two but typically no more than three or four persons, seen most often from the level of the street or room in which it is taking place and explained by a more-or-less amusing caption. This formula dominated both the paper’s full-page engravings and its “socials,” its more minor images often half or a quarter the size of a big cut. The subjects covered by the two papers were not, however, as different as their graphic conventions would suggest. Although in the 1860s Punch typically focused on the comedy of everyday life – relations between family members, employers and servants, friends and colleagues – it, like the ILN, also consistently treated art and politics, filling its pages with graphic accounts of foreign events and economic conditions at home, images of heads of state mingling indiscriminately with those of workers and street people. Capitalizing on the growing taste among middle-class audiences for reproductions of contemporary art works,19 the ILN featured an even greater visual diversity, a graphic exuberance that sometimes seems overwhelming: paintings past and present, portraits of notable men and women, depictions of livestock and ships, items of interior decor, all join a wide range of architectural illustrations, particularly those depicting mammoth building projects such as the Thames embankment. Prominent also are provincial and exotic landscapes, as well as depictions of battles and catastrophes – fires, shipwrecks, and explosions – along with a range of ceremonial occasions that put people together in crowds: royal processions and weddings, elections, inaugurations, and exhibitions. In both newspapers this wealth of visual materials inevitably comments on each of the individual prints that they published. Because the August 4 issue of Punch is filled with its usual variety of subjects, it depicts the world going about its everyday business as if no violence had erupted in Hyde Park: predictable and therefore reassuring are reports on croquet, a Royal Academy exhibition, the stock market, Roman Catholicism, the inconsistencies of the English language, and the laying of the Atlantic cable. Yet other items in the issue of Punch for August 4 are less comforting. From the first image on its first page, the number is filled with references to Hyde Park, every page bearing at least one and sometimes as many as three comments on the subject. This sustained attention, highly uncharacteristic of the paper, suggests a kind of comic overkill, if not hysteria. There are brief items: one-liners (“PARK RAILINGS.  – ‘Mob Abuse.’”) and single paragraphs that, for instance, castigate the parliamentary “pervert” who has decided to support the Reform League (47, 50). Some of these items attempt to make light of the threat posed by the rioting only to make it seem more ominous because they work so hard to belittle it. Among several “admirable suggestions” that Punch has received for clearing Hyde Park is a joke based on a common stereotype of the working classes: “Let the park be filled with fire engines. Let the fire engines play soap-and-water on the Great Unwashed”

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(49). Here Punch laughingly conveys the mingled fear and contempt ­elicited by ­working-class numbers: like fire, such men constitute a danger to be extinguished as quickly as possible; but they are more notable for their unparalleled dirt than for any other form of Greatness. The unrelenting cascade of jokes conveys a clear message: the rioting in Hyde Park may not be so amusing after all. A similar, though more elaborately produced reversal of meanings takes place in the pages of the ILN’s issue for August 4. Readers that week were treated to its characteristic visual prodigality: eight depictions of the Austro-Prussian War; engravings after three paintings, one by Auguste François Biard that was being shown at the French Exhibition in Pall Mall and two others at the Royal Academy by S. J. Carter and J. H. Hodgson (“Lapland Lovers off Cape North,” “Rescued from the Wolf,” and “A Jew’s Daughter Accused of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages,” respectively), as well as images of the Yorkshire Fine-Arts and Industrial Exhibition, two ­sporting events, a foreign potentate, and a colonial church, not to men­ tion  its regular offerings, a coat-of-arms gracing one of the week’s obituaries, a chess board, and Paris fashions. Amid such attention-grabbing variety, the accounts of the Hyde Park riots appear in only two places: as the subject of that week’s leader and as a page devoted to a group of three visual images, the first and most prominent of which is “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” along with a brief, first-hand account purportedly submitted by the artist who designed the engravings. While Punch accords relative prominence to “No Rough-ianism” by placing it on an unbacked page, the print in the ILN appears in the middle of a number that is longer than Punch’s by twelve much larger pages. That context tends to obscure the message of “The Mob” by diluting it in the typical stately parade of images that surround it. The events in the park might not be so upsetting after all. Thus, although the ILN places its visual rendering of the violence in Hyde Park on the first page of its supplement, in the exact center of the issue, the larger context in which it appears makes it seem less central and  therefore perhaps less disturbing than it is when seen alone. The text of the leader in the August 4 issue of the ILN confirms such a reading. It laments what it calls “the miserable Hyde Park business,” but it identifies the chief victims of the riots as the cause of reform and the “devastated flora” of the park: “the result is before the eyes of London.” Yet even as the ILN deplores the fact that “the proceedings of reformers out of doors” have “been designed to array class against class,” it construes class in a way that makes reform seem almost palatable. Defending the “just claims of artisanship” against the follies perpetrated by “agitators,” the ILN focuses on educational differentiations: passage of franchise reform, it announces, will be the “result of conviction on the part of the educated class,” not the effect of attempts at intimidation; the leaders of

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the Reform League should therefore gather a petition of forty thousand signatures as “an educational test” of the signers’ fitness for the franchise (August 4, 1866: 106). By focusing on literacy, the ILN identifies potential working-class voters with its readers and other members of the “educated classes.” The analysis here therefore turns as thoroughly on the contrast between respectable worker and disreputable ruffian as does the design of “No Rough-ianism.” In this leader the ILN, like Punch, presents its response to the riots as an argument for, not against, an enfranchisement of at least some working men. Moreover, even the engraving “The Mob” can be read as evidence of the validity of such a message when it is judged in the context of the layout of the page on which it appears. From its first decade, as Peter Sinnema explains, the ILN tried to defuse potential threats whenever it pictured current events,20 and that tendency was even more pronounced by 1866. Especially telling in relation to the Hyde Park riots is its handling of an earlier instance of civil disorder, the 1860 disturbances at St. George’sin-the-East, a church whose “mob congregation” of three thousand had repeatedly protested against the ritualistic practices of its high-church clergy by smoking, throwing nut shells, hurling orange peels, and setting off firecrackers (February 11, 1860: 127). The ILN took no visual notice of these disturbances until they were over, when the paper printed a touristic view of the interior of the church, complete with four well-dressed sightseers (March 3, 1860: 217). In the case of the Hyde Park riots, the ILN similarly renders as peaceful a chaotic and dangerous scene, not over the course of weeks or months, but within a single page. Appearing under the heading “The Riot in Hyde Park” is “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” which covers slightly more than the top half of the page, and side by side below it are two smaller prints, “Scene of the Destruction near the Marble Arch” and “The Broken Railings at Hyde Park-Corner” (fig. 3.4; August 4, 1866: 117).21 In the middle are three short columns of text that convey the frantic dismay of the eyewitness, “our artist,” who had been admitted to the park before violence broke out: “He saw hundreds of rough fellows, men and boys, with some women among them” break down the railings and a “mob … fighting desperately against the police.” According to the rational discourse of this text, the rabble has taken over. By depicting what “our artist” has seen from within the park, “The Mob” similarly evokes for the regular reader of the ILN earlier images of strikes in the north of England or of election riots, particularly those in Ireland. Yet the second and third images are more poetically expressive. Portraying the exterior of the park on the day following the first night of the riots, they distract attention from the damage that they depict: the broken railings are evident, but the larger architectural features, set against the massed trees in both scenes, conform to the conventions of the paper’s ­frequent depictions of buildings and landscapes. Placed at the bottom of the page

Fig. 3.4  “The Riot in Hyde Park,” wood engraving (9½˝ by 14 ½˝), ILN (August 4, 1866: 117)

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where churches and other forms of civic architecture often appear, the prints, as if constituting the base of a pyramid of pictures, seem to be associated with images of stability. These smaller prints offer almost pleasing scenes that might be mistaken for views of cultivated landscapes, complete with architectural follies, or for a newly erected place of worship. As such, they offer little cause for alarm. Other design conventions of the ILN ratify such a conclusion. The paper often defined the term picturesque in the loosest of fashions, meaning simply a scene that is worth picturing. Yet the term also refers more specifically to the style recognized since the late eighteenth century as particularly adapted to the delineation of ruins, fragments, and wildness, a style that turns “‘roughness’, ugliness or poverty” into a “benign” spectacle. In this case Ruskin’s principles of composition reveal how such an effect is created.22 Juxtaposing the two pictures at the bottom of the page creates repetition, the formal equivalent for Ruskin of repose and calm, not agitation and alarm. The similar compositions of the images of the Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner, seen from approximately equal distances at roughly the same angles, create a kind of visual harmony, an orderliness that belies the damage evident in the broken railings themselves. In addition, because, according to Ruskin’s laws, curvature conduces to beauty, the prominence of the curvilinear forms of the foliage of the trees in the smaller images on this page, compared to jagged and irregular clusters in “The Mob,” also constitutes a compositional version of peace rather than discord. Significantly, the damaged railings around the park, seen from a much greater distance than they are in the Punch print, become objects of presumably calm aesthetic contemplation. Instead of including in the foreground of these prints human figures who might serve as the viewer’s surrogate or repoussoir, as conventions of the picturesque would dictate, such figures, like the damage to the park, are also distanced from the viewer: the close-up inspection that they give the park is precisely what the reader is not invited to undertake. Finally, by telling a story of event and aftermath, by creating a narrative that the eye reads as it moves from the top to the bottom of the page, the layout here eases the anxiety that its first image might arouse were it not part of a larger composition. Looking first at “The Mob,” readers witness with “our artist” the invasion of the park; but viewing the two prints below it, they move away from and above the scene to view from a safe distance the results of the disturbances. The layout of the page therefore gives the last word to the relative calm of the architectural engravings on which the eye comes to rest. Reading “The Mob” as part of the full page of “The Riot in Hyde Park,” like setting it or “No Rough-ianism” in the larger contexts of the issue and the paper in which each appeared, therefore effects an exchange, reversing the meanings that such engravings seem to declare. As one of many ­references to the disorder caused by reform demonstrations, “No

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­ ough-ianism” is less reassuring than it seems to be when read alone. As R part of an issue of the ILN less obsessed with the topic than that of Punch and as one element in the layout of a single page, “The Mob” is not as unsettling as it first appears to be. Yet the relative longevity that the two papers had achieved by 1866 provided each of them with a variety of contexts that further shape the implications of these engravings. Prose, poetry, and cartoons alike formed series in Punch – “The Legend of Camelot” and “Punch’s Physiology of Courtship” were prominent in the springs of 1866 and 1867, respectively – and items of non-fiction frequently followed the serial model set by such long-running features, a point particularly evident in the case of “Punch’s Essence of Parliament,” a column published weekly during the months of the year when the legislature was in session, as was the series in the ILN called “Sketches in Parliament.” Noting the length of time it often took to produce its visual images, that paper frequently called attention to the connections between issues. As the text printed under “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane” specifies, “The outrageous scenes which took place in Hyde Park on Monday week … were related in our last publication; but the Illustrations, from sketches taken on the spot, were necessarily deferred, and appear in this Number” (August 4, 1866: 117). Punch is equally explicit on the importance of linked readings of its images and numbers. In its commentary on an 1868 print called “Pounded,” the paper assumes that its readers will remember “A Leap in the Dark,” its best-known visual response to the passage of the 1867 bill (August 3, 1867: 47; December 5, 1868: 239). Side by side with contributions to their “Reform narrative” and reform “chronicle,” the two papers offered other, unidentified series created by their treatment of a particular subject over months and sometimes years. In the case of Punch in 1866 and 1867, the most politically relevant of such topics was the character of working-class men. The Working-Man of “No Rough-ianism” is arguably the most significant graphic statement that the paper made on this subject. He is, no doubt, an example of a characteristic Victorian visual type, the so-called respectable worker easily identified by his strong but relatively unrefined features, particularly his prominent nose and his capable hands.23 Yet the extent to which Punch differentiates this artisan from more unexceptional versions of that stereotype witnesses to the lengths to which the paper went in 1866 to cast the prospect of franchise reform in the most positive of lights. P u nch and his Working - M an

As Punch’s 1865 depiction of an imaginary Royal Westminster Exhibition suggests, “No Rough-ianism” epitomizes the paper’s interest in the central issue of the reform debates of the mid 1860s: the apparently mysterious identity and uncertain civic potential of working men. In 1859 Punch

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had declared that supporters of reform were shoeblacks and slaves to an illusory working man (April 2: 134). Just a few years later, however, the newspaper was participating in what had become a widespread fascination with the ideal worker. As Keith McClelland explains, “The axial figure within the controversies of 1866–7 … was the ‘respectable working man’: could he be trusted if he were to be given the vote? How was he to be differentiated from the ‘rough’ or ‘unrespectable’?”24 Punch’s Working-Man gives physical proof of his trustworthiness. He is not only keeping the Rough outside the park but also choosing not to cross the broken palings himself. This artisan will presumably enter into the privileges of full citizenship only when invited to do so. But if the Working-Man is so ready to defend the constitution even when he stands outside its pale, why is there any need to enfranchise him? In addition to this question, Punch in 1866 explicitly posits two interrelated queries: “The Working Man! but who is he, / And differs, how, from you and me?” (April 7, 1866: 141). How is this supposititious figure related to the presumably reputable writers for and readers of the paper? To answer that question, Punch creates a series of comparative encounters – first, between such potential working-class men and a range of icons and public figures; and, second, between the reader constructed by the contents of the paper and stereotypical members of the working classes. Like all encounters, these meetings, depicted or imaginary, have the potential to issue in exchanges of values and valuations. “But who is he?” The identity and stature of the Working-Man of “No Rough-ianism” are revealed in part by the number of Ruskin’s laws of composition that apply to his form and by the engraving style that creates it. Fearless though unarmed, this artisan clutches his opponent in a contest of strength that emphasizes the contrast between them and therefore their distinctive individuality. In his appraisal of the artistry of Tenniel’s Punch designs, Ruskin points in particular to “the shadowy masses and the sweeping lines of his great compositions,”25 and that description nicely catches the basic opposition visualized in “No Rough-ianism.” Size also grants the figure of the Working-Man its principality in this print; and principality, as Ruskin defines it, teaches the political values of dominance and subordination. Moreover, the artisan’s arms and legs constitute the “leading or governing lines” of his figure – chiefly the left arm extended horizontally to collar the Rough and the right leg from which the Working-Man will push off if he needs to engage his opponent more closely. Lines that govern, again according to Ruskin, reveal future fates, and the “fateful” lines of the Working-Man’s form seem to prophesy that he will toss off and discard from the scene the shabby man who is not his equal. The artisan’s body also exhibits the kind of verticality of form that Ruskin praises with particular enthusiasm in The Elements of Drawing. Commenting on a wood engraving that reproduces less than a third of a mezzotint designed and etched by J. M. W. Turner and engraved by Charles Turner, Ruskin

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discourses on the importance of the “tall and upright” forms of the trees that dominate the detail. He asserts the superiority of artistic compositions that emphasize the power inherent in verticality: “all the great composers” – he instances Titian and “Tintoret,” as well as Turner – “have [the] same feeling about sustaining their vertical masses.” To Ruskin the Turner detail is “as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm lines.”26 Such praise applies to Tenniel’s design as well. When he joined the Punch staff late in 1850 to make up for the defection of Richard Doyle, Tenniel was instructed in his new duties by Joseph Swain. According to Rodney Engen, the collaboration of artist and engraver, overlapping that of Leech and Swain, issued in “the Tenniel-Swain style of clear, crisp outlines and sparse backgrounds”: the artist’s “short-hand drawings” in pencil were clarified by the engraver and by the men in his shop, who thereby contributed to the “clear outline style which his public came to expect from a Tenniel cartoon,”27 a style epitomized by the lines that constitute the main figure in “No Rough-ianism.” Even as Punch casts its central question in negative terms  – how is the Working-Man different “from you and me”? – the paper inevitably implies that it might also discover similarities between its readers and at least some members of the working classes. Yet the Working-Man, speaking in the accompanying text, stresses the difference not only between the Rough and himself but also between the reader and himself; and the second of those differentiations would seem to cast doubt on the possibility of any similarities or, in Ruskin’s terms, any sympathies shared by them. The Rough is distanced from the respectable artisan by his language since, as the latter points out, the “gross transgressions” of the Rough’s speech would cause his ejection from “our clubs and reading rooms”; but similar linguistic distinctions set Punch’s readers apart from the Working-Man, whose speech is rendered as less-than-standard English with its use of words like “’tain’t” and “reglar,” ironically in the phrase “reglar way of speech.” In one sense, therefore, the two comparisons taking place here – one within the image and another between its dominant figure and its audience – have predictable results. What one expects from comparative encounters is precisely what one gets – lines as clearly and firmly drawn as if they were made visible in an engraving after Tenniel. Yet there is also the potential here for an exchange: the figure of the Working-Man may become more nearly the reader’s equal because they are identified with each other in their shared superiority to the Rough. For all the differences between this figure and Punch’s middle-class readers – distinctions of dress and manner and speech that are as obvious in this cartoon as they are during daily encounters on the street – the Working-Man is literally standing for the principles of restraint and order that such readers might see themselves as valuing. Difference may yield to similarity.

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Before that outcome can be reached, Punch has to counter the ­negative stereotypes of working-class character that were prominent both in debates about franchise reform and in its own pages, as its 1865 big cut “The Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition” amply demonstrates. When Robert Lowe countered what he always derided as Gladstone’s sentimental approach to expanding the electorate, he posed a rhetorical question that became infamous among working-class reformers: “If you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimidated; or if, on the other hand, you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?” Lowe identified those who already had the vote – “the £10 shopkeepers, and lodginghouse keepers, and beerhouse keepers” – as clearly “an indifferent class of people”; and he mocked the idea that enfranchised artisans would be any better. As proof of his point, Lowe cited his own “unhappy experiences” during an 1857 election riot in Kidderminster: his skull had been fractured and one life was lost when, as the winning candidate, he was forced to run a gauntlet of enraged workers throwing stones and bricks while they yelled at the unpopular, albino MP, “Kill the bastard; kill the pink eye!”28 Lowe charged that Gladstone’s proposal to lower the qualification for the vote would put in practice “the sort of theory that ancients had about the north wind”: going lower than £10 would be like going beyond the north wind, “where the people, called the Hyperboreans, were always perfectly warm, happy, and virtuous.” In short, franchise reform would simply indulge the most fantastical forms of wish-fulfillment. Part of the visual strategy that Punch uses to counter such an argument grounds its depictions of working-class men in the actualities of events in the 1860s by identifying the Rough as a Fenian. One of the subjects prominent in the paper during that decade was the threat to public order posed by the Irish republicanism, to which “No Rough-ianism” is linked not only by its depiction of the face of its Rough but also by the disciplinary role played by the Working-Man. Significantly, the closed, reptilian eyes, the deeply shaded face, the jutting jaw, and the downturned, gaping mouth of the Rough bear little resemblance to the features of the English workers depicted in Punch during these years, but such features do recall the Fenians that it often represented.29 In 1865 and throughout the first half of 1866, the paper had offered its readers a series of visual and verbal responses to the unrest in Ireland and its increasingly ominous spread to England. The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, founded in 1858 and supported by allies in the United States, had established its local organizations or “circles” in some of the largest of England’s cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool  – and in 1866 its founder boasted of having fifteen thousand members in the British army. By February 1866, the government, fearing a rising in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day,

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had suspended habeas corpus in that country and was purging its army of Fenians with a series of courts-martial, floggings, and death sentences.30 In May came the attempted invasion of Canada by American Fenians, the failure of which did nothing to dampen fears that Britain itself would soon be the site of armed rebellion. The Fenian “outrages,” as they were called, gave Punch repeated opportunities to illustrate its belief in the savagery of the Irish. Of all the different facial types represented in its pages, the one that the Rough of “No Rough-ianism” most resembles is the stereotypical Fenian depicted in the mid 1860s, who, like the Rough, is often seen carrying a stick or brickbat. Just three weeks before “No Rough-ianism” was published, Punch rendered its judgment against Irish republicans as it dismissed the reports in New York newspapers that Horace Greeley was supporting them: “But we don’t believe in MR. GREELEY’s Fenianism. He has been too much among niggers to go so much lower” (July 14, 1866: 16). Earlier still, Punch had proclaimed its discovery of the “missing link” between the “Gorilla and the Negro” in the figure of the “Irish Yahoo” of London (October 18, 1862: 165). Such flamboyant displays of prejudice responded to the threat posed by the Irish, who made up the lower ranks of the working classes in England in the 1860s, totaling as much as 30 percent of the population in northern industrial cities.31 The arm of the Working-Man is the “governing line” needed to control the Rough’s potential for violence and, by association with the Fenians, rebellion. While the Rough of “No Rough-ianism” resembles the “Irish Yahoo,” one of the most prominent of the big cuts dealing with the Fenian threat also suggests that the Working-Man is identified with the iconic figure of Britannia. In Tenniel’s “The Fenian-Pest” (fig. 3.5; March 3, 1866: 89), the female embodiment of the British nation and its military might tramples down a document labeled “Rebellion.” Britannia is embraced by the figure of Hibernia, who restrains the arm of her more powerful sister. Yet Britannia has also evidenced such a determined resistance to a group of Fenians that they, to the right and rear of the engraving, move in retreat from her wrath. Like “No Rough-ianism,” “The Fenian-Pest” invokes the standard visual convention of the political cartoons in Punch by rendering the contrasts so typical of its designs as the opposition between a figure of authority and the object needing control or correction. In the seven months of 1866 before the publication of “No Rough-ianism,” this basic formulation – of disciplinary power opposed to actual or threatened violence – had been employed repeatedly to criticize a wayward politician or an uncooperative foreign nation. Frequently in previous years, however, the object of such control had more often been a stereotypical worker standing for all working men, who were supposedly, by definition, in need of domination and control. Yet by 1866 the Working-Man of “No ­Rough-ianism” has assumed the role of such authorities, and his features

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Fig. 3.5  “The Fenian-Pest,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (7¼˝ by 9⅝˝), Punch (March 3, 1866: 89)

align him specifically with Britannia. His face, particularly the cut of his chin and his glaring eye, his strong left arm and clenched fist all proclaim that he, like Britannia, is ready to do his duty in maintaining order. In this context, the answer to Punch’s second question is obvious. What is the Working-Man’s relation to “you” and “me”? As a stand-in for Britannia, he is “our” better.

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The image of Britannia’s immobilized arm in “The Fenian-Pest” ­identifies another source of the impressiveness of the various comparative encounters enacted in “No Rough-ianism.” Because the police and the soldiers who might have kept peace in Hyde Park on July 23 were either not equal to the challenge or, for one reason or another, not present to face it, the Working-Man fills the gap left by more traditional forms of authority. In this way Punch signals its recognition of the relative weaknesses of those conventionally expected to keep the peace. Although neither the cartoon nor its explanatory text articulates this possibility, the WorkingMan is playing the role specifically fulfilled by the Reform League during the Hyde Park riots. On the first night of the disturbances, troops had cleared the park of demonstrators or ruffians – using interchangeably in this case the Victorian terms for the participants in the disorder seems appropriate since it is difficult to know exactly who was doing what there. Yet by Wednesday, the 25th, when the Punch staff was sitting around its mahogany table and deciding on the subject of the upcoming big cut, the Reform League had taken over responsibility for maintaining order on the understanding that both the police and the army would stay out of Hyde Park. Acknowledging this agreement, the text below “The Mob” in the ILN therefore concludes its account of “cases of personal maltreatment and insult” with a simple statement of fact: “the Reform League will take care of the public peace” (August 4, 1866: 117). To most observers at the time, it was therefore perfectly clear who was in charge. This outcome was what most enraged Matthew Arnold: speaking of situations that obtained in both 1866 and 1867, he deplored the fact that “the other day in Hyde Park” the working classes “took upon themselves all the functions of government,” as he explained in one of the articles that became Culture and Anarchy. The authorities had handled these things better in April of 1848 when both Leech and Tenniel were among the many citizens deputized as constables in response to threats of Chartist violence. Although their participation in that earlier episode may now seem simply comic – Tenniel timidly hoped that he “shouldn’t have to fight anybody”32 – the example of past preparedness made present insufficiencies seem even more galling. As the events of July 25 suggest, then, for many Victorians the breaching of the pales in Hyde Park was frightening because it revealed not only the threats posed by working-class numbers but also, perhaps more disturbingly, the incompetence of the government’s attempts to deal with such numbers. In many of its comments on the riots, Punch consequently focuses not on the metropolitan police as a weak bulwark against disorder, but on the inadequacies of one man, the home secretary, Spencer Walpole. An apparently inept administrator prone to fits of depression, Walpole, thinking himself within his legal authority, had ordered the police to prohibit the gathering planned for the park on July 23, the first night of the

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Fig. 3.6  “An Allegory of Hyde Park,” wood engraving (7½˝ by 4˝), Punch (“Almanack,” 1867: [ix])

disturbances. He met on the 25th with Edmond Beales, the president of the Reform League, who demanded permission to announce plans for another demonstration in the park a week later. According to one witness, Walpole wept at this prospect: “he broke down and, burying his face in his hands, gave way for a minute or two.”33 Walpole’s tears, actual or imagined, became the symbol of the government’s inability to deal with the situation; and workers wadded up bits of bread into pellets called “Walpole’s Tears” to symbolize the weakness of the opposition to their cause. For Punch Walpole’s weeping provided the basis of repeated jokes, the first appearing on August 4 (56). As late as the publication of the Almanack for 1867, Walpole’s tears were still a feature of the paper’s commentary on reform: an incidental decoration at the top of one of its pages, “An Allegory of Hyde Park,” revisits the confrontation between the roughs and the police with a winged figure of a weeping Walpole floating above them (fig. 3.6; [ix]). In this crudely executed but effective vision of disorder, the police seem to be borne down as much by Walpole’s gigantic tears as they are by the force of the mob: the first two policemen facing the crowd are already sitting down, and the rest are fleeing in retreat as tears rain down, poised to hit the minions of the law, not those whom they should be controlling. Tellingly, crowds pour out from the gate of the park, the ­territory that they have been able to make their own. Months after Walpole had been

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replaced as home secretary, Punch mercilessly and repeatedly ridiculed the former official who continued to haunt the paper’s political imagination – so much so that at the end of 1867, it quoted at length and with approval Carlyle’s attack in Shooting Niagara on Walpole as the man who “blubbered over BEALES” (November 30, 1867: 217).34 According to James Fitzjames Stephen, in his denunciation of the vitiating effects of democracy, “strength, in all its forms, is life and manhood.”35 By that measure, Walpole was hardly the man he ought to have  been. Even  though a leader in the Daily Telegraph generously concluded that Walpole’s tears were “no impeachment of his manhood” (July 26: 4), the sustained cruelty of Punch’s attacks on the home secretary, like its demonizing of the Irish, can be explained only by the anxieties that his actions aroused. As an embodiment of the physical strength capable of supplying the determined resistance lacking in Walpole and the police, the Working-Man in the big cut of August 4 was, therefore, both a fantastic and an actual recourse, both an idealization of working-class respectability and a depiction of working-class force, of the men who, through their participation in the Reform League, restored order after a regiment of the Life Guards had done its duty late on the first night of the riots. Once again the answer to the question “The Working Man! but who is he?” involves an exchange: by using force to restrain the actions of the Rough, the Working-Man is superior not only to the seated and necessarily inactive readers holding copies of Punch but also to the government officials whose authority such readers would be expected to grant. Yet another exchange results from one of the most prominent of the ways in which Punch needled and prodded politicians to pass the reform bills of 1866 and 1867: the depiction of MPs as workers, not gentlemen. The paper’s “Reform narrative” featured a range of public personages along with its archetypal worker – politicians like Gladstone, Russell, Bright, and Lowe. Such figures, as Bagehot might have noted, provide a grand, “dignified” show of exclusivity, but Punch typically juxtaposes them with equally prominent, more physically “efficient” members of Victorian society; and in some instances the two kinds of people – relatively high and relatively low – are conflated into one figure. As Richard Altick notes in discussing its first decade, Punch practiced a form of mild caricature that transformed public figures into other human beings or even into members of a species other than their own.36 In such cases, the comparative encounter being enacted takes place within the humorous depiction of the politician, not between him and a figure standing opposite him on the page: Disraeli, say, confronts the barkeeper he himself is impersonating, and John Bright, the chimney-sweeper he has become. From 1859 through 1868, the parliamentary personalities involved in reform played a vast ­number of roles: they appeared as schoolboys, slaves, pantomime characters, jockeys, gladiators, even garrotters, dogs, and horses. Lord John Russell was repeatedly a tiny

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old woman carrying a sickly baby named “Reform.” Disraeli, a politician thought to lack the integrity associated with a single identity, played the most diverse roles: newsboy, tout, property man in a theatre, kidnapper, potboy, charwoman, egg-dancer, and, not least offensively, Fagin. When the issue at hand, however, was the need to get the job done, MPs and their leaders in Parliament appeared most consistently as the artisans, mechanics, and operatives whom reform would enfranchise. One of the most effective of such images is Tenniel’s “A Block on the Line,” published in March of 1867 as Disraeli and Derby were delaying the introduction of a franchise bill by proposing instead a series of trial resolutions. The full import of this picture does not emerge until it is analyzed both as a separate image and as part of a two-page layout that significantly reinforces its message (fig. 3.7; March 2, 1867: 86–87). In this big cut “REFORM” is a derailed train engine. Facing the railway workers but with his back to the viewer of this drawing is “Superintendent [John] Bull,” who exhorts them, “Come, look alive! I must have the rail cleared. There are no end of trains due.” The grouping of the parliamentary workers thus called to action suggests that not much is expected to happen: Bright and Russell, incongruous in size and similar in expression, face John Bull, as they argue over whose job it is to deal with the mess created by the derailed engine. Gladstone, the only silent figure in the print, leans on his pickaxe, glaring at “Ben Dizzy.” The gazes of these two parliamentary leaders do not meet. No wonder: Disraeli, overwhelmed by the weight and awkward size of the equipment, the “RESOLUTIONS,” that he is attempting to carry, bends awkwardly as he makes the unlikely claim, “Our gang’ll manage it, if you’ll lend a hand, Bill Gladstone.” The composition of this cartoon emphasizes the frustration that it portrays: uncharacteristically two groups of figures dominate the page, but no clear opposition or ordering is being created by them. According to Ruskin’s criteria, there is in “A Block on the Line” no composition, no process of making one form out of many elements. Like “Dizzy” himself, the cartoon is not up to the task it faces in arranging the forces available to it. The poem on the page opposite “A Block on the Line” stresses the seriousness of the crisis caused by this derailment as it deplores the lack of cooperation between the workers pictured in the engraving: “This is not the way to do it, / Yet ’tis work that must be done.” The final exhortation of this ditty – “Union’s strength, and strength prevails, / Hoist the Engine on the rails!” – recalls the terms that R. H. Hutton uses in his contribution to Essays on Reform (1867) when he points to the values that workers embody, specifically their understanding of the “claims of the organized whole” and their “distrust of mere scattered individual energies,” values that their betters might well adopt.37 In both print and poem, Punch is making a similar argument for reform. Through the exchange enacted between MPs and workers within the figures of “A Block on the Line,” the

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Fig. 3.7  “A Block on the Line,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (7˝ by 9½˝); “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” wood engraving after George du Maurier (7˝ by 5⅜˝), Punch (March 2, 1867: 86–87)

Punch and his Working-Man

Fig. 3.7 (cont.)

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“strength” of “Union,” the kind of collaboration that Punch derides when it results from trade-union organizing, becomes a wholly positive attribute. Tenniel’s MPs impersonate railway operatives both to identify the problem of governmental impotence and to propose its solution through an infusion of working-class discipline and physicality. Like the layout that balances “The Mob” in the ILN with the relatively pacific images below it, this big cut in Punch is counterpoised with an image that affects its message, commenting wryly, in this case, on conceptions of working-class character. Across from “A Block on the Line” is “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” an engraving after George du Maurier. The two facing pages therefore stage an artistic encounter, one that juxtaposes Tenniel with du Maurier, the designer who owed his place on the Punch staff to Leech’s death in 1864. Educated as a painter in Antwerp and Paris, du Maurier began drawing for the paper after his grander artistic ambitions were frustrated by the loss of the use of one eye. According to Ruskin’s later comments, the abilities that du Maurier developed in this second-best career allowed him to portray “telling points of character” with “a closeness of delineation the like of which has not been seen since Holbein.” Moreover, again according to Ruskin, du Maurier achieved a greater “precision of the use of his means and [more] subtle boldness” than Tenniel and Leech.38 Conventions of layout in Punch often brought the work of du Maurier and Tenniel together: by 1865 the most prominent of the artists assigned to provide socials dealing with daily life, du Maurier often designed half-page engravings that frequently appear to the left of Tenniel’s big cuts, which are typically printed unbacked on the recto of a two-page spread. Because du Maurier’s most characteristic subjects are the trials of upper-middle-class life rather than, say, the more lowly figures typical of Charles Keene’s smaller graphic jokes, there is often a strange congruity between du Maurier’s domestic scenes and Tenniel’s political cartoons: one can easily imagine the gentlemen in the former moving across the central margin of a Punch layout to take their places in the latter. Typical of du Maurier’s work, “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” like the hundreds of wood engravings that Punch devoted to the comedy of genteel Victorian manners, visualizes the kind of stark contrast that also characterizes the paper’s depictions of political subjects. Its composition pits two children against each other: Tom and Augustus meet as their parents look on, themselves elaborately dressed and symmetrically arranged among the equally ornate decorations of a drawing room. Tom, the bigger and hardier of the boys, addresses the young visitor to his home after having been “‘shut up’ by the Crichton-like accomplishments of his cousin Augustus”: “I tan’t sing, and I tan’t ’peak Frenss – but I tan punss your ’ed.” Unable to sing or to speak French, feminine talents both, Tom is quite equal to the task of beating up his sissy cousin. Augustus, hearing this threat, seems

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concerned, even though four parents look on, at least two of whom are presumably ready to protect him from his bully of a cousin. Tom, the academic inferior, is literally taller, his more evident bare arms and white apron making his body seem bigger than Augustus’s diminutive form. As Ruskin points out, analyzing a picture involves identifying which “one feature [is] more important than all the rest,”39 and Tom’s principality is evidenced by the focusing of all eyes on his childish form. Yet the meanings created by that placement depend on both the composition and the visual details of his characterization. Although Tom crosses the center of the engraving to confront Augustus, the image employs a graphic convention typical of the minor designs in Punch that portray the contretemps of middle-class domestic life. In such engravings, the horizontal arrangement, the opposition of figures facing each other from either side of the page, allows the paper to stress the importance of hierarchy, the vertical ordering of social groups. In the comparative encounters depicted in image after image in Punch, whatever its mockery of middle-class foibles and oddities (outrageous coiffures and the use of hair dye as an unintended depilatory were easy targets in the mid 1860s), the paper manifests its obsession with status. Its engravings repeatedly place opposite to each other figures who, in social or economic or legal terms, stand above or below each other: husband and wife, master and servant, mistress and maid, parent and child, policeman and criminal or, in more specialized cases, titled gentleman and Royal Academy painter, gentlemanly fare and his cabby, or sportsman and the horse that has just thrown him. Often, as the last of these examples suggests, the normal state of affairs has been upset, the hierarchy turned upside down. Frequently, however, the effect of the joke is to uphold distinctions of status: which figure is superior – or, rather, which should be – is clear, and the humor works because the inverting of more normal relations is either temporary or unlikely. If horses really did ride their masters, jokes about the difficulty of keeping them under control would not be funny. In the case of “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” the reader is encouraged to find its basic opposition amusing because it involves two miniature gentlemen so young that they are still dressed in frocks. Tom, a presumably wellbred little boy, becomes here the counterpart of all those uppity servants, demanding cabmen, rude children, domineering wives, and poorly trained horses who overturn the social order even as they witness to the pertinence of its distinctions. Yet the specific class inflections of this encounter establish its function as a commentary on the cartoon that it faces. Dropping his h’s like any little urchin from the streets, Tom is threatening to act out working-class physicality by giving his cousin a definitive demonstration of his muscular superiority. Tom’s location in his own home allows him to wear a smock strikingly like those that identify agricultural laborers in many other

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engravings in Punch and in a painting like Frith’s Derby Day. Moreover, “Physical Strength v. Intellect” – with its explicit reference in its title to the threat posed by the so-called physical-force Chartists of the 1840s and its mockery of the kinds of incapacities of the politicians pictured in “A Block on the Line” – reiterates, in juvenile domestic terms, the message conveyed by the long series of cartoons and squibs depicting Walpole’s tears. The visual analogy created by the layout of these two prints is even closer, however, than such analysis suggests. For all the differences between the designs and formats and engraving styles of “A Block on the Line” and “Physical Strength v. Intellect,” the postures of the two most important pairs of figures in them quote each other: Tom is obliquely turned toward Augustus almost exactly as Gladstone turns toward Disraeli, the shorter figure in each pair with a similarly downturned mouth. In his role as Gladstone’s counterpart, Tom, who as an adult would presumably be more able to put a train back on its tracks than the out-of-office Liberal, is the politician’s better. Tom’s principality, based as it is on “physical strength,” therefore dominates both pages, not just one. Significantly, both Tom in this social and John Bull in the big cut facing it declare their superiority to their opposites by standing to the left of them. Such an orientation is, I think, one of the most significant of the compositional conventions in Punch, and long years of visual tradition would have made clear to the readers of the paper that the figure on the left is being presented more often than not, by whatever criteria, as relatively better or higher in status than the figure on the right. When Ruskin offered his fullest commentary on Punch in his 1883 lectures at Oxford, he acutely identified the “ruling charm” of that “immortal periodical” as its “earnest comparison of things which [are] graceful and honourable, with those which [are] graceless and dishonest, in modern life.”40 Punch habitually compared “things” of greater or lesser value through their spatial orientation, as historical accuracy required Hayter to do in his portrayal of the House of Commons in 1833, with the party in power on the right hand of the speaker and therefore to the left of the viewer of the painting. Such an arrangement takes its force from the numerous biblical texts that place Christ on the right hand of God, but it is particularly relevant to the secular realm of journalistic images.41 Treating a print as if it were a paragraph of text, Punch gives priority to the figure first encountered when one moves one’s eyes across the page as if one were reading the paper’s letterpress. Why the left is favored may also be the result of the printing technology involved in wood engraving. When Tenniel and du Maurier designed a print, they drew either on paper or on the end of a block of boxwood an image that was reversed when it was printed: the figure on the left and in the right therefore began its life as the one on the right. That orientation repeatedly characterizes the comparative encounters that appeared in Punch in the months before “No Rough-ianism” was

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published: like Britannia in “The Fenian-Pest,” the superior figure is on the left when Carlyle or Russell confronts Bright; Gladstone, Disraeli; the Archbishop of Canterbury, an obstreperous archdeacon; and, not least, when Britannia faces Napoleon III. Moreover, with increasing frequency between 1859 and 1867, Punch pictured its political commentary as an encounter between a worker and a politician, and in almost every case Tenniel places the worker on the right.42 The working man is often being depicted as the passive object of the MP’s suspect actions – misrepresentation, manipulation, exhortation – actions that should put the politician, most often John Bright, on the right because he is clearly in the wrong. Yet an MP’s social superiority wins out over his chicanery to justify his place on the left. In this context, Tenniel’s “No Rough-ianism” seems both conventional and atypical. It is the latter because it envisions a worker encountering not his superior, but his inferior, the Rough. Yet the title of the verse accompanying the cartoon plays on a pun to emphasize its adherence to this major design convention. In “The Wright and the Rough,” the opposition between smooth and rough becomes a moral evaluation conveyed by the opposition between [w]right and wrong. Such unqualified approval makes the Working-Man an unusual figure in Punch, unlike the misguided men of such cartoons as “Dr. Bright and His Patient” (February 4, 1865: 47) and “Manhood Suffrage” (December 15, 1866: 243). The exceptionality of the Working-Man has another source: his association with the kind of painting with which “No Rough-ianism” is most closely allied, history painting, particularly as that genre was practiced during the mid nineteenth century in the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament. The link between graphic journalism and the art objects sponsored by the Fine Arts Commission is especially relevant to an engraving after a design by John Tenniel. His work as a book illustrator had encouraged him to develop a stunning range of styles, which were particularly evident during the 1860s in the differences between the orientalism of Lallah Rookh (1861) and the humorous caricatures of the Alice books, as well as between Punch’s Working-Man and the later Carpenter from Through the Looking-Glass (1872), whose figure is grotesquely more than one-third head. Although Tenniel may have been speaking with selfdeprecation when he later described himself as a young artist who had had “a great idea of High Art,” Charles Knight confirmed this characterization when he heralded Tenniel’s Punch cartoons as images that deal with the “leading topics of his own time in the spirit of a great historical painter.”43 Tenniel’s earlier accomplishments prophesied such a role. After a notably short stint in the Royal Academy antique school, he found more congenial training at the Clipstone Street venue of the Artists’ Society. In the 1830s he was establishing his credentials as a painter by exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. Yet Tenniel was still a relatively young and unknown artist when he submitted to the FAC competition in 1845

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his mural cartoon The Spirit of Justice. In that contest he gained one of the three £200 prizes, which allowed him to travel to Germany to learn the fresco techniques that preserved the one painting he later did in the Poets’ Gallery in the new Palace of Westminster years after the deteriorating frescos by other artists had to be covered with wallpaper. In Germany Tenniel also studied the examples of composition offered by the Nazarenes and the style of wood engraving practiced by Dürer and his followers – all of which markedly influenced Tenniel’s later work.44 Although an 1865 guidebook to the Houses of Parliament concluded that his contribution to their grandeur could hardly cause readers of Punch “to regret that Mr. Tenniel’s ‘cartoons’ of recent years have not had another destination,”45 this pun on the two meanings of the word cartoon points to a connection particularly evident in the composition of “No Rough-ianism.” In particular, the figure and stance of Tenniel’s Working-Man recall the grand gestural rhetoric of military prowess typical of a number of the designs displayed at FAC exhibitions. Among his specific visual analogues is George Frederic Watts’s Alfred Inciting the Saxons to Prevent the Landing of the Danes, which was entered into the 1847 competition for large, portable oil paintings. Alfred commands the center of a relatively crowded composition, but Punch reduced this painting to a few figures when it published a wonderful parody after a design by W. M. Thackeray (fig. 3.8; July 10, 1847: 8). Here the heroic military leader stands almost alone, the extension of his arms the most obvious feature of his posture. The left leg of both Thackeray’s and Watts’s Alfred is prominently planted, making his body a strong vertical line; his right arm and his weapon are raised across his chest, and his left arm stretches horizontally beneath it. Like the Working-Man, he is preeminently a figure ready to take action, ready to meet a foe. The movement of his cloak, which Thackeray mocks as evidence of the “wind” to which both Alfred and Watts’s treatment of him are subject,46 rises across his body to intensify the sense of the horizontal conformation of the hero’s upper limbs. If raised arms are, for obvious reasons, the mark of military valor, left arms stretched out, often in contrast to a right arm holding a weapon, are even more definitively so – at least they are according to the painters who were or who hoped to be involved in filling Westminster with their art. Late in that process, Cope’s Charles I Raising his Standard at Nottingham, 1642 was entered into competition when the Fine Arts Commission called for images of “the heroic virtues.” Finally painted in the Peers Corridor in 1861,47 Cope’s Charles extends his left arm, a gesture mirrored in the figure of the most prominent of the lords facing him, all of whom lift their arms as if in imitation of his determined action. Other similarly posed heroes seen in FAC exhibitions, such as those in Caesar’s First Invasion of Britain (1843) by Edward Armitage and in The Knight (1844) by Daniel Maclise, further identify the lineage of Tenniel’s Working-Man. Not

Fig. 3.8  W. M. Thackeray, “Professor Byles’s Opinion of the Westminster Hall Exhibition,” wood engravings after W. M. Thackeray (3½˝ by 9˝), Punch (July 17, 1847: 8)

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entered into any such competition, however, is a painting that, like “No ­Rough-ianism,” bears the impress of such august images, Ford Madox Brown’s Work. The Working-Man replicates the pose of the central navvy in that painting, which was exhibited the year before Tenniel designed his version of a working-class hero. All these Victorian visualizations of noble stature quote, however distantly, the Apollo Belvedere. This Roman copy of a Greek statue was one of the casts that students in the antique school of the Royal Academy – and therefore briefly Tenniel – were expected to sketch. To a mid-Victorian commentator like Frances Power Cobbe, not only was that statue the epitome of male beauty; it was also “Power itself, deified and made real before our eyes.”48 Thus, despite the broken fencing in the background of “No Rough-ianism” and the scattered stones in its foreground, its hero can boast a distinguished artistic genealogy, one that might have offered reassurance to readers of Punch when they opened their copies of the paper on August 4, 1866. In all the contexts that I educe here, “No Rough-ianism” pictures a comparative encounter capable of effecting politically relevant exchanges. The answers to the questions that Punch poses are not simple, but they are decisive. “The Working Man! but who is he, / And differs, how, from you and me?” He is the man whose stalwart defense of the constitution invites the readers of Punch to identify, not with the gentleman mocked by his servant or a cabman, but with an artisan who, in Bagehot’s term, is efficient: he is doing the work of governing that is not being done by the men who ought to be doing it. Most important perhaps, this worker is, again to use Bagehot’s word, dignified: related to Caesar and Alfred and Britannia, the Working-Man is venerable, his sharply delineated and bold form “brilliant to the eye.” According to the visual case that Punch makes for him, the enfranchisement of workers must be a public good. Because the Working-Man’s very differences “from you and me” render him fit to exercise the franchise, a similar argument might also be extended to include workers who resemble him – even men like the navvies of Work. No wonder that later in the century Gladstone was moved to pay his respects to Punch for “its services in the Liberal cause.”49 T he I L N and the strength of numbers

In addition to the prospect of Fenian violence so frequently recorded in the pages of Punch, the high-Victorian period, despite its subsequent reputation as a time of relative peace and stability, witnessed a number of physical threats that called for physical responses – dangers posed by trade unionists, unruly electioneering, and striking workers. At the time, however, the most significant and sustained external challenge to British security seemed to result from the ambitions of Napoleon III and the eagerness of the French military to build a technologically advanced steam-powered,

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ironclad fleet. Fears of a French invasion caused widespread alarm in 1858, as had been the case in 1848 and 1851, but this time they inspired a successful movement to reestablish a volunteer force to defend London and the southern shores of the homeland from French aggression. Attracted to this opportunity for part-time military service were a number of men now remembered for entirely other sorts of activities: most notably, for my purposes at least, artists and writers, including George Cruikshank, William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais, Matthew Arnold, Ford Madox Brown and, most surprisingly, his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti – individuals in whose biographies their participation often constitutes a merely curious episode.50 Among the volunteers were to be found other, more publicly prominent men: 48 members of Parliament in 1861, a figure that rose to 130 by 1869. But the movement was remarkable less for the noteworthy individuals whose efforts it engaged than for the numbers of otherwise unremarkable men who chose to enlist. Enrolling 100,000 men in its first year after the forming of units was authorized in May of 1859, the auxiliary army rose in strength to 160,000 men by 1861 and nearly 200,000 in 1868.51 It therefore virtually equaled in size and arguably exceeded in visibility the regular army, half of whose units were at any given time stationed overseas. The volunteer force, therefore, was characterized from the first by its combination of distinguished individuals and impressively massed numbers. Because the ILN had developed graphic conventions suited to the representation of large groups of figures, it was particularly well suited to depict this amateur army in a politically resonant fashion. In the spring of 1866, one of the most celebrated of the verbal contests in the House of Commons turned on the issue of numbers. Robert Lowe repeatedly decried proposed extensions of the franchise as the “mere worship of numbers,” the elevation of the “principle of numbers” as against “wealth and intelligence.” After Gladstone had denied that workers were massing in “some Trojan horse approaching the walls of the sacred city,” Lowe quickly adapted this classical image so that it defined the constitution as a space threatened by hordes of invaders, and he triumphed over his colleagues’s vaunted classical scholarship by pointing out what had happened when that “monstrum infelix” had breached the fortifications around Troy: “the ancient rampart falls / And swarming millions climb its crumbling walls.”52 Such a military metaphor, like Bagehot’s visualization of the “lines of our constitution” as the effects of past battles, provided the basis for an unspoken analogy between volunteering and reform, which the ILN was well placed to render in visual terms: the aggregations of men engaged in the activities of the force had their counterpart in the “swarming millions” that an extension of the franchise would add to the electorate. When the newspaper portrayed the large gatherings of ­people that volunteering typically brought out for its most popular events, troops

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often exceeding twenty thousand and spectators five times that figure, it provided perspectives on the threat posed by working-class numbers, both in the streets and at the polls. Exploring the full range of the sometimes contradictory meanings that attach to “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane” (fig. 3.1), the ILN’s most prominent image of reform agitation, involves examining first its depiction of the volunteer force. Particularly relevant are its routine activities in 1866, the portrayals of which often depend on the interplay of the compositional principles of genre painting, battle painting, and history painting. The ILN, like Punch granting to the Working-Man the role usually played by Britannia, argues for reform, not by presenting workers as virtuous or docile enough to deserve the franchise, but by depicting middle-class culture as needing the physical strength that only numbers can offer it. The ILN quickly began a visual love affair with the volunteer movement, discovering in the first year of its establishment compelling opportunities to depict its various activities, including marching drills, rifle practice, dinners, reviews, awards ceremonies, al fresco fetes, balls, and sham fights. Such events provided the paper with subjects whose “picturesque” appeal even its most lavish and sustained coverage could not seem to exhaust. By October 1860, the paper’s reporting on the volunteers had become a standard serial feature, nearly as predictable as its fashion plates or chess games. During the subsequent decade, moreover, the volunteers were treated to the ILN’s most generous forms of visual documentation: they appear in series of pictures, two engravings often filling one page or one image spreading across two full pages, in intermittently published supplementary colored prints, and in sheet music of patriotic songs. Many magazines and journals, not least among them Punch, stressed the comic aspects of volunteer activities,53 often ridiculing either the vanity or the incompetence of the recruits. The ILN, however, consistently refused to mock these amateur soldiers, instead respectfully categorizing news about the force, week after week, year after year, under the heading “Naval and Military Intelligence.” As early as 1860, the paper characterized volunteerism as a form of civic association that had become “the subject of Royal approbation, the theme of lordly compliment, and the object of national hope”; for that reason, the paper explained, “sham fights, inspections, and rifle meetings follow one another in quick and varied succession” (September 15, 1860: 257). The seriality of the coverage of the movement in the ILN allowed its readers to compare accounts of the current and previous Easter reviews or of the meetings at Wimbledon of the National Rifle Association, an organization founded in 1859 to promote volunteerism. Along with, often side by side with, its “chronicle of the Reform Bill,” then, issues of the ILN told an ongoing story about men joining together to defend the nation. How and when the paper depicted the volunteers who peopled its issues says a great deal about the political implications of their activities.

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The sites and activities that the paper chose to depict – troops drilling in Westminster Hall, as if the heroic images of earlier FAC exhibitions had come to life; files of marching men presided over by the enormous statue of the Duke of Wellington or being welcomed into the confines of the queen’s property of Hyde Park  – all such carefully documented events witnessed to the official sanction enjoyed by the force. Yet the timing of the most extensive coverage in the ILN suggests an even more revealing correlation between the force and parliamentary politics. The paper’s enthusiasm for the volunteer movement, like Hayter’s chances of selling The House of Commons, 1833, waxed and waned in relation to the fortunes of reform. The greatest number of images depicting the volunteers was published when its activities were still novel, with over twenty appearing in the second halves of both 1860 and 1861. During the next several years, however, when reform was put aside in deference to Palmerston’s lack of interest in the cause, the ILN published significantly fewer images of the force. From the second half of 1862, pictures of volunteer activities in every subsequent six-month period fell into the single digits. It remained so until the second half of 1866 and throughout 1867; in those months, when the question of franchise reform dominated political debates, the number of images devoted to the volunteers more than doubled – as if the ILN were responding indirectly to one topical issue by also enlarging the space given over to the other. Planned originally to give middle-class men opportunities for military leadership that were denied them until the elitist practices of the regular army were reformed in 1871, the force initially adopted organizational forms and statements of purpose that reflected their values: independence and individuality, as well as respectability. The first circulars issued by the War Office in May 1859 assumed that units would be autonomous, local groups unsupported by government funding. Members of such units, often called “clubs” rather than “corps,” were distinguished from those of the other traditional auxiliary forces, the militia and the yeomanry, by the freedoms that they enjoyed: volunteers were, by definition, not constrained by law to serve or to find others to serve in their places unless the country was actually under attack. The autonomy granted to individual volunteers explains some of the difficulties encountered in maintaining anything like military discipline: talking and smoking on parade were common. Enrolling in even the rank and file of the volunteers was considered respectable because the majority of the companies established early in the movement were local rifle corps; and the rifle, idealized as the reincarnation of the heroic longbow because it requires of its handler intelligence and finesse, was thought to be superior to the musket, a weapon supposedly more suited to the unskilled masses. Thus, the elaborate frame around the 1861 print in the ILN depicting the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield (fig. 1.2) is decorated with images of two sharpshooters of the Victoria Rifles, the

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oldest and arguably the most elite of the volunteer corps, and the figures of these two individuals dominate the smaller and more numerous and unarmed workers below them. A government circular dated 1860 repeatedly instructed the commanders of volunteer infantry units to “exercise” the “individual intelligence” of their men, rather than their capacities for cooperation, which an activity like drilling would encourage.54 In its earliest depictions of the force, the ILN stressed this conception of a single volunteer joining with others in a small, club-like group of men, in part because the paper paid so much attention to the matter of their self-designed uniforms. Engravings of the dress of different corps necessarily offer full-length portraits of individual soldiers. On January 7, 1860, the first image of the volunteers published by the paper takes this form: across two facing pages are spread two rows of men, but they either appear singly or they join one or two other men to show off their various “Rifle Corps Uniforms,” and the self-consciously portrait-like qualities of this engraving are emphasized by the frame of wood vines that surrounds it (8–9). The ILN’s second visualization of the force, another display of genteel military garb in the issue for January 21, 1860 (69), features two representatives of the rifle corps. Their slender figures, along with their sharp noses, coordinate with the shape of clothes so tightly fitted that their belts, like corsets, pinch in their unnaturally slim waists. These gentlemen pose as if they were standing on the grounds of their estates, ready less for waging battle than for being immortalized in an eighteenth-century family portrait or conversation piece. By depicting members of the rifle corps in this fashion, the ILN was invoking an iconography of individuality that characterizes paintings of the force into the mid 1860s. Volunteers, despite their absence from most historical accounts of the high-Victorian period, appeared with some regularity on Victorian canvases, most notably but also most marginally in Frith’s The Railway Station and Brown’s Work, in the former as two men boarding a train apparently bound for the seaside location of a review and in the latter as two tiny, gray-clad figures taking their ease in the deep background of the scene. Representations of volunteers exhibited at the Royal Academy, which also typically portray one or two officers, were particularly popular in the early years of the force: of the nine paintings of volunteers on view there between 1860 and 1867, as many as five portraits appeared in 1860–61 alone. Images of larger groups also emphasize the individuality of the men who compose them. Like the ILN’s portrayal of fifteen named figures of the Queen’s Westminster Rifle Volunteers (March 22, 1862: 290), Henry Tamworth Wells’s Volunteers at Firing Point (1866) includes a number of easily recognized leaders of the movement, among whom is its prominent patron Lord Elcho, one of the leaders of the MPs who defeated franchise reform in 1866 by gathering with other Liberals in what was called the cave of Adullum.55

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Throughout the 1860s Punch also focused on individual volunteers, picturing the activities of the force, more often than not, as encounters between two or three figures in accordance with its conventions for representing national movements and national institutions. In the first big cut that the paper devoted to the movement after its authorization in May 1859, a volunteer is being sweetly lectured by a lady who promises to award him with a lock of hair if he does his duty well (May 28: 216). The comic plights characteristic of the volunteers made them subjects particularly congenial to artists designing the socials printed in Punch. In its most famous visual depiction of the force, an amateur soldier appears with the two young boys who mock him with the cry “Who Shot the Dog?” (April 28, 1860: 176), a reference to a rifleman who had actually fired on a dog during a rifle practice in Wandsworth Park. (In similar accidents involving artists, poor Cruikshank had to come up with £48 to indemnify a man whose horse had been shot by his recruits; and Ford Madox Brown, who often turned to rifle practice after a day’s effort on Work, injured his own dog in his first attempt to hit the target set up in his backyard.)56 Some RA paintings of the movement follow Punch’s comic model.57 Arthur Boyd Houghton’s Volunteers (1861) offers an informal view of four off-duty soldiers as they divert and are diverted by the ladies whom they have encountered on a sidewalk outside a park. These volunteers stand together, a little girl looking out from between the legs of one of them, other children mocking their fancy uniforms. Despite such widely adopted representational practices, which privileged the single volunteer and a few of his close comrades, the ideal of the force as a loosely coordinated association of distinct individuals gave way almost immediately to a quite different reality. As an organization aspiring to embody military forms and values, it faced obvious structural imperatives: to be a viable defense against the French, it would have to bring together large numbers of men. Only by enrolling workers could that goal be achieved. Consequently, mill owners soon enlisted their factory operatives; landlords, their tenants and laborers. By March of 1860, small, independent rifle “clubs” had been organized into companies, battalions, and regiments. Drill practice became the central activity of the force, with noncoms from the regular army employed to put recruits through their paces. As the size and complexity of the movement grew, so too did government support and control. During an earlier instance of amateur soldiering in 1839, workers who armed themselves were subject to transportation, but Enfield rifles were issued to all volunteers by January 1860. As the result of the findings of a royal commission in 1862, an act of Parliament provided financial support for uniforms and a yearly capitation of £1 for each member of a corps who drilled regularly enough to be considered “­efficient.” This act, according to the historian Hugh Cunningham, makes clear that Parliament had determined that “the Volunteers had become and should

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remain largely working-class” because it ensured that enlisting would not cost more than such men could afford. By 1862 members of the working classes had come to constitute the majority of those enrolled in volunteer corps.58 According to accounts by prominent contemporaries like Matthew Arnold and Samuel Smiles, as well as later historical assessments, participation in the volunteer movement required workers to conform to middle-class conceptions of orderliness, self-sacrifice, and self-discipline.59 Yet the visual politics of the ILN suggest that that argument is less valid than its reverse. More than most of the phenomena that the newspaper treated regularly in the 1860s  – royal marriages, epic building projects, foreign wars, international exhibitions, and Royal Academy art – representations of the volunteer movement redistribute the characteristics usually attributed to members of different classes, yielding exchanges that raise the relatively low and lower the relatively high. Such images blur categories and upset conventional expectations, the most prominent of which involves the distinction between members of the middle classes as self-disciplined individuals, each one a unit significant in his or her unique singularity, and workers as unruly numbers, daunting when en masse, insignificant one by one. On many occasions, the very inability of a viewer of a depiction of the volunteers in the ILN to determine by the usual signs – dress, physiognomy, manner – the status of the men being represented turned such images into visual analogues of a generously inclusive measure of franchise reform. If those already eligible to vote would have to cede the exclusivity of individual identity that they had enjoyed when they became in 1867 part of the “swarms” of men created by an extension of the franchise, the volunteer movement had effected, at least in the pages of the ILN, a similar exchange some five years before that event. Joining the force was, in the words of a trade publication for printers, a way of coming “within the social pale.”60 Even more remarkably, it opened the gates to the political pale. Because the volunteers had been by 1866 and 1867 so firmly identified as members of a largely working-class institution, arguments about franchise reform could be read not only in the lines of the wood engravings through which the ILN represented their activities but also in its various uses of the word line. In 1857 the Duke of Cambridge, the commander in chief of the army, had opposed the formation of units of amateur soldiers because they would be composed of “an armed and a very dangerous rabble.”61 Because the word line also refers to a row of soldiers, especially foot soldiers, and, by extension, to a defensive or offensive position created by them, it occurs frequently in the ILN’s sometimes mindnumbingly detailed descriptions of the volunteers’ military maneuvers. The “Line work” of wood engraving, as Ruskin defines it, would seem to be a medium eminently capable of depicting such numbers in the least

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anarchic of fashions. As is demonstrated by both Hayter’s 1833 depiction of Parliament and the actual seating in the House of Commons, one of the most orderly of ways in which to arrange numbers of people or things is to put them next to each other in rows. During peacetime in the nineteenth century, soldiers exhibited their competence primarily through the display of their drill formations, so the word line becomes particularly significant whenever a writer for the ILN wants to praise the efforts of a working-class corps because “their step was as regular and their front as accurate as if it had been ruled by a line” (June 30, 1860: 628). The phrase “ruled by a line” describes the effect of other, more conventional representations of working-class men, which for years had trained the readers of this newspaper to see them as if they had been “ruled” by the lines that they were required to form. Linear arrays of figures carried with them associations with such men as the Manchester cotton operatives as they awaited relief or those standing in rows by the machinery on which they worked. Yet if working-class men were not to be viewed as massed numbers rendered orderly by their abjection or their manual tasks, a series of exchanges would have to transform the relation to their superiors that was visualized in such conformations. Marchi ng i n Hyd e P a rk The coverage in the ILN of the first Hyde Park review prophesies such politically meaningful changes when it charts the transition from individuals to numbers that the volunteer force would soon undergo. Held on June 23, 1860, the event inaugurated the practice of gathering in the park that lasted into the 1880s,62 and it threw the ILN into a frenzy of patriotic pride. There was no hyperbole sufficient to express the significance of “the massing of 18,000 armed men,” but the paper tried: “The day was the grandest in the modern history of England.” (One wonders what had happened to Waterloo.) The review was “a magnificent spectacle” (June 30: 622, 618), the kind of “theatrical show” that, in Bagehot’s terms, “rules the multitude.”63 This “perfectly national” demonstration was, according to the ILN, “the fête-day of constitutional freedom” because it proved that fewer than “twelve short months have sufficed to convert a hundred thousand busy citizens into effective soldiers” (628). The review commanded five images in the issues for June 30 and July 7, as well as the colored engraving whose publication was announced on the earlier of those two dates. The two most elaborate of these images make visible the tension between individuals and numbers. A two-page print of members of the rifle corps as they await the arrival of Queen Victoria provides a close-up in the foreground of individual men at ease, much like those in Houghton’s Volunteers, with one horseman to the side and in front of them. As if to suggest that each soldier enjoys as much singularity as the

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Fig. 3.9  “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park,” wood engraving after J. Palmer (14½˝ by 9⅞˝), ILN (July 7, 1860: 21)

viewer, one volunteer looks directly out from the page to anyone holding a copy of the paper. The spectators in the foreground of the engraving, a woman and two children and one man, are almost as prominent as the individual volunteers (June 30: 624–25). Yet a very different kind of composition characterizes “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park” (fig. 3.9; July 7: 21), a full-page engraving after J. Palmer, presumably John Palmer, a painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy and specialized in theatrical and industrial subjects.64 By prominently featuring arrays of hundreds and thousands of figures as its most eye-catching element, the paper offers its final pictorial word on this particular event. Capturing a view of the volunteers in their “marching past,” the moment when their formations cross before a reviewing stand, Palmer’s design emphasizes Ruskin’s “leading or governing lines”: the longest uninterrupted line depicts the front of the grandstand holding the spectators, but its relative lightness contrasts to the dark and more prominent forms of the volunteers, who constitute row after row of figures. Any worry about the unpleasing effects of uniformity that so exercised the reviewers of Hayter’s The House of Commons in 1843 – “even” and “long

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lines,” according to The Times, cannot be “picturesque”65 – does not seem to have occurred to the artist or the engravers of this design. The men in the ILN image also conform to Ruskin’s definition of the law of continuity by which “orderly succession” reveals the submission of the elements in a composition to the “law that rules them,” in this case the military discipline that has turned individual men into coordinated units. The print attempts to combine into one image as many human figures as possible: marchers, horsemen, military band, Victoria and Albert in one of a number of carriages, reviewing officers of the regular army, and crowds of spectators so numerous that they fade into the distance, the horizontal strokes that sketchily indicate their presence becoming indistinguishable from those composing the trees above them. In an instance of contrast as the compositional feature that, according to Ruskin, reveals character, the regularity displayed by these amateur soldiers is emphasized by the relative disorder of the spectators, who, along with the casual groups of the horsemen and the bands of the professional military of the Household Brigade, do not conform to the uniform linearity of the men whose movements they are watching. Rather, the spectators here resemble the groups depicted in G. H. Thomas’s 1862 view of Rotten Row, while the men they watch appear as if they have been “ruled” by a “governing line.” The interplay of numbers and individuals also characterizes the obsessively detailed verbal description of the 1860 review, which was published on June 30. Numerals dominate the text, not only in reporting “the exact number of volunteers under arms in Hyde Park on Saturday” (18,450 in all), but in designating the companies and battalions present. As one typical, though brief, excerpt records: The first two battalions were constituted of the 1st and 2nd battalions of the City of London Volunteers, each 600 strong, under Major Close and Captain and Alderman Rose. To these were added the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th, the 26th, 39th, and 40th Middlesex, and the 2nd City of London forming a 3rd battalion, under Major Ralph Grey, M.P., and a 4th battalion, under Lieutenant-Colonel Walker, formed by the 2nd and 3rd Tower Hamlets, the 33rd Middlesex, and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 7th Essex. (628)

Such an account tends to reduce all the men in these units to sheer numbers. There is no way of distinguishing in this list, for instance, the 3rd City of London Rifle Volunteer Corps, a working-class brigade, from other units in the “1st and 2nd battalions of the City of London Volunteers.” The writer, however, does not want to ignore completely the individuality of at least some of these volunteers: the named officers – Close, Rose, Grey, and Walker  – therefore stand out from the rank and file. Similarly, the 38th Middlesex is noteworthy because in it, “‘the Artists’ [corps] Captain Millais marched by the side of Full Private Holman Hunt.” Even more prominently, however, the text continues to insist on the leveling effect of military discipline by declaring that all these brigades and battalions

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are “as competent as any line regiment.” The writer’s frequent recourse to descriptions of the volunteers in terms of the colors of their uniforms – “a red mass,” “a grey tint,” “a dark mass” (628) – also suggests the extent to which volunteers have become aggregated numbers  – “not a force of irregular riflemen, but an army of 120,000 men, … large masses of troops act[ing] together” as if they were “the great bulk of the soldiers of the line” (618). Casting the effect of that transformation from disorder to order in explicitly visual terms, as the distinction between, say, masses of gray and masses of light blue, the writer foregrounds the collectivity that these men have become. The ILN’s account of the 1860 Hyde Park review therefore involves an exchange: middle-class and upper-middle-class men are brought down to the level of their working-class counterparts. In Palmer’s depiction of that event, the distinctive caps of the London Scottish corps mark its members on the right, but no such identifications are possible for other volunteers, whose figures become smaller and smaller as the ranks extend farther and farther into the distance. The text regaling its readers with the details of a review may make explicit the class distinctions so dear to the Victorian middle-class culture, especially in the case of workers: “the 3rd City” is specified, for instance, as the “(Working Men’s)” (June 4, 1864: 550). Yet poetically expressive images of the massed numbers of volunteers typically do not allow for such niceties. Volunteer drills and reviews made barristers and civil servants part of units also comprising artisans and cotton operatives, rendering all of them significant primarily in terms of the contribution that they made to the size of a particular unit when, as the second War Office circular put it, they took their “place in line.” As workingclass men came to constitute a majority of the members of the various companies and battalions, not all the professional men who had enrolled as privates could become officers. One Punch engraving illustrated this point in June 1862 when it depicted a “Private and Landlord” threatening to raise the rent of his “Sergeant and Tenant” for “com[ing] down upon [him] so sharp at drill” (June 7, 1862: 223). A landlord might well be taken aback by the diminishment of his customary status when his place in a corps turns him into a more or less cowed subordinate of his own tenant. Although being a member of the rank and file in the volunteers was in no way comparable to serving as a common soldier in the regular army, it was closer to that role than some of its more genteel enlistees might have originally expected. The leveling effect of participation in the volunteers, translated into the political terms of parliamentary reform, might therefore argue for an extension of the franchise. Trollope in his Autobiography envisions social mobility in precisely these terms: the man who is willing to aid “the many to ascend the ladder a little” does so “though he knows, as they come up towards him, he must go down to meet them.”66 The simultaneous

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movements up and down effected by the largely working-class ­composition of the volunteer force might similarly bring “down” those higher up on the ladder, who would then see those below “com[ing] up towards” them. A greater equality in the lines of the amateur military might presage more equality at the polls. Such an outcome, however, was not recognized by commentators at the time. The volunteer force of the Napoleonic era had sometimes aligned itself with the republican ideals of similar amateurs in France and the United States,67 but in the 1860s those on either side of the reform question saw the two movements as simply incompatible. Some Victorian observers denounced volunteering as “a Tory dodge,” a way of diverting attention from the need for political action. Reformers often advised workers to agree to carry rifles only if and when they were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections, and Lord Elcho was “mobbed” in Hyde Park in June of 1866 because he opposed enfranchising men who were already enrolled to defend the nation.68 Tennyson’s famous contribution to the movement, the poem published anonymously in The Times just days before the War Office authorized the revival of the volunteer force, directly instructs its readers to: Let your reforms for a moment go! Look to your butts, and take good aims! Better a rotten borough or so Than a rotten fleet and a city in flames! Storm, storm, Riflemen form! Ready, be ready against the storm! Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!69

The poet laureate’s message to his countrymen is emphatic, if bathetically so: they should pay more attention to their “butts,” embankments built for rifle practice, than to a “rotten borough”; they should choose rifle drills over reform demonstrations. Such contemporary perspectives, however, ignore the congruities that identify the franchise with volunteering. Both depended on one’s economic qualifications: as was the case with the pre- and post-1867 rating requirements that determined whether one could vote, the cost of subscribing to a unit, as well as paying for a uniform and equipment, excluded those who fell below a certain level of income. The volunteers, in the words of a twentieth-century historian of the movement, showed “a preference for maintaining exclusiveness by the barrier of expense,” instituting subscription fees for enrollment and systems of small fines as a form of discipline.70 Thus, when the ILN praises the 1860 Hyde Park review, it does so because the eighteen thousand participants in it are “mustering of their own free will, and at their own cost” (June 30, 1860: 622). Yet the franchise and volunteerism shared an even more salient characteristic: in both these forms of civic participation, being able to meet a specific economic requirement gave one the opportunity to vote – in the case of the franchise

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that mattered most to reformers, for members of Parliament; in the case of the volunteers, for one’s officers. The War Office tried to discourage the election of officers in volunteer units, that kind of “participatory democracy” being too much a violation of military hierarchies for the authorities to countenance; but the practice flourished throughout the movement’s first years, and it was only gradually abandoned in the 1870s. Following the model of “subscriber democracy” that had characterized the volunteers during the Napoleonic era, their Victorian counterparts prided themselves on having opportunities to elect not only officers but also those members, both officers and privates, who served on the committees charged with overlooking the activities and finances of individual corps. The movement was, according to The Times, a “vindication” of the time-honored British principle of “self-government.”71 As more and more workers came to constitute wholly or primarily working-class companies, they too began to enjoy electoral rights and even the chance to be voted in as candidates for commissions as officers. Although twentieth-century histories of the volunteer movement do not record instances of such opportunities, contemporary sources do. Accounts of the companies associated with the Working Men’s College reveal that manual laborers voted on occasion for those of their fellows who would become, typically, ensigns, then lieutenants and captains. One of them, John Roebuck, a woolturner and former Chartist, served as captain of the college’s second company. In 1869 that captaincy was filled by George Tansley, a student teacher at the college and, since the age of eleven, “a ball or rout furnisher by trade.” In Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial (1864), which offers a rare extended fictional account of the volunteer movement, the narrator laments, with characteristic genteel condescension, that its activities inconvenience members of the gentry: “the tradesmen forgot their customers in the excitement of electing officers.”72 Tradesmen – tailors and other artisans and small shopkeepers – might or might not be eligible to vote for MPs; but, according to Yonge, they did enjoy a comparable right as amateur soldiers. Membership in the volunteers was, therefore, very much a form of enfranchisement: if one could come within the economic pale of a company, one could participate in its governance by voting for its leaders. Other specifically political lessons are conveyed by images of the volunteer movement in the ILN whenever it depicts one of the force’s most popular activities, sham fights. A feature of reviews at such places beyond London as Brighton, Dover, and Kent, these counterfeit skirmishes divided volunteers into offensive and defensive units engaged in mock battles that were routinely witnessed by tens of thousands of spectators. A typical two-page engraving titled “The Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton: The Defending Force Retreating across the Valley of Bevendean” (fig. 3.10; April 14, 1866: 356–57) portrays an 1866 “mimic

Fig. 3.10  “The Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton: The Defending Force Retreating across the Valley of Bevendean,” wood engraving (20½˝ by 14½˝), ILN (April 14, 1866: 356–57)

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contest” the moment before the retreating defensive forces regroup on a height so that they can defeat the attacking units (367). There are so many volunteers being depicted here that it is difficult in some passages of this engraving to tell the men from the features of the landscape, particularly its foliage, as is the case with the figures depicted in the first Hyde Park review of 1860. Yet this picture, like the figure of Punch’s Working-Man, puts to good use a number of Ruskin’s laws of composition. Its marching men both near and distant form an “orderly succession … of objects more or less similar,”73 the definition of consistency in The Elements of Drawing that the writer for the ILN unwittingly echoes in calling their formations a display of “magnificent order” (April 7, 1866: 342). The diagonal lines constituted by rows of volunteers repeat each other, those in the foreground with the shafts of their rifles outlined against the cannon smoke and those in the background forming parallelograms so far in the distance that each man is indicated by a single, minuscule line. Roads cut across the center of the print, their lines emphasized by the formations of the soldiers that both repeat their directions and intersect them. Clouds of smoke, issuing from weapons being fired, similarly link the rise of land near the viewer to the far horizon and the sky. Most important here is Ruskin’s law of consistency: however “broken” or “various” the parts of an image displaying this virtue, a “consistent assemblage in its divisions” will be created by the “aggregate force of colour or line.” The gently curved mass of marching men in the foreground of this print exhibits an “aggregate force” that is balanced against and reiterated by the hills across from them. Tellingly, when Ruskin explains this law in The Elements of Drawing, he uses the metaphor of an “army” that “can only act effectually by having … formed and regular masses.”74 Such compositional features define not only the form of this engraving but also its subject: the frame of one oversized ILN print contains within its landscape format thousands of men whose patriotism and battle-ready capabilities make them worthy to be included in it. Portrayals of mimic conflicts like this one draw, not surprisingly, on the conventions of battle painting. Before the nineteenth century, images in oil depicting scenes of warfare on land, associated as they were in British art with the conventions of topographical documentation and genre painting, had been largely consigned to the lower reaches of the aesthetic hierarchy that defined history painting as supreme. Moreover, Louis Philippe’s state patronage at Versailles of images that looked chest-thumpingly bellicose to British eyes could hardly have increased their popularity.75 As Thackeray notes in criticizing a depiction of Waterloo, “I like to see the British Lion mild and good-humoured,” a sentiment that he reinforces visually by depicting that icon as a sweet tabby cat (fig. 3.8). Yet, like fresco painting, representations of battles were accorded respect by the competitions held for the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster,

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although scenes of contemporary conflict were not permitted until large oil paintings were called for in 1847. The image from that competition that most closely resembles the picture of the 1866 Easter sham fight in the ILN is Thomas Sidney Cooper’s massive eight-by-ten-foot canvas, The Defeat of Kellerman’s Cuirassiers and Carabineers. Sir William Allan’s The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815,76 which appeared at the RA in 1843, however, is even more relevant. Both paintings chronicle epic battles of the Napoleonic wars by setting military formations amid scenes of carnage in dramatic panoramas that portray enormous battle fields beneath an expanse of sky. Both aspire to the high seriousness of history painting and a fidelity to facts, yet Allan’s Waterloo is exemplary because, as the ILN had noted when the work was first exhibited, its creator achieves a “grandeur of style” by depicting “a great conflict in its entireness” (June 17, 1843: 416). These qualities also characterize the paper’s portrayal of the lesser, staged military engagement of 1866. In each image lines of soldiers spread out in the middle distance, although observers in the ILN’s engraved contest take the place of the rows of cannon and the casualties extending across the foreground of Allan’s canvas. The difference between live and dead bodies underscores one feature of mock battles: whereas the victims of Napoleonic slaughter litter Allan’s scene, perhaps hindering the movement of men and materiel across them, that role is played by the spectators of the 1866 contest. Such viewers – in the words of the ILN, often “multitude[s] of all ranks and classes” (June 4, 1864: 550) – were a feature of sham fights almost as significant as the volunteers themselves. As one historian concludes, “Volunteering may be considered the spectator sport of mid-Victorian Britain.”77 Sometimes these observers interrupted and actually put in danger the maneuvers of the amateur troops. At other times an unruly audience was merely humorous: one of the ILN’s visual responses to the Brighton sham fight, a relatively rare comic image subtitled “Starting a Hare,” depicts a hillside full of spectators running pell-mell after a rabbit that they have spotted (April 14, 1866: 352). Yet the larger picture of the maneuvers in the valley of Bevendean testifies to the difficulty of controlling the viewers gathered there. The principal lines that constitute this image – troops in square and linear formations, roads, and the ridges of hills  – clearly differentiate the part-time soldiers from the full-time civilians watching them and from the reader, who shares a line of vision similar to but elevated above that of the crowd. Particularly evident in the part of the valley on the right are groups of spectators scattered across the field in a way that threatens to disrupt the movements of the troops, an outcome that two mounted soldiers are trying to prevent by chasing small groups of civilians from the field. The various kinds of lines creating this part of the image emphasize the contrast between regularity and randomness: the spectators stand in a white space, an area of what

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Ruskin calls “incised light,” into which project straight lines made by a tint tool, while their bodies are formed by tiny, intersecting curves. Such confrontations between orderly soldiers and disorderly spectators reflect the role that the volunteers played as keepers of the public peace, a function that they began to fulfill almost as soon as the first corps were formed. Because every British subject was required by law to put down instances of civil unrest – that fact explains in part why Punch’s WorkingMan is collaring the Rough in “No Rough-ianism” – the volunteers could easily be called to such duty, though their specific peacetime functions were not officially clarified until late 1867. Volunteer units were mustered to control an impressive range of unruly people: from mutinous regulars, Irish Roman Catholics, and Garibaldians to, oddly enough, the parties involved in an unusually fractious divorce. Most threatening were Fenian activities, and entire battalions of volunteers were sworn in as special constables to suppress them in places like Middlesex and Manchester.78 The crowds at Bevendean that have to be driven away from the mock battle that they have come to see are identified in visual terms with such riotous mobs rather than with the disciplined members of the force. In the exchange depicted in this engraving, members of the “dangerous rabble” feared by the Duke of Cambridge turn out to be civilians enjoying a day of sightseeing. The distinction between spectators and volunteers has its artistic counterpart in the encounter between battle painting and genre painting that takes place in “The Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton.” As in the engraving of the first Hyde Park review, vignettes of casually grouped spectators engaged in the mundane activities more typical of street life than of warfare stand out against the rows of the largely working-class troops behind them. Like the audience portrayed in Haydon’s painting of a Punch-and-Judy show, the spectators in this print encompass a variety of human characters: two small boys on the run, a fruit seller plying his trade, a woman holding a parasol, and a mounted lady and gentleman entertaining each other. All these people ignore the sights in the valley below them. Similarly, a couple in the left foreground and several men near the far right of the image, who are all trying to move away from the advance of the troops, have turned their backs on the volunteers. The running boy whose lightly colored clothes outline his body against those of the marching soldiers becomes a kind of pivot between the left and right sides of the composition, and his anomalous placement in front of the troops further contrasts his movement to the main action going on next to him. What is he doing there? Admiring the soldiers by imitating them or mocking them? The identification of the spectators at this sham fight with figures characteristic of the kind of genre painting practiced by Frith in a work like The Railway Station raises the status of the volunteers: the latter, depicted as if they populated a battle painting,

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Fig. 3.11  “Members of the South Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps at Work by Torchlight in the Gardens of Burlington House, Piccadilly, Clearing the Ground for a Drill-Shed,” wood engraving (14˝ by 9½˝), ILN (January 18, 1862: 77)

are being associated with world-historical combat; the former, with tame images of everyday experience like buying newspapers or preparing one’s pet for a journey by rail. From such a perspective it would be possible to argue that all the men enrolled in volunteer units, not just some of them, deserve to participate in the choice of their legislative representatives precisely because their activities are pictured according to the conventions of a more elevated form of art than that appropriate to their onlookers. In one of the most remarkable of the engravings in which the ILN represented the force, “Members of the South Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps at Work by Torchlight in the Gardens of Burlington House, Piccadilly, Clearing the Ground for a Drill-Shed” (fig. 3.11; January 18, 1862: 77), a similar, but farther-reaching exchange is envisioned when gentlemen are turned into laborers even lower on the social scale than the railway workers of “A Block on the Line.” In this ILN print the most genteel of the volunteers become “Amateur Navvies.” Their “fatigue party” is composed of between sixty and a hundred men from “the Hon. Artillery Company, the Civil Service, the Westminster.” The various London corps were among the most socially differentiated units in the country, some

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of them maintaining their exclusivity long after workers had become the majority of the members in other units; and the South Middlesex and the Westminster were among the most elite. One contingent of the latter had been “raised in Belgravia,” by Earl Grosvenor, the son of the Marquess of Westminster, as the ILN was shortly to explain (March 22, 1862: 291), and it was also the “royal” unit to which Matthew Arnold belonged. These men, the text notes, were often joined by the “noble Colonel” of the South Middlesex, Lord Ranelagh (January 18, 1862: 78). Ranelagh, an outspoken advocate for the independence from the regular army of the volunteers, took pride in the fact that those enlisted in his corps were, as he said, “men of position and education,” whom it would be more appropriate to guide by the rules typical of a “club” than to command by the regulations typical of a “regiment.”79 Strikingly like the figures laboring in the earlier Enfield “Foundry,” these men can be seen working – and working hard, at that. The ILN pictures such elite figures laboring “from four to ten o’clock with pick, spade, and barrow, in true navvy style,” undertaking, in other words, the tasks typical of the men who excavated canals and railway lines. They do such arduous work at a politically resonant site: like Hyde Park and Westminster Hall, Burlington House was a government building, having been purchased by the state six years before, though it was another four years away from becoming the home of the Royal Academy. The paper lauds the nightly efforts of these “Amateur Navvies” with the kind of hyperbole typical of its treatment of the volunteer movement: “To judge from the work done, the problem of fortifying London in case of invasion is at last solved. Our volunteer corps would, judging by this instance, turn out any number of most efficient navvies at a moment’s notice to construct earthworks in the vicinity of the metropolis” (January 18, 1862: 78). “Men of position and education” here do exactly the kind of physical labor pictured in Brown’s Work, but this image is more consistently serious because it includes no beer or attendant children or dogs. The print emphasizes the number of figures involved by portraying them variously in lights and shadows and by massing them together so that the repeated forms of their tools express what Ruskin calls their “aggregate force,” an effect particularly evident in the row of men whose raised pickaxes constitute a rough diagonal across the image. With such workers committed to the defense of the city, Londoners need not fear a French invasion. The exchanges being enacted in this 1862 engraving are multiple and extensive. Gentlemen are being transformed into workers, but that process also alters the status of working-class men. The savagery of navvies was legendary in the mid-Victorian period. Often living in gangs outside town, they had an apparently well-justified reputation for drunken and uncivilized behavior. As late as the 1870s, when George Eliot, often the champion of the idealized artisan, wants the readers of Daniel Deronda to

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imagine an act of unmotivated and murderous violence, she conjures up the image of a navvy waking from sleep and pointlessly heaving “a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping companion.”80 Remarkably, however, in their amateur form and in the refined setting behind a West End mansion, navvies have become genteel, respectable, and wholly patriotic. The “Bravo!” with which the ILN later hailed Brown’s inclusion of navigators in Work is doubly, triply appropriate here (March 18, 1865: 266). Yet a more startling exchange takes place in this picture: the manual labor being done in the gardens of Burlington House links these amateur soldiers to members of the regular army, the rank and file who normally constituted fatigue parties forced, often as punishment, to work “with pick, spade, and barrow in true navvy style.” Soldiers of the line were usually recruited in the Victorian period from among the otherwise unemployable members of the working classes. The Duke of Wellington had famously called the rank and file at Waterloo “the scum of the earth,” and their Victorian successors stood in no higher repute. Drunken and dissolute and frequently Irish, such men were part of a generally despised institution, suspect because it constituted a standing army and inconsequential because, before the building of Napoleon III’s fleet, England, as an island stronghold, was thought to be adequately defended by its Royal Navy. Despite the military victories that occasionally won for soldiers national attention and respect, they were so looked down upon that they were often excluded from such public places as omnibuses and theatres. Badly paid, ill-fed, ill-housed often in remote barracks, soldiers, like prostitutes, were considered a disgrace to their working-class families. In Barrington (1863), a novel by Charles Lever, the ne’er-do-well Tom Dill enlists, causing “misery” to his virtuous sister because he thereby evidences his “love of low company.” As late as 1876, one self-respecting worker wished his son would die rather than become a common soldier. Because they were deemed brutal themselves, soldiers were subject to harsh military discipline. Flogging remained the principal form of punishment – in 1867 a private died after receiving fifty lashes – and until 1871 the branding of miscreants was still practiced, “BC” for “bad character” and “D” for “deserter.”81 Yet the characteristics of such men, principally their physical prowess, are attributes of the gentlemen gathered at night to clear the ground for the storage of their equipment. If men of Arnold’s status and above could be at once common soldiers and rough navvies, perhaps men in both groups deserve something better than contempt. Contemporary accounts of the volunteers confirm the implications of the exchange that the ILN pictures in this engraving. Sir Garnet Wolseley, an observer who had been critical of the volunteer force, thought that it had by 1878 reduced “the stigma” associated with the soldier of the line: because so many of its men have “all [been] taught to look up to the Regular Soldier as their model of excellence … the Volunteer movement

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has popularised the Army, and the soldier is now looked upon as one from whom much is to be learnt, as a model to be copied, rather than as the pariah to be despised, which he was before our citizen army sprang into existence.”82 The same point is made in more personal and touching terms by J. C. Furnivall in his memoir of the Working Men’s College. Furnivall, a Cambridge MA and a notably irascible philologist (thus his eccentric orthography), had been a teacher at the school since its inception, and he recounts how he and his students formed a volunteer company: The starting of the Rifle Corps was a great event in our social life. When I told my grammar class what we meant to do, and askt its members to join our Corps, a quiet member at the back – whom I had then only just seen – said, “I shall be glad to give you any help I can, Mr. Furnivall,” I answered, “Thanks, Read, but do you know anything about soldiering?” “Rather,” he said; “I was wounded outside the Redan, and was serjeant-major of the – – – foot when I was invalided.” So we all clusterd round Read after class, and made him the hero of the College. We always cut and buttered his bread at tea and paid for it, and would, any of us, have blackt his boots with pleasure.

Read, at the time a telegraph clerk at Buckingham Palace, had served, as another student later explained, in the “hard-fighting 33rd Regiment of Infantry, the ‘Duke of Wellington’s Own’”; and he later became a lieutenant in one of the college’s companies.83 Although Furnivall maintains clear distinctions in his account  – he is “Mr.,” his student simply “Read” – it nevertheless depicts the exchange of roles effected by Read’s potential value to his volunteer corps: he will be a leader, and his fellow amateur soldiers, the gentleman Furnivall among them, will become waiters and shoeblacks who serve him “with pleasure.” In similar terms Punch had mocked the supporters of reform in 1859 for blacking the shoes of an imaginary working man, but Furnivall’s tone here is wholly respectful. “No Rough-ianism” asks its readers to answer the questions “The Working Man! but who is he, / And differs, how, from you and me?” The ILN in its picture of “Amateur Navvies” agrees that “he” or “they,” as that newspaper would put the query, are better than “you” or “we.” Men on the f e nce On one occasion when the ILN expatiated on the efficiency that volunteer troops had quickly attained, it prophesied yet another distinction between amateur soldiers and reformers. Although volunteers have undoubtedly taken “silken banners and silver bugles” from their “estimable ladies” and enjoyed banquets and balls, they have done “yeomen’s service” by “emulat[ing] the steadiness and accuracy of regular soldiers … With the exception of a few casualties and contretemps inseparable from an organisation so extended, they have not fired off their ramrods, they have not got into Hyde Park without being able to get out again” (October 27,

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1860: 383–84). Almost six years later, in July 1866, the men who, along with some boys and youths, crossed the railings around Hyde Park had not been, according to some accounts, “able to get out again.” From one perspective, the ILN’s visualizations of the largely working-class volunteer movement, as of the relative docility of factory operatives producing rifles, would have made images of workers in the park seem less frightening than they otherwise might have been: after all, workers had already been armed in the defense of their country, and many of them had actually been allowed to keep in their homes their government-issued Enfield rifles. Such trustworthy, patriotic, and self-sacrificing behavior, as Gladstone had pointed out in 1864, evidenced workers’ moral eligibility for the vote. Such explanations, however, tell less than half the story. The images of volunteers in the ILN cast its “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Parklane” in a different light. As the placement of that print in the context of the August 4 issue of the ILN also suggests, the comparative encounters enacted in what the text calls this “outrageous scene” convey attitudes that are not nearly as enraging as they might appear. The threat depicted in this engraving is manifest. The “view … from the inside of the Park,” a view made possible by the location of “our artist,” allows the reader to see the “actual” assault against what the paper defines earlier as “the Queen’s gardens” (August 4, 1866: 117; July 28, 1866: 82). Like Bright’s conception of the “pale of the constitution” as a “kind of garrison … surrounded by 5,000,000 persons, who required to be admitted within its bounds,” this image depicts a space most noticeably characterized by the frailty of its defense against intruders. Eleven policemen, with their backs to the reader, face sixteen men trying to dislodge a row of palings from their stone foundation; two other men are already crossing a disabled section of fence; and one depicted in silhouette exults on his having presumably just passed over the low wall below the broken rails. Between the mob on the edge of the park and the buildings opposite it, the street is filled with demonstrators who so completely outnumber the police that retreat on the part of the latter would seem to be the only option. In an eyewitness account of the “indescribable confusion and tumult” that night at Hyde Park Corner, Henry Broadhurst uses a metaphor similar to the image of swamping so prominent in reform debates when he compares the “huge, swaying, shouting mob” to bodies of water: the constables “tumbling up from the main gates … might as well have charged the Falls of Niagara [or] the Atlantic.”84 Rather than depicting waves, however, the composition of this engraving emphasizes the lines that constitute it: the cross bar of the still-standing fence, its palings, and the vertical linearity of the buildings opposite the park emphasize how far the fencing has already been bent into it, soon to join the railings on the ground. All these elements would seem to suggest that what is giving way in Hyde Park is another version of the various lines – of the machines at

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the Enfield Factory or the wooden fencing in a charitable establishment of Manchester – that subject workers to one form of discipline or another. Yet the artistic traditions on which the ILN draws in depicting this scene both underline and undermine the sense of threat that it conveys. As a composition, “The Mob,” like the depiction of the 1866 sham fight outside Brighton, combines conventions of genre painting and history painting. The arrangement of men in the image isolates single figures or small groups of people as discrete vignettes  – principally the dark man on the left, the two men to his left, the eleven police in the right foreground, the sixteen men above them, and between the two groups on the low wall, a youth looking into the park – and the visual practices of the ILN encourage its readers to look closely at each of these groupings in this engraved version of a genre painting. Yet the blackened figure at the left recalls the elevated personages of history painting, thereby contributing to the sense of danger that he conveys. This man seems to be at least a foot taller than the men along the still-standing fence, a difference not to be dismissed as a function of perspective since both he and they are similarly placed at relatively the same distance from the reader. Quoting in an obvious fashion the iconography of revolution in France, he stands on the broken palings, raising his right arm – not the left arm of Punch’s Working-Man and other heroic figures, but the one that Liberty raises in Delacroix’s The 28th of July: Liberty Leading the People (1831), a painting that had been put on permanent public display in 1861. Instead of the tricolor that Liberty holds, the figure in the ILN image waves his cap, possibly made, like hers, of a revolutionary red cloth.85 In this single figure, the paper successfully evokes the aura of history painting in its classical sense: his dark form takes part in a conflict set in the present, but his pose replicates that of an abstraction worthy of portrayal in the most timehonored of manners. “The Mob” also offers a form of visual reportage that brings an event of contemporary history literally closer to the viewer than is characteristic of the paper’s more typical practices. In the 1860s the ILN, in accordance with its usual interest in recording peaceful gatherings of large numbers of people, had published print after print that could have provided a model for “The Mob,” among them ice-skating on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, a celebratory bonfire, Derby Day, and any number of royal processions including that of Princess Alexandra to Hyde Park. In such images of lawabiding activities, people fill the entire middle distance of an engraving in sometimes barely controlled disorder. Yet “The Mob,” as an insider’s view of a current event, places such crowds beyond the park’s palings, while it locates the arguably most threatening figures  – the row of men throwing their weight against the yielding palings – between those crowds and the foreground of the image. Unlike either the frontal designs of many of the entries into the FAC competitions in the 1840s or the composition

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of the ILN’s 1843 image of the exhibition at Westminster Hall, which sets  back from the picture plane the elegant figures that it depicts, the placement in the middle distance of the main group of men in “The Mob” resembles that in Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo or, more grandly, in John Singleton Copley’s Death of Major Pierson (1783). Numbers of men, but not the great masses of people that the ILN usually includes in its images of civic celebration, fill the frame of “The Mob,” but they do so in the moderate and therefore potentially reassuring formats of not only genre painting but also history painting. Other visual features of this print point to other exchanges taking place in it. Because the demonstrators are standing in a neat row against the fence, its railings, as they are being dismantled, array the men in line as they threaten to break through a line. In this sense, they exhibit the Ruskinian quality of continuity, a willing submission to authority. Repetition also characterizes the formal qualities of the figures in “The Mob”: like the MPs depicted by Hayter in The House of Commons, 1833, their forms vary and repeat each other to display the unity that results from symmetry and the sympathy expressed by equal and balanced forms. These men also seem to be behaving like those who, in Broadhurst’s account, marched to the park by joining in an “orderly progress of a disciplined army rather than a hastily arranged procession of civilians.”86 Standing in a row as if they were amateur soldiers in training or men employed in a factory, “as if … ruled by a line,” the men in “The Mob” look like the volunteers who regularly practiced their marching formations in Hyde Park. Years of viewing in the pages of the ILN sham fights like the one staged at Brighton a few months earlier might have suggested that what is taking place in the park is yet another planned conflict, another “mimic contest” on British soil during which two equally patriotic groups of men oppose each other only to prove their commitment to the nation’s security. The men on the fence might be part of a formation called out to keep the peace rather than disturb it. In that sense they resemble Punch’s Working-Man, the graphic epitome of the law-abiding artisans and mechanics whose numbers were crucial to the success of the volunteer force. Moreover, uncertainties about the identity of the men on the fence make plausible the possibility that they are participating in a sham fight. With their broad and bearded faces, they seem to be Englishmen. Their jackets and cravats resemble those of Punch’s Working-Man, while their top hats, alternating with soft-crowned bowlers, testify to their relatively comfortable economic status. None has the reptilian features or the disreputably torn dress of either the Fenian or the Rough. In view of the ILN’s extensive coverage of the Fenian threat, with eight engravings appearing in the first half of 1866 alone, the vision of the men on the edge of the park as presumably not Irish is telling, but even more so is the

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difficulty of determining just who these men are. The rocks on the ground would presumably define them as “rabble” and “roughs,” a particularly nasty instance of whose rioting at Victorian elections had broken out in Nottingham the year before. Yet no one in this picture is depicted as actually throwing such missiles. The two men apparently taking malicious glee in climbing over the stones that once held the park’s palings have physiognomies identifying them with the lower-middle-class types that one would find on the border of a Frith painting or in illustrations of novels by Dickens or George Meredith.87 Although the text below the image of “The Mob” is careful to describe the rioters as “hundreds of rough fellows,” there is nothing in the visual depiction of them to suggest that they are not among the workers on whose strength and numbers the Reform League would soon depend to keep the peace in Hyde Park. According to one MP who was speaking during a debate on the day after the commencement of the Hyde Park riots, the artisans in his constituency felt “entitled” to use a park frequently devoted to volunteer reviews; and during the same debate, Mill claimed that a reform demonstration in a space that “belong[s] to the public” could not cause “a thousandth part of the interruption” occasioned by “an ordinary review or meeting of the Volunteers in the Park.”88 One such event had taken place there exactly one month before the riots. On the occasion of the review held on June 23, the metropolitan corps – some fifteen thousand strong – had mustered within the confines of Hyde Park. They included such units as the 38th Middlesex (the “Artists”) and the 19th Middlesex, which was composed of men from the Working Men’s College. The review took place on the day that the ILN announced, “The Reform Bill has broken down” (June 23, 1866: 602). In its visualization of this gathering, “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last” (fig. 3.12; June 30, 1866: 644), the paper offered one image in what had become by that year a series of scores of such pictures. Once again amateur soldiers occupy civilian territory: ranks of men in geometrical arrays contrast with the curved and more randomly placed forms of mounted officers, guards with their backs to the viewer, and ladies clustered together to watch the maneuvers. The arrangement of the volunteers once again exhibits the Ruskinian principle of consistency, the powerful massing of a similar visual feature like “colour or line.” At the head of the volunteers is a row of seven soldiers, all of them stepping with their right legs in the direction of the reader, toward whom the three in the center seem to be looking, thus literally bringing them closer than usual to the person holding a copy of the ILN. Tellingly, these first men may be either amateur navvies or less elite members of a working-class corps. Whatever their specific class status, their pickaxes specify that they are fulfilling the role of manual laborers. Here within sight of the Prince of Wales and under the auspices of Wellington’s statue (who is, with a bit of no doubt unintentional humor, pointing in the wrong direction), these

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Fig. 3.12  “The Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last,” wood engraving (13⅜˝ by 9½˝), ILN (June 30, 1866: 644)

seven men are not only welcome to parade in Hyde Park; they are also given pride of place in the depiction of the event that brings them there. The message communicated by the peaceful activities undertaken by their massed numbers might apply a month later to the men on the fence in “The Mob.” Like the contrast that differentiates the character of Punch’s WorkingMan from that of the Rough, the contrast between the men on the fence and the police in the park is central to the composition of “The Mob,” but its meaning is more ambiguous. The figures of authority here are certainly not themselves genteel or even comfortably middle class, although the reader’s line of sight is similar to theirs. Police in the 1860s worked seven days a week for wages comparable to those of agricultural laborers. Ineligible to vote in parliamentary elections until 1887,89 policemen had more in common with the men on the fence than with those whose lives and property they protected. Yet as the paid representatives of their betters, the police in the park are behaving like the randomly placed and disorderly groups of spectators in the volunteer reviews and sham fights pictured in the ILN. The perspective of this engraving most closely identifies its viewers with the policeman standing in the center of the picture, his back in line with

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and facing in the same direction as theirs; and the ­masculine bulk of the policemen’s bodies, again like that of Punch’s Working-Man, would seem to offer a comforting vision of physical strength to any readers doubting the ability of authority to restore order. Yet one detail makes it difficult to draw such a conclusion: low, calf-level fencing appears directly in front of the policemen who are running, their bodies bent forward, to meet the rioters. The purpose of this item of garden decor is hard to decipher. As a stumbling block between the police and those threatening to enter the park, however, it raises questions about what the defenders are trying to accomplish. In addition, the sections of the dismantled larger fence seem to be holding the police back, unable to engage with the demonstrators because the palings are posed as weapons against them – as is, even more dangerously, the section about to fall in their direction. In support of such a reading, the ILN text notes that the worst injuries caused by the riots occurred when people fell “prostrate on the iron rails, which lay upon the ground” (August 4, 1866: 117). The real sources of strength in this image, then, the weapons that could defeat an enemy, are those in the hands of the workers, not the batons that the police are depicted as carrying, only one poised to strike, others lowered or partially hidden from view. That the demonstrators stand literally above the policemen who are trying to defend the park makes even more telling their bid for dominance in this scene. Advancing like the volunteers in the valley of Bevendean during the sham fight of the 1866 Easter review, the men in the park turn both the police and the readers of the ILN into members of their more or less disorderly audience. In a very different fashion the paper would later portray nine policemen, all arrayed neatly in a row as they fire their rifles at the men staging a Fenian “insurrection” near Dublin; their opponents, Irish revolutionaries, are small, indistinct figures hemmed in between two walls, not breaking through them (March 16, 1867: 264). The discrepancies between the account offered by the text accompanying “The Mob” and some of the implications of the image itself further emphasize the power being granted to the men on the fence: if the railings around the park are nine feet high, as the writer in the ILN notes, then men who are taller than those railings must be giants. The power of the act of violence being represented is equally exaggerated: the fallen palings on the left are longer than the ones still standing, a depiction that has, to say the least, the odd effect of seeming to move the fallen railings out into the street beyond it. The dark figure on the left therefore stands on fencing whose supporting wall has been pushed out at a right angle so that the dimensions of the park have been increased by the violence that has allowed him to enter it. “The Mob” thus becomes an image of a pale extended to include rather than to exclude. The extent of the order portrayed in the ILN’s “The Mob” emerges clearly when it is compared to an engraving of the same scene published

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Fig. 3.13  “The Great Reform Demonstration: Forcing an Entrance into the Park near the Marble Arch,” wood engraving (9½˝ by 9½˝), Illustrated Times (July 28, 1866: 49)

in the Illustrated Times. Fewer in pages and less expensive than the ILN, the Illustrated Times featured the same mix of news, art, and fashion as the former, and its artists and engravers somehow managed to scoop the ILN by publishing a week earlier than its competitor their view of the clash between demonstrators and police at the railings in Park Lane. “The Great Reform Demonstration: Forcing an Entrance into the Park near the Marble Arch” graced the title page of the issue for July 28 (fig. 3.13; 49). This square image includes many more details than are ­visible in the ILN’s version of the scene – pyramids of people rising against the front of the houses in the

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background, flags, banners reading “HYDE PARK DEMONSTRATION” with “REFORM” in large letters, a cart without its horse, and many, many more demonstrators than “our artist” of the ILN depicts. In the representation of none of these details does linearity reign. Moreover, the way in which “The Great Reform Demonstration” is engraved underscores the disorder that it depicts: the objects in it, particularly the houses in the background, are created by lines that are more slapdash and sketchy than those in the ILN print, which indicate shading on the surfaces of the buildings through more or less closely spaced indentations created by a tint tool. Yet the reader of the Illustrated Times is asked to view a scene of violence in which the police, not disciplined reformers, have the upper hand. One worker on the right falls below the truncheon of an officer, while in three different locations in the middle and foreground of “The Great Reform Demonstration” two of his brethren beat a demonstrator, his body falling toward or already having fallen on the ground. In this visual account of the riots, the men pushing in the railing around the park number only seven. Because they are placed in the background, they do not command the same amount of attention as the sixteen comparable figures in the ILN’s version. In “The Great Reform Demonstration” the group of three figures located behind the top-hatted man jumping over the low fence to the left is particularly significant: the demonstrator appears between two policemen, one of whom holds up his baton as if to strike the head of the man whom he is trying to subdue, whose eyes and mouth have been transformed by terror into three black circles. Despite awarding the victory in this conflict to its numerous police, the Illustrated Times represents a highly chaotic scene in which no one is behaving in an orderly way, while the artist and engravers of “The Mob” turn the undoubtedly disturbing events of July 23 into a representation striking for the organization being displayed by the demonstrators. Finally, however, the most important figure in the ILN’s “The Mob” may be the boy, awed and hesitant, who is peering into the park from behind the legs of the first of the men working to dislodge its palings (fig. 3.14). Like a Dickensian child such as Oliver Twist or Florence Dombey wandering lost in the great city, he appears startled by the forces that move around him. Applying Ruskin’s law of principality to the composition of “The Mob” makes it tempting to identify this boy as its principal component since, as Ruskin explains, “in the grandest compositions … very commonly the figure which is really chief does not catch the eye at first, but is gradually felt to be more and more conspicuous as we gaze.” Principality, moreover, is a function of the viewer’s judgment, and it emerges only after ongoing and repeated examinations reveal the meanings of a picture’s composition. Describing a painting by Titian, Ruskin analyzes the process by which a conviction of the primacy of a specific feature develops: “little by little we are led away from [the figures

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Fig. 3.14  “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” wood engraving, ILN (August 4, 1866: 117), detail

at the center of the composition] to a gleam of pearly light in the lower ­corner, and find that, from the head which it shines upon, we can turn our eyes no more.”90 The light that illuminates the youth in “The Mob” as he looks into the park makes a similar interpretive appeal. His relation to the viewer of this newspaper image also establishes his principality: their specific physical orientations paradoxically make them, at the same time, each other’s double and opposite. The youth looks into the park; the

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reader looks out. In doing so, they exchange roles: the boy becomes the lower-class mirror reflecting the reader’s dismay; and the reader, figured as standing inside the park with the police, becomes a helpless onlooker. Yet these witnesses see the same scene, one in which conventional expectations no longer obtain. What is inside the park would seem to belong outside it; what is outside the park would seem to be virtually already within it. Both the reader and the boy behold a pale of the constitution that has already given way, but it has done so not in response to violent disorder, but in response to a physicality marshaled to a high degree of order. That the men on the fence, men intent on their work, will enter the park and win the right to vote is a fait accompli. Reassuring as their discipline may be, it also emphasizes their spectators’ passivity. The reader, like the youth, can do nothing but watch. In concluding my reading of “The Mob” by construing a youthful figure of uncertainty and alarm as the viewer’s surrogate, I am again stressing the extent to which the strength displayed by the men on the fence can be read as an ideal, a formerly negative stereotype that is now seen as an attribute to be admired and even imitated. Commentaries from the 1860s support such an interpretation. Military metaphors, made ubiquitous by the volunteer movement, are particularly well suited to identify the political value of those defined by the strength of their numbers. Thus, Hutton championed reform by pointing out that workers exhibit a “wonderful esprit de corps, [a] solidarité” that “transferred to the larger sphere of politics … will open a new era of political organization.” When Gladstone objected to Lowe’s characterization of the disfranchised as enemies being conveyed in a Trojan horse, the contention that ensued over the propriety of his allusion obscured from view his own characterization of the workers he wished to see enfranchised. They were, he said, “persons” who “ought … to be welcomed as you would welcome recruits to your army”; or, as he put it in a later speech, they were, not “the numbers of an invading army,” but rather “our fellow-subjects, our fellow-Christians, our own flesh and blood.”91 Enfranchisement would therefore simply ratify what the volunteer movement had already accomplished by welcoming “our own flesh and blood” into the ranks of those who were, not “invading” the nation, but defending it. In its first leader on the Hyde Park riots, the ILN distinguished between volunteers and reformers, a differentiation that, in effect, reiterated the similar goals of the two movements by pointing out that the former had achieved what the latter wanted to accomplish: “The very volunteers, whose parade in the park occasions so much ill-feeling on the part of the [Reform] League, would have been a hundred times more worthy to be heard in behalf of the nation, for they are the élite of every county, and might have been received as an improvised Parliament” (July 28, 1866: 82). Since the writer for the ILN is ready to label the volunteers who

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had recently held a review in Hyde Park “an improvised Parliament,” he ­indirectly affirms the legitimacy of what the paper called one week later the reformers’ “desire to be admitted into the pale of the franchise” (August 4, 1866: 106). Yet Gladstone’s reference to potential working-class voters as “recruits” is even more telling. Armies take on recruits only when they are needed. According to Bright back in 1848, admitting those outside the garrison walls that enclose current voters would “tend considerably to strengthen and support [the] constitution.” The lines formed by the volunteers as they drilled and marched made much the same point. Although Ruskin extols the beauty of curves, he recognizes that straight lines may be “indispensable to [the] use or stability” of an object.92 The nation in 1866 was such an object. Like Punch’s depiction of an artisan’s nobility in “No Rough-ianism,” but less obviously or directly, the ILN’s many visions of the volunteer force create a context in which “The Mob” argues for reform on the basis of working-class strength even as it responds to the events that most frighteningly demonstrated its potentially destructive effects. In that sense the ILN in 1866 was displaying political tendencies that were more liberal than those imaged forth in Punch, whose Working-Man, after all, stands outside Hyde Park and beyond the constitution defined by its palings. A similar but more pronounced exchange of political sympathies also characterizes the subjects of the following chapter, the prints with which the two papers depicted the passing of the reform bill of 1867. In response to the new parliamentary realities of that year, Punch, only tepidly supporting reform, altered the ways in which it had previously pictured the subject. The ILN stayed the course as if it had not noticed that “swamping” the constitution with great numbers of workers had become a possibility. The final interpretive encounter that I stage between these two newspapers therefore effects another exchange, one that ultimately reveals the extent to which the political stance of each paper was dependent upon its visual conventions.

Chapte r 4

Within the pale

Although the formation of a Conservative government in mid 1866 ultimately changed the nature of the electoral reform being discussed in Parliament, it more immediately encouraged demonstrators to stage street spectacles supporting such a measure. Some nine months later it was no longer a matter of extending the suffrage to include the elite of working-class men, the so-called labor aristocracy. Disraeli’s desire to get the job done  – an attitude that Punch wryly visualizes in “A Block on the Line” – and the complicated party maneuvers of both Conservatives and Liberals added a greater number of workers to borough registers than had been proposed by the Liberal government – in the event approximately 400,000 or 500,000 more men, only about half of whom were artisans. Yet, in the summer of 1866, Bright expressed in terms of a visual “aspect” his fear that his fellow legislators would not feel compelled to extend the franchise: “It is only numbers, and the aspect of force that will influence them.”1 Reformers of all varieties agreed with Bright’s assessment, and they forged new coalitions to put on one enormous rally after another. In accordance with traditions of the mass platform remembered by the former Chartists among the members of the Reform League,2 the demonstrators adorned their ranks with ribbons, banners, and flags, thus putting into practice Bagehot’s theories about the political uses of visibility. Punch and the Illustrated London News represented the “monster meetings” that followed the events in Hyde Park in July 1866 by employing their different brands of visual reporting in ways that clarify their attitudes toward reform, with the status of the various artists assigned to depict these gatherings revealing the importance or lack thereof that its fate was granted in their pages. Portraying such demonstrations, particularly those that took place on December 3, 1866, and May 6, 1867, again involved seeing men either as numbers or as individuals and creating lines either of inclusion or of exclusion. But these enormous public meetings also gave the two papers opportunities to picture reform as an outcome that had already taken place – either, according to their political sympathies, to the benefit or to the disadvantage of the nation. After the fact, Trollope, taking on a new role as political historian rather than that of the political prognosticator of Phineas Finn, registered the 184

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importance of such gatherings, even as he exhibited a typically ­genteel ­condescension toward them. In Ralph the Heir (1870–71), he created a drunken and politically besotted worker who revels in the destruction that has taken place in Hyde Park: “Hyde Park! … That’s the ticket; – and down with them golden railings. We’ll let ’em see!” To Trollope’s narrator, it is folly to expect “rebellion” from men who, despite their wild talk the night before, show up on time for work the next morning. Marx had seen a different prospect in those “golden railings.” Still depending on the English proletariat to start the revolution, he had imagined that a “really bloody encounter” in the park between workers and “the ruling powers” might easily have resulted from the disturbances there.3 Hindsight, however, allows Trollope’s worker to prophesy the future more accurately: demonstrators’ desires to “let ’em see” predominated over more rebellious impulses in the months that followed the collapse of the fences around Hyde Park. The visual endings to the “Reform narrative” in Punch and the “chronicle of the Reform Bill” in the ILN reveal the changes that took place between their political leanings, while an analytical encounter between the first two reform acts of the nineteenth century suggests that a comparison of their effects as agents of democracy yield a similar exchange. Street and pa rk Circumstances surrounding the demonstration planned for December 1866 were felt at the time to be particularly alarming. Under the auspices of the London Working Men’s Association, it was to include a procession through the streets of London culminating in a mass meeting. This event was the first and most prominent of the collaborations between the Reform League, now declaring its support for manhood suffrage, and the trade unions that had recently become willing to agitate for explicitly political goals. Peaceable open-air gatherings had taken place in 1866 before the Hyde Park riots  – tens of thousands had met at the end of June in Trafalgar Square and again at the beginning of July on Clerkenwell Green4 – but memories of that violence determined attitudes toward renewed gatherings. Sir Richard Mayne, the chief commissioner of police who was himself struck by a rock during the first night of the Hyde Park riots, acted out a more defiant form of the incapacities indicated by Walpole’s tears when he simply refused to be responsible for keeping the peace. One of the leaders of the Reform League declared that they had no choice but “to organise themselves on physical force lines and establish a Reform constabulary.”5 Like volunteers sworn in as special constables to defend against the threat of further Fenian outrages or Punch’s WorkingMan imagined to be guarding the boundaries around Hyde Park on July 23, 1866, “peace protectors” from the London branches of the league were enrolled to do Mayne’s job.

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Fears about what might happen were fueled by the unrest in London caused by a continuing economic crisis and a deadly outbreak of cholera. Not surprisingly, Lord Ellenborough, a Tory who had voted against an extension of the franchise back in 1832, was convinced that this meeting of workers would reenact the events of 1848 in Paris, and he begged Lord Derby to call out the troops: the “3rd of December … means the Revolution and nothing less,” he told the prime minister; it would certainly end in “the sacking of London.” Similarly, Bright told a correspondent that, although the procession planned for December 3 could be effective only if it demonstrated “great force,” he feared the consequences of continuing government inaction. “It would be easy,” he noted, “to induce many scores of thousands of men to provide themselves with arms  – to form something like a great national volunteer force, which, without breaking the law, would place the peace of the country on a soil hot with volcanic fire.”6 In this odd formulation, Bright, who routinely discouraged working-class participation in the volunteer force, imagines the possibility of what in that movement had already become a fact – tens of thousands of armed men acting within the law – but he equates reformers and volunteers so that he can create an image of uncontrollable violence. When the ILN reported in its issue for December 8, 1866, on the event whose prospect occasioned such disturbing visions on the part of both Tory and radical, the paper treated it as the most conventional of subjects and in the most matter-of-fact tones. Invoking the language and covering the topics typical of accounts of volunteer reviews  – summaries of the weather, descriptions of the crowds of spectators, detailed lists of participants  – the newspaper noted first the significance of the location of the meeting, referring to reformers and volunteers in the same sentence as Bright had done but to entirely different effect. Lord Ranelagh had offered the demonstrators the use of “the rifle-grounds of the 2nd or South Middlesex Volunteers, at the back of Beaufort House, Old Brompton”; he was, significantly, the “noble Colonel” who had often worked with the elite “Amateur Navvies” back in 1862. The letterpress of the issue for December 8 is filled with details in its presentation of the event, listing forty-seven different kinds of trade unions represented in the march, from “tallowchandlers, hatters, coopers” to those in “the silk trades of Spitalfields and Bethnal-green.” Led by a “mounted division” of the Farriers’ Society – the military term here is significant  – between twenty and thirty thousand men marched along Pall Mall, Piccadilly, Knightsbridge, Brompton, and Fulham roads to Beaufort House. They were preceded by fourteen carriages carrying committee members, accompanied by brass bands, and outfitted with flags and banners – a popular version, if there ever was one, of the kind of elite spectacle to which Bagehot attributed the power to govern. Once on the rifle grounds of Beaufort House after a review-like procession that took one hour and twenty-two minutes to cross each point

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that it passed, the reformers did what was typical of their demonstrations: in protest against their exclusion from the franchise, they constituted themselves as an elective body, moving resolutions and voting on them (December 8, 1866: 558–59). One of these motions, again quite characteristically, protested against Lowe’s denunciation of workers as venal, corrupt, and drunken – a portrayal that the marchers’ obvious good conduct on this occasion visibly belied. Reform demonstrators in the 1860s made maintaining the order of their march a primary goal; and like members of volunteer corps, they often employed retired army drill sergeants to keep them in line.7 On this occasion, the marchers, whose numbers, no doubt, included men enrolled as amateur soldiers, seemed to have learned their lessons well. Most remarkable about the ILN’s verbal coverage of this particular demonstration, then, is that it is so totally unremarkable. In addition, the writers of the reports on the events of December 3 are careful to suppress information that readers might find troubling. Although the newspaper, according to a standard practice that it sometimes openly acknowledged, took much of its material directly from The Times, what it does not include is often more revealing than what it does. In its commentary on the banners displayed by the various unions, the ILN explains that “comparatively few” mottoes were “political in character,” and even they were “very goodhumoured.” When describing potentially disturbing political symbols, the writer of this account strives to downplay them: “The nearest approach to Republicanism was made by the branches of the Reform League, who brought up the rear … The Leaguers had refurbished the banners of the Chartist movement, and they only displayed a green flag and a cap of liberty” (December 8, 1866: 558). The Times is much more expansive on this subject, pointing out the presence and meaning of the tricolors, red flags, and multiple caps of liberty that its reporter identified: “The Reform League may be innocent of levelling designs, but if its object were to proclaim such tendencies openly, it could hardly have chosen more significant emblems.”8 At Peterloo, the legendarily bloody reform demonstration of 1819 in Manchester, the yeomanry had singled out for attack those wearing caps of liberty. In this instance, according to the practices of the ILN, the less said about such signs of revolution, the better. More revealing of the ILN’s positive attitude toward the December monster meeting is its major visual account, an engraving titled “The Great Reform Demonstration on Monday Last: The Procession in Piccadilly Passing the Green Park.” As is the case with “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” the significance of an individual print emerges only when it is seen in the context of its layout, in this case as one of two full-page images facing each other. Opposite the representation of the London march is “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton: The Procession Escorting Her Majesty up Snow-Hill” (fig. 4.1; December 8,

Fig. 4.1  “The Great Reform Demonstration on Monday Last: The Procession in Piccadilly Passing the Green Park”; “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton: The Procession Escorting Her Majesty up Snow-Hill,” wood engravings (two pages, 14˝ by 9½˝ each) after C.R., ILN (December 8, 1866: 560–61)

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1866: 560–61). Instead of being printed so that the reader turns the page once to see the ­engravings above and below each other, as is more often the case in the ILN, the titles of both these images run down along the central margin that joins the two pages. The fact that these prints, both signed by “C. R.,”9 are the work of the same artist or possibly artist/engraver makes particularly resonant the visual statement that they constitute when read together. Both images organize spectators along lines that are prominently featured in the verbal accounts of the parades. Wooden palings hold back the crowds in the street of Wolverhampton, while “thousands of spectators,” displaying a self-discipline that the writer finds particularly praiseworthy, are arranged along the “line of streets” by the pales of Green Park (558). Surprisingly, the need for crowd control is more evident in Wolverhampton than it is in London: the writer explains that local volunteers, whose bands played the national anthem, aided the police and constabulary “in keeping the line of route” as Victoria progressed through the town (562). The queen’s visit to Wolverhampton moved Punch to something like its old radical ways: a town notorious since the 1830s for violent election riots, Wolverhampton was still, according to the comic newspaper, an “unhallowed place,” populated by “pale toil-stunted children,” “brutal” men, and “bold” women (December 8, 1866: 238). By contrast, the ILN recognizes nothing but reason for celebration in its account of the city. More important, the paper uses the layout of these two pages to present a visual referendum on an extension of the franchise. When “The Great Reform Demonstration” and “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton” are viewed as a single composition, reform march and royal progress mirror each other, with crowds and street and sky appearing reflected as if each print were a body of water on the surface of which a landscape is visible. Differences emphasize similarities. Trees in one image stand where buildings are in the other. If one looks at the two prints while holding upright a copy of the newspaper as if one were reading one of its articles, the largest architectural features are at the top left and bottom right. Yet the more prominent groups of spectators in both images are opposite each other; and the cloudiest part of the sky on the left, made by straight lines of shading, replicates that on the right. Moreover, the specifically political implications of the formal features that connect these images are evident as soon as the reader physically rotates the newspaper, first to the right and then to the left, in order to see the prints separately. Doing so combines the two images into one continuous depiction of a single parade. Because the reformers march up the left side of the facing pages while the carriages carrying Victoria and the prime ­minister ­proceed down the right side, the first image seems to cross its right-hand margin to join the image opposite it. Consequently, the layout here locates the reformers’ procession, not at the very end of Victoria’s, as was the typical placement of trade-union groups in most civic parades, but at its beginning. Though

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the two events took place on different days – that in Wolverhampton “on Friday week” and that in London “on Monday last” (December 8, 1866: 562, 558) – their appearance as a single parade in the same issue of the ILN makes them contemporaneous with each other. In their represented forms, they take place at the same time and in the same location: on December 8, 1866, in facing pages of the ILN. Linked with each other, “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton” and “The Great Reform Demonstration” invite interpretation according to Ruskin’s laws of composition in ways that would not be equally applicable to either image on its own. The use in both their subtitles of the word procession, inverted almost exactly across from each other, emphasizes the effect of symmetry, a species of repetition in which, according to Ruskin, “like things [are] reflecting each other” and therefore demonstrating their mutual sympathy. Continuity also unites the two images to make visible the “orderly succession” and submission of their various elements to the “law that rules them.”10 Here an encounter becomes an exchange. Since the queen, in her august and dignified progress, is part of the same “orderly succession” as the reformers, she and her attendants are, like those demonstrators, ruled by the same “law.” Like the alternating colors on a shield, the two prints are linked by an interchange. Ruskin’s conception of the effects of such a compositional form again merits quotation: interchange “enforces the unity of opposite things, by giving to each a portion of the character of the other,” and it therefore “teach[es] us how opposite natures may be helped and strengthened by receiving each, as far as they can, some impress or reflection, or imparted power, from the other.”11 The relative grandeur of Victoria’s procession and the great numbers gathered for the trade-union march are qualities that now characterize both events. The organizers of the parade in Wolverhampton were careful to represent workers, in Marx’s terms, as “congealed” into the tools and products of their labor, specifically in two of the six triumphal arches through which Victoria passed, one of these fantastic creations composed of implements used in mining; the other, of varieties of “hardware goods” (December 8, 1866: 562). Yet in the pages of the ILN, the men in London who work with their hands join the front of a parade that includes the monarch of the country and Lord Derby, its chief parliamentary officer, as well as representatives of the regular army. Those championing the cause of reform are now, in the poetically expressive form of the visual reporting in the ILN, part of the tripartite constitution pictured by Hayter decades earlier. The real test of reform discipline and government control, however, was yet to come. When the Reform League again called for a meeting in the queen’s park in May of 1867, the home secretary, still the hapless Spencer Walpole, determined that he could not actually ban a gathering there, so he issued a proclamation meant to discourage participation, most copies of which, when posted in the streets, were quickly torn down or covered

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up by the League’s yellow placards.12 Since Beales boldly rejected Walpole’s notice as illegal, the proposed meeting was significant not simply as a way of putting pressure on Parliament to move forward with reform – most MPs unsurprisingly claimed not to have been so influenced – but also as a test of the rights to meet and to speak in public. The Reform League had originated as a response to an earlier challenge to the right of assembly.13 Now the connection between franchise extension as a form of inclusion and the freedom to meet as a form of entry into a particular space, pale and palings, was again located in Hyde Park. Two days after the government posted its warnings against attending the demonstration proposed for May 6, it also introduced a bill to outlaw public meetings in any royal park. Called the Parks Regulation Bill, this ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prohibit free speech in such spaces could not have been passed quickly enough to keep the Reform League out of Hyde Park.14 Once again there was talk of impending revolution. Beales declared that the demonstrators would force their way into the park if necessary. Charles Bradlaugh, the radical republican, warned that workers would “gather on the green sward … as a People’s Parliament,” and members of the House of Commons called for the arrest of both Beales and Bradlaugh.15 Because Walpole’s 1866 tears, real or not, were still prominent in the public imagination in 1867, as Punch often makes clear, the contest between the Reform League and the home secretary inevitably brought into question the ability of the authorities to govern. Walpole and the police made extensive and elaborate plans to defend the peace of London by marshaling, according to the ILN, up to 3,500 police officers in Hyde Park and a “still more formidable” number of troops inside and beyond its boundaries (May 18, 1867: 486). This response was both too much and too little. As the ILN explained, the massing of workers was cause for concern, not because they might damage the park, but because an “invasion” displaying “the tyranny of numbers” ought not to decide a legal question. As the paper later commented, this “splendid illustration of true British muddle” demonstrated only that the government had brought ridicule down upon itself: “Nobody expected a riot; the artisans are not rioters … The meeting was much more peaceable than a vestry, the turf and flowers were uninjured” (May 11, 1867: 459). Again the ILN offered the blandest of accounts, not mentioning that up to 150,000 people had entered the park led by a red flag and a cap of liberty or that speeches made there included calls for a “new Cromwell” and a national convention to replace Parliament.16 In a sentence that puts into words the visual recognition made in “No Rough-ianism” of an earlier working-class restoration of order in the park, the writer in the ILN notes, “the roughs were overawed, and made no demonstration; and the people themselves took a thief or two into custody” (May 11, 1867: 459). Instead of being opposed by the police, the people were the police.

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Fig. 4.2  “The Reform Meeting in Hyde Park,” wood engraving (8¾˝ by 9½˝), ILN (May 18, 1867: 485)

In the following number when the ILN printed its pictures of the ­ eeting on May 6, the text focuses its lengthy descriptions on the demm onstrators gathered to listen to speeches (May 18, 1867: 486). Significantly, the mundane activities depicted in two half-page images underscore how little needed were any defensive preparations: police gather casually in Kensington Gardens as if for a picnic, and Grenadier Guards quietly read or stand at ease as they chat (492). More revealingly, the unsigned engraving on the front page of the issue for May 18 depicts “The Reform Meeting in Hyde Park” as an assembly of demonstrators peacefully standing in front of platforms numbered 1 and 6 and 9 (fig. 4.2; 485). Here

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there are no roughs, no street urchins – in short, no distractions from the business at hand. The men – and all the figures are men, except for one apparently well-mannered boy – are respectably dressed, top hats far outnumbering soft caps. Like the crowds at the Dover volunteer review just two weeks earlier, these participants are arrayed in the informal groupings whose curvilinear forms are typical of the genteel spectators gathered in Westminster Hall in 1843. The class status of these workers, no longer standing in a line to do industrial labor or kept in line by fencing, is still made distinguishable by their numbers, but they move freely through the park, choosing which speaker to listen to attentively. The sense of power so prized by Ruskin as the effect of vertical compositions is evident here in the form of a central tree, under and around which stand six or seven men ready to address the crowd from the platform marked as “1.” The prominence of this tree  – an oak symbolizing the nation’s strength – aligns the engraving in which it appears with the polite conventions of eighteenth-century high art,17 the conventions that also characterize the ILN’s first images of the individuals enrolled in the volunteer force. Like depictions of aristocratic or genteel families on their estates, “The Reform Meeting” sets its central human figures under a tree in a cultivated landscape that they either possess or use as if it were their own. The ILN’s portrayal of the reform meeting of 1867, therefore, contrasts starkly with the paper’s visual image of the Chartist demonstration that took place on Kennington Common on April 10, 1848. In that earlier engraving large numbers are also aggregated in a space that they make their own, yet it is a treeless field stretching far into the distance until it reaches a long range of factory buildings, their smokestacks and chimneys indicating their industrial functions. In 1867 workers enjoying their proximity to the trees of a royal park replace Chartist demonstrators characterized by their relation to the sites of their manual labors. The greatly exaggerated size of the equestrian figure of Wellington on the arch depicted far in the distance of “The Reform Meeting in Hyde Park” emphasizes the extent of the vast crowds assembled there. More than in the ILN print of the 1866 Hyde Park volunteer review, Wellington here presides over the crowd, almost as if he were sanctioning their activities  – as Hayter had pictured his own artistic efforts being protected by the duke in The House of Commons, 1833. This ironic conjunction of statue and crowd is particularly meaningful. Wellington’s participation had done much to ensure that the Chartists gathered in 1848 did not get out of hand, but now he seems almost to approve of working-class numbers. Significantly, the reader’s line of vision has become associated with that of the demonstrators in the park. No longer facing invading numbers, as is the case in “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane,” the reader, slightly above and distanced from the crowd, joins it, identified equally with the man closest to the picture plane and with the one astride a horse. In visual terms this

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image answers Punch’s question about the identity of the Working-Man: “he” and “we” are nearly the same. Since the analogy that likens the pale of the constitution to the palings around Hyde Park was as prominent in 1867 as it had been in 1866, the way that the ILN visualizes the meeting of May 6 demonstrates that months before the passage of the Second Reform Act, the people have quietly and decisively come into the public place that embodied not only their rights to speech and assembly, but also their right to representation. Print and text combine to emphasize the exchange that has taken place in “The Reform Demonstration in Hyde Park”: the relative positions of those conventionally deemed above and below each other in Victorian conceptions of hierarchy are reversed. Like the men on the fence in the ILN’s 1866 depiction of “The Mob” in Hyde Park, these demonstrators could be spectators attending a volunteer review in the same location. At the same time, the words of the leader in this issue cast the MPs in the House of Commons as men manifesting their “steady and workmanlike” commitment to reform. The ILN column ends with a prophetic vision that unites images of military defense and manual labor to convey the paper’s hope that the “hands” of the members of Parliament will be “strengthened that they may conserve, while improving, the institutions of the country” (May 18, 1867: 491). These were almost the same words that Bright had used in 1848 when he championed extending the franchise as a way to “strengthen and support [the] constitution.”18 According to the ILN, both politicians and potential voters are law-abiding “hands” now ready to undertake labors of protection and preservation. After years of portraying orderly masses of working-class men, men joined as volunteers in the defense of their nation, the paper could hardly conclude otherwise. Vit riol, comi c reli ef, and hero ic h igh s e r io us ne s s Using different methods to different effect, Punch also records the acceptance of reform before it was achieved. Throughout the last months of 1866 and the first half of 1867, the paper continued to treat the franchise question in terms of comparative encounters, at first altering its standard compositional practices to portray the confusion that reigned when the Conservatives proposed a reform measure hedged with endlessly complicated provisions to ensure against granting any supposedly undue political strength to working-class men. In place of the earlier binary designs involving two or three representative individuals, five or six politicians, their forces hopelessly disorganized, now typically crowd Tenniel’s big cuts, as they do in “A Block on the Line.” This pictorial approach continued even as the Conservative bill was being altered in the direction of the so-called household suffrage. A particularly striking instance is a double-page cartoon depicting Disraeli as a Middle Eastern “enigma,” an engraving after

Fig. 4.3  “D’Israel-i in Triumph; Or, the Modern Sphynx,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (15½˝ by 9½˝), Punch (June 15, 1867: 246–47)

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Tenniel titled “D’Israel-i in Triumph; Or, the Modern Sphynx” (fig. 4.3; June 15, 1867: 246–47). As the subtitle of this engraving reveals, its application of a passage from Exodus to the current political moment was “Suggested by Mr. Poynter’s admirable Picture of ‘Israel in Egypt,’” then on view at the Royal Academy exhibition.19 Tenniel truncates Edward Poynter’s Israel in Egypt (fig. 4.4), literally cutting this enormous canvas down to size. Bringing the action forward in the fashion characteristic of FAC history paintings, Tenniel addresses what is arguably the painting’s major shortcoming, its doubtfully impressive lion. (It was described by my companion when we saw the painting at the Guildhall Art Gallery as being made of aspic. The writer for Blackwood’s thought it looked like a buckram big cat from a pantomime.)20 Tenniel substitutes for this animal a strong and forceful image of a sphinx. In addition, the simpler design of the cartoon, augmented by its bold cross-hatching, is emphasized by the clarity of the Tenniel-Swain line, which is most evident in the form of the whip flashing over the heads of enslaved Israelites. The exchanges enacted in this parody identify some of the sources of its formidable visual wit. In Tenniel’s rendition of Poynter’s subject and design, the Conservatives are the Egyptians; the Liberals, the Israelites. Disraeli, as the leader of his party in the House of Commons, becomes a monumental sphinx drawn on a cart by over twenty half-naked, straining MPs, among whom Mill, amusingly, is one of the most energetic, if not the most robust. Bright looks forward but away from a triumphal arch labeled “REFORM,” and it is hard to tell if he is helping or hindering the progress of the sphinx toward that goal. Just to the left of Bright – a nice counterfactual touch – Lowe, identifiable by his albinism, raises his clenched fist in defiance as he looks back toward Disraeli. Gladstone, located above and to the left of Mill, replicates Lowe’s backward-facing pose, the two major Liberal debating opponents transformed momentarily into allies. The cartoon, whose landscape format is more typical of the ILN than of Punch, is filled with figures: in addition to the politicians cast as ancient Israelites, the PM Derby plays the role of the slave driver, a dancing girl on the right adorns the celebration, and, most incongruously, a Sairey Gamp-like crone, identified by her oversized mobcap as the Standard newspaper, is tending to a fallen Liberal, most likely the unfortunate MP Sergeant Stephen Gaselee, who had sponsored an amendment to Disraeli’s bill that was quickly defeated, but not before, as Punch reports in a column printed two pages before this cartoon, he was told to “shut up” by his exhausted and overheated colleagues (244). The dating of this print makes it clear that Punch is poised to mark the passage of the Conservative bill through the triumphal arch that signals its victory even before that event. In a further ironic effect, the Liberals are Israelites suffering the pains of exile and captivity, but they are making possible the apotheosis of the chancellor of the exchequer who

Fig. 4.4  Edward Poynter, Israel in Egypt, oil on canvas (124˝ by 54˝, 1867)

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is,  like them, an outsider because he too is “of ” Israel. Yet, in another ­reversal, Gladstone might well be looking toward the sphinx-like leader of Commons because that unfathomable force is driving the Liberals to the goal that they themselves would have tried to reach had they been in office. When set against the painting on which it is based, “D’Israeli in Triumph” reveals as much about the fate of history painting in the 1860s as it does about the trials of the Liberal party. The antiquarian classicism of Poynter’s Israel in Egypt – for all its topographical inaccuracy, it was based on artifacts in the British Museum – suggests that the painter was looking backward as intently as Lowe and Gladstone are in Tenniel’s cartoon, but not to the conception of history painting as that genre was understood by Reynolds in the eighteenth century or by the members of the Fine Arts Commission in the 1840s. The often enthusiastically positive reviews that greeted this painting in 1867 typically mention its status as a depiction of archaeology, not history: the ILN, for one, credits its success to its creator’s familiarity with “recent Egyptological research” (May 11, 1867: 478). Blackwood’s Magazine immediately follows its praise of Israel in Egypt with a lament about “the extinction of old schools of historic art”: “Painters now, instead of grappling with a whole nation, are content to deal with its individual units. Artists forsake the broad road of history, and betake themselves to pleasant by-ways. They are content to enjoy distant views or side-glances.”21 Great history paintings, like great autobiographies, serve the present by depicting the past, and Poynter’s picture carefully avoids doing that. As Patrick Connor notes, no reviewers at the time saw any relation between Poynter’s subject and the building of the Suez Canal: any “parallel” between the enslaved Israelites and the fellahin forced to work in its trenches could be seen “only from retrospect.”22 The painter’s evocation of a biblical past is, if anything, a calm “distant view,” colder than Tenniel’s art was famously said to be. Only after becoming a Punch big cut, only after being exposed to the most thoroughgoing of parodic revisions, could Israel in Egypt become politically relevant. The poem that accompanies Tenniel’s “D’Israeli in Triumph” registers the full extent of the prejudices that made it difficult for Punch to support reform whole-heartedly once its fate came to rest in the hands of a Conservative leader about whose racial and religious identity the paper had always had doubts. The anti-Semitism of this doggerel, “The Triumph of the Sphynx,” is remarkable even for Punch. In unusually effective, although repellant, verse, Disraeli is cast as the ruler appropriate to a realm “Where birds, beasts, creeping things for God-heads pass – / Apes, crocodiles, cats, monkeys, hawks, and owls.” Addressed to those pulling Disraeli’s image, the poem identifies them as political slaves of “all colours, races, ranks of men  – / True blue, and blue and buff, and

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drab and red.” Disraeli’s deceit is fully matched by their willingness to be deceived: He waited for his time, his time is come:    He knew his place kept for him in the shrine, Nor recked what hideous shapes, foul things, and dumb,    Shared it, so crawling crowds hailed all divine. Drag him into his seat, with loud acclaim    Of sounding brass, keen whips, and shouting herds, O’er broken pledges, reasons brought to shame,    Ruin of parties, spume of eaten words. But though he move towards his place of power,    Where many knees are bent; and heads are bowed, ’Tis thanks to backs before the lash that cower,    Blind priests that shout and scourge a blinder crowd. (June 15, 1867: 249)

As “The Triumph of the Sphynx” proceeds, human sycophants replace the “creeping things” described in its opening. “Crawling crowds” worship Disraeli, but he owes his “place” to the flunkeys who now serve him, “Blind priests that shout and scourge a blinder crowd.” By echoing Milton’s castigation of rapacious, irresponsible clergy in Lycidas, the writer expresses contempt for the MPs who have ensured Disraeli’s apotheosis. Punch, schooled by its own visual conventions, does not like crowds – or the devious politician empowered by them. Despite such rants, Punch frequently signaled its acceptance of an extension of the suffrage as a foregone conclusion by depicting reform demonstrations as a consistently comic subject – one, unlike the Hyde Park riots, that is genuinely humorous, not hysterically so. Significantly, the newspaper had almost nothing to say about the procession to Beaufort House on December 3. In the issue that normally would have contained responses to this event, Punch confines its explicit notice to two one-sentence squibs: in “A Palpable Error,” for instance, the writer jokes that it is “impossible that there should have been … youths, apparently apprentices, in the Reform procession, for everyone who walked from the Mall to Beaufort House must have been a journeyman” (December 15, 1866: 239). Turning all the reformers into men who have not yet become masters, this pun invites the readers of Punch to laugh at popular support of reform. As the date set for the May demonstration approached, Punch printed “The Demagogue’s Ditty,” which advises reformers to eschew violence because a display of their numbers will accomplish the end they seek: O, a monster demonstration never fails!    In your thousands march the streets.    All the barriers your will meets Will go down before you just like Hyde Park rails. (May 4, 1867: 178)

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Fig. 4.5  “A Sketch Taken in Park Lane, May 6, 1867,” wood engraving after Ernest Griset (4⅜˝ by 3¾˝), Punch (May 18, 1867: 201)

Yet in this case no railings went down because no barriers kept the crowds from entering the park. According to “Punch’s Essence of Parliament,” the “farce” has “passed off with perfect quietness, no opposition being offered to it” (May 18, 1867: 205). Instead of being featured in the paper’s big cuts, reform demonstrations typically become material relegated to the smaller socials and therefore to conventions aligned more with book illustrations than with the heroic images of high-art oil painting. Attacking Spencer Walpole, not surprisingly, is the paper’s chief and repeated response to the monster meeting of May 6. Although one big cut does depict Beales and Walpole (203) – tellingly, politicians, not workers, deserve such prominence – the only other visual notice that the paper takes of the meeting are two comic sketches. One again attacks Walpole by picturing an “elderly female” who impersonates him so that she will be allowed to cross Hyde Park (202). The other, “A Sketch Taken in Park Lane, May 6, 1867,” is an even slighter effort (fig. 4.5; May 18, 1867: 201). Yet, despite its small size and crudity – or, rather, because of them – it speaks volumes about Punch’s attitude toward the cause that it mocks. This social by “E. G.” depicts a madly careening donkey cart, accompanied by dogs and carrying four men. They cheer under a sign bearing

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the single word “REFORM,” a measure that would seem to have already passed if their celebratory gestures are any indication of its fate. Unlike the impressive front-page coverage of the event in the ILN, however, this image places four demonstrators in one of the streets bordering Hyde Park, thereby denying them entry into it. Apparently drunk with either elation or liquor, Punch’s workers are badly dressed, in contrast not only to the men in the ILN’s comparable view of the interior of the park but also to other contemporary reports of working-class demonstrators who on such occasions usually wore their Sunday best. The caricatured features of these four men are stylistically similar to those of the animals running along side the cart, a Ruskinian formal consistency that points toward the significance of the specific draftsman chosen to execute this “sketch.” E. G. or Ernest Griset, known principally for his animal caricatures, was in 1867 a newcomer to Punch. Although he went on to do better work as a book illustrator, M. H. Spielmann rightly concluded that Griset’s “human figures [in Punch] are most of them of one ragged type.”23 Thus, a young and relatively unknown artist was assigned the job of picturing the events of May 6, his “ragged” figures being deemed quite equal to the occasion. This editorial decision reflects a determination to render the demonstration as insignificant as possible. The resulting image resembles an uninspired version of the illustrations that George Cruikshank had done for Dickens’s Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist in the 1830s. As Robert Patten points out, “by the late 1850s, Cruikshank’s style seemed old-fashioned and crude”;24 and that judgment would be even more to the point in the 1860s at the zenith of book illustration. The distance that Punch’s visualizations of reform have come in the year since the publication of “No Rough-ianism” is also made clear by the content of “A Sketch”: no longer is it appropriate to envision a worker as a stalwart, even heroic defender of public order. Like the depiction of Joe Gargery as a buffoon late in Dickens’s Great Expectations when the blacksmith covers himself with ink as he tries to write a letter, the characterization of these demonstrators identifies them as silly chuckleheads. More than even Joe, such men are useful only to the extent that they provide comic relief. In 1867 Punch also turned reform into the source of good fun by replacing any anxiety created by the likelihood of enfranchising workingclass men with the mixed hilarity and scorn that necessarily attended the prospect of enfranchising women.25 Almost as if to offer the paper a source of humorous diversion, John Stuart Mill in May 1867 proposed an amendment to Disraeli’s measure that would have given the vote to widowed and single female householders by using the term persons to define all those to be granted the suffrage. Punch responded to this idea with predictable glee, offering image after image, visual and verbal, of its absurdity. Although the paper refrained from using the distinguished member for Westminster quite as cruelly as it treated Walpole, it continually identified Mill’s cause

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Fig. 4.6  “A Leap in the Dark,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (9½˝ by 7½˝), Punch (August 3, 1867: 47)

as “epicoene.” Punch’s wife Judy lets Mill, “a poor creature,” know in no uncertain terms that “woman” already rules over “her born-slave and palpable inferior, man”; for that reason, politics should be left as “the natural occupation of the inferior or slavish sex, whom we have admitted to the suffrage, as I see it is now proposed to admit the Negroes in the Southern States” (June 1, 1867: 224–25). In this textual encounter, comic because the exchange that it enacts is patently impossible, enfranchised Englishmen are emancipated slaves. Such jokes allowed the paper to distract attention from the enfranchisement of workers as it was about to be effected in Parliament by mocking a cause whose triumph few thought possible, including, I suspect, some of the seventy-two MPs who voted for Mill’s amendment. The paper’s continued focus on this non-issue suggests how thoroughly it fell back on its standard prejudices – against women, workers, Jews, and blacks – as the 1867 reform bill was making its way toward passage. Yet Punch returned to heroic images comparable to those planned for the new Palace of Westminster when it published its decidedly negative and now best-known visualization of the passage of the Second Reform Act, the engraving after Tenniel called “A Leap in the Dark” (fig. 4.6; August 3, 1867: 47). The 1832 act had inspired a similar, though less grand, graphic response from John Doyle (HB): impersonating John Gilpin, William IV

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rides wildly through the streets, his crown flying off behind him, his ­runaway steed trampling down geese and a Tory dressed as an old apple woman. Forty-five years later Punch used the same cliché that Lord Derby applied to the 1867 act26 to convey the uncertainty of the future. This image redraws the line between male and female that Mill had blurred: Britannia here is a figure of stereotypical female weakness and beauty, her slim waist and ample breasts prominently displayed, her long hair flying out in disorder behind her. Britannia rides side-saddle on a horse that sports two noses, Disraeli’s above the beast’s flared nostrils, and she approaches an intimidatingly high jump labeled “Reform.” The poem accompanying this print repeats the word line to emphasize its point: despite the fact that Britannia is a well-practiced horsewoman, she has unaccountably let her “dark” steed “take … a line of his own,” and her “line” is therefore “shaped at random” (46). Britannia has to go wherever her horse takes her, but she cannot bear to see where she is being carried. In this engraving she becomes the female counterpart of Haydon’s Marcus Curtius, but unlike that hero, she had made herself an involuntary sacrifice; and her half-Disraeli horse, unlike his, is happy to be facing destruction. The figure who appears in “A Leap in the Dark” resembles in her conventional femininity almost all the various depictions of Britannia in Tenniel’s cartoons throughout the mid 1860s. During the Victorian period, as Madge Dresser has established, Punch pictured this icon in four basic incarnations – weak virgin, sorrowing madonna, scolding nanny, or passive Athena – and the 1860s offered very few exceptions to that rule.27 Yet during that decade Tenniel also asked his queen to sit for his portraits of Britannia, although he often tried to deemphasize the matronly features of his model, specifically her squat form and heavy jowls. In “Erin’s Little Difficulty” (September 30, 1865: 127), a portrayal of Britannia as she advocates the thrashing of the Fenians, Tenniel pictures her as a dumpy version of Victoria, the kind of image characteristic of the paper’s other treatments of the queen in the 1860s. In another instance Britannia and Victoria appear together as opposites when the former, standing to the left of a mourning “Queen Hermione,” exhorts her to “be stone no more!” (September 23, 1865: 116). This cartoon appeared a week before “Erin’s Little Difficulty,” and the similarity between Victoria as Hermione in the earlier issue and Britannia in the later image is striking. Even at her most martially impressive in “The Fenian-Pest” (fig. 3.5) when she prepares to take on the Irish enemies massed against her, Britannia maintains a stern female beauty. In November 1867, however, Punch broke with its customary practices by offering a transformed characterization of this symbol of the nation in the engraving after Tenniel called “Check to King Mob” (fig. 4.7; November 30: 221). The title of this cartoon responds specifically to the multiple attacks on civil order that Punch had recorded throughout 1866 and 1867: increasingly

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Fig. 4.7  “Check to King Mob,” wood engraving after John Tenniel (7⅛˝ by 9¾˝), Punch (November 30, 1867: 221)

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large and frequent reform demonstrations, continuing Fenian violence in England, and “the Sheffield outrages.” In the context created by thousands of cholera deaths and increasing unemployment, Bright appeared at a series of “monster” meetings calculated to impress observers by the numbers of their participants: 120,000 in Manchester in September, 130,000 in Glasgow in October, perhaps as many as 250,000 in Birmingham two months earlier.28 In 1867 the Fenians had also been particularly active. In February they tried unsuccessfully to attack the armory at Chester Castle. St. Paul’s was rumored to be the next target. The killing of a policeman in November during an attempt to free two Fenian leaders from jail in Manchester seemed to prove that Irish revolutionaries had infiltrated both the police and the army.29 In Sheffield a series of industrial “outrages,” the term also applied to Fenian activities, included “rattenings” (work stoppages caused by damaging machinery or stealing tools), the maiming of animals, and murder. In early 1867 a subcommittee of a royal commission was appointed to investigate whether the unions in Sheffield were responsible for the violence there. That spring and early summer, as Disraeli’s bill was making its way through one more liberalizing amendment after another, accounts of the outrages appeared in one issue of Punch after another. On July 6, along with articles on other unsettling problems like garroting in London, the Governor Eyre controversy, and recent attacks on the City Militia committed by “roughs” (8, 7), the paper devoted three separate items to the events in Sheffield, including a Tenniel cartoon in which the puppet Punch plays the role of policeman as he stands to the left of a misguided union member (5). “Check to King Mob” presents itself as an answer to all such dangers, with the word league around Mob’s waist indicating that he represents not only “Rowdyism” and “Fenianism” but also the Reform League. The 1867 reform bill may have become law, but, according to Punch, the time of national crisis has not passed. “Check to King Mob” proposes an eye-for-an-eye solution to current unrest – violence for violence – and it does so by taking as its model for Britannia not a comely young woman or an ageing monarch, but the Working-Man of “No Rough-ianism.” Like that earlier print, this one adopts the conventions of Victorian history painting, the gestures and sharp outlines in Tenniel’s design recalling the images in fresco and oil created at the behest of the FAC in the 1840s, along with the frontality typical of the German manner. Details of visual characterization reveal the extent of the gender exchange that takes place between the figures in these two engravings. Distinguished from the Working-Man by the battle helmet that she wears in place of his paper cap, Britannia now exhibits his masculinized features. She has the Working-Man’s face and his broad shoulders. Their jaws and ears differ in size and shape. His chin is obscured by a beard. Yet her brow and nose and mouth reproduce the features of the Working-Man, and they are larger and more distinctively angular

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than in earlier engravings such as “The Fenian-Pest.” Most importantly, the outstretched left arm and clutching hand of the heroic female figure in “Check to King Mob” replicate the “leading or governing line” of his pose. In Ruskin’s terms, such a repetition of gestures creates a sympathy between the two figures. As if to underline this identification, the accompanying poem explains that “the duty of duties for all men / Hand or brain toiler, commoner, nob, / Strong or weak, rich or poor, great or small men – / Is to chorus a ‘CHECK TO KING MOB.’” Britannia serves here as the surrogate for “all men,” the “Hand or brain toiler[s]” represented by the Working-Man and Punch’s reader, respectively (November 30, 1867: 220). In this role she offers condign punishment to all those forces of disorder leagued against her. As a result of franchise reform, then, according to this image in Punch at least, not only has the Working-Man by late 1867 come within the pale of the constitution, but also his manly strength constitutes the nation in the person of Britannia, arguably its most cherished icon. To object here that the similarities between these two images, the likenesses that enhance the manliness of this female personification of a brave and free land, result only from their having come from the hand of the same artist, John Tenniel, is to support the argument that I am making. Since Punch’s big cuts were typically drawn by one or, at most, two artists, Tenniel’s designs, like the prose features that readers had come to expect week after week, constitute units in a series. “Check to King Mob” reflects back on Tenniel’s “No Rough-ianism” when Rough’s stick and brickbat become Mob’s flagstaff and falling gun, the banner emblazoned with the word “Rowdyism” explicitly linking the latter to the former. Moreover, the transformation that Britannia undergoes in the image from late 1867 draws its significance from an even earlier image with an almost identical composition. The clenched fist of the Working-Man recalls Britannia’s gesture in “The Fenian-Pest” of March 1866, just as they both prophesy the form of the hand that holds a sword ready to immolate the heavily armed “League” of riot and rebellion. In effect, then, these three prints – “The Fenian-Pest,” “No Rough-ianism,” and “Check to King Mob” – constitute an identifiable series of prints, one that implies a distinct and coherent narrative. As if they were the frozen images in a Victorian photographic motion study, they represent linked and successive movements: first, the impulse to act, as Britannia glares at the Fenians she would like to master; then a step in that direction, when the Working-Man raises his left arm and grabs the collar of the Rough; and finally a triumphantly completed action, when Britannia pushes down Mob and forces him to drop his weapon. Yet if “Check to King Mob” incorporates the Working-Man’s identity, thereby ratifying an extension of the franchise, it does so only by not taking franchise reform as its manifest subject. In these months

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Punch continued its drift toward a political conservatism consonant with ­pictorial practices that value the individual over the mass. From this perspective the paper’s handling of the volunteer force is revealing. During 1866 and 1867, it frequently conveyed its conviction that the volunteer movement was both ineffective and silly. In the issue for August 4, 1866, when it responded so repeatedly to the Hyde Park riots, Punch registered its contempt for the force in a social depicting a decidedly fat volunteer named Private Giglampz, who is posing proudly with his rifle for his twenty-fifth carte de visite (54). The Working-Man pictured two pages earlier, not Giglampz, is the hero who will save the day. A week before “A Leap in the Dark” appeared, a half-page engraving after Charles Keene called “Villainous Saltpetre!” makes a similar point. In it a genteel figure with spindly legs and arms, a “Small-Bore Swell” at a rifle meet, holds out from his body the smelly weapon that he declines to fire (September 27, 1867: 40). What is needed, as “No Rough-ianism” argues, is working-class strength, not a middle-class parody of it. Yet not even its own graphic proof of the weaknesses of individual volunteers moved Punch to visualize in its pages the large numbers of men whom it declined to have its Working-Man represent. The passage of the reform bill in the House of Commons, however, provided the ILN with a final opportunity to create a verbal image of the numbers so often visualized in its pages. Declaring “So ends the chronicle of the Reform Bill,” the paper commends Disraeli’s final comments on the Conservative bill when he explained why he rejected the option of “enfranchising only the pick of the artisans” (July 20, 1867: 59). In this speech as the ILN summarizes it, Disraeli drew a firm distinction between his approach to enfranchising workers and Gladstone’s, a distinction that recalls many of the terms used to describe both the reform and the volunteer movements. Gladstone had attempted to carry an amendment that, according to Disraeli, “would have entirely emasculated the Bill.” By contrast, the Conservative measure would put at the service of the nation an entire army of loyal defenders: “the feeling of the large number would be more national, than by only admitting what I call the Praetorian guard, a sort of class set aside, invested with peculiar privileges, looking with suspicion on their superiors, and with disdain on those beneath them, with no friendly feelings towards the institutions of their country and with great confidence in themselves.” By using the military language that often defined the issues related to suffrage reform, Disraeli enacted a final and significant exchange between class identities. Casting “the pick of the artisans” as a “Praetorian guard,” as elite soldiers capable of sustaining or destroying empires,30 Disraeli spurned their support, calling instead on the “national” feeling that he attributed to “the large number” of working men. To Disraeli’s analysis, the ILN gave its assent, hoping that the inclusion of “the large number,” like its images of mass meetings and reviews

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and sham fights, might yield a “change for the good,” supported as it was by “an Englishman’s belief in the sound-heartedness of his countrymen and … a Christian’s humble faith in a superintending Providence” (59). With the ILN’s blessing, then, the constitution came to enclose those whom it had previously excluded, and the political implications of the paper’s graphic treatments of reform were as firmly ratified as the reform bill itself. By 1867, then, the characteristic visual practices of the two illustrated newspapers were determining their politics rather than the reverse. Responding to the formats of their own most impressive engravings, Punch tries to hold on to the principles of the past, principles that favor individuals over groups, while the ILN, supposedly Punch’s more respectable and genteel rival, becomes the champion of numbers by portraying uncritically, even enthusiastically, the aggregations of men whom it presented as ready to serve their country as either voters or volunteers. In the weekly encounters that the publication schedules of the papers made virtually inevitable, Punch by 1867 often seems the more Tory of the two. Commenting on the reluctance of those working for that paper to adopt technological innovations such as stereotyping, M. H. Spielmann concluded, “Punch, in his own house at least, is a Conservative among Conservatives,”31 and that point is applicable both to the paper’s visual conventions and to the political attitudes that such conventions foster. Moreover, Punch and the ILN combine in different ways artistic traditions that are relatively high and relatively low. The most politically revealing images in Punch share conventions in some cases with book illustration and in others with history painting, while the ILN often melds qualities of genre painting with those of eighteenth-century paintings portraying the gentry and aristocracy. Yet both papers treat franchise reform as a fait accompli well before the passage of the 1867 bill – the ILN by turning it into a subject of routine reporting, and Punch by making it the occasion for minor jokes and silly puns. In the visual politics that not only conveyed but created their political tendencies, a reversal occurs: the comic newspaper becomes the genteel better; and the staid weekly, which prided itself on its refined devotion to art, emerges as the more democratically inclined social inferior. Reversed ref or m acts This exchange between the two most prominent high-Victorian illustrated papers is matched by a number of reversals between the Great and the little reform acts. From current perspectives, the Second Reform Act, in granting the borough suffrage to any man paying rates on the dwelling in which he lived, seemed to be moving inexorably, if very slowly, toward the electoral simplicity of a democratic future that would enfranchise all

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adults. By removing a specific monetary figure as a qualification for the vote, the act also suggested that economic distinctions were becoming less pressing, less pertinent by the third quarter of the century than they had been previously. Yet the lines drawn in 1867 were both as clear and as uncertain as they had been in 1832, in part because of the paradoxical results of the new bases for the franchise, in part because so little had actually changed. A brief look at arguably the most important battle fought by Disraeli and Gladstone, as well as one that the former refused to fight, explains how that could be so.32 In 1867 Gladstone and Bright attempted unsuccessfully to defeat one of the chief stipulations of the Conservatives’ bill by championing, in the case of the former, the borough franchise set at “a yearly rateable value of £5 or upwards” and, in the case of the latter, a suffrage based on a specific rental value of a house.33 Gladstone in particular realized that, in the absence of such a “fixed line,” the remaining rating requirement, because it was dependent on the customs and practices of individual parishes, would ensure that the franchise was even more a matter of economic differentials differentially applied than it already was. In the event, as two historians have noted, the new law was remarkably “capricious in both its inclusions and exclusions.”34 Furthermore, the distinction between the First and the Second Reform Acts, between the measure establishing a “fixed line” suffrage and the measure abolishing it, makes the earlier legislation potentially more liberating than the admittedly more inclusive later act, even though the former stripped many working-class men of the vote and the latter enfranchised a good number of them. Because the Great Reform Act rested its qualifications for the borough franchise on the basis of a “fixed line” that might in the future be lowered to include more men paying less for their “houses,” it is the more decisive move toward democracy. The diagnosis that Bagehot offered of the “real and very solemn crisis” that the country faced in 1860, as talk of franchise reform was being revived, turns on precisely such an understanding of the First Reform Act. For the current troubles he blamed “the peculiar danger introduced by the Act of 1832” with its “uniform monied franchise”: “all future changes [will be] purely questions of degree … £6 will in time become £4, then £2.” Disraeli used the same logic to oppose Gladstone’s attempt to establish what one Conservative called a “mere line” because such a measure would not be the last.35 In essence, the stipulations of the 1867 act, by removing precise economic qualifications, would be vague enough to seem, to all but the most ardent reformers, simply incontestable, leaving no basis for future expansions of the suffrage. Such hopes for a future secure from demands for the vote from more and more diverse kinds of people were no doubt delusional, but those who watched the workings of the Second Reform Act in the first decade after its passage had every reason to think that it would be what Whig supporters of reform in 1832 had expected their bill to be: final.

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That the 1867 statute would not have as limited an effect as Disraeli at first predicted was the result of his startling acceptance of an amendment offered by the Liberal back-bencher Grosvenor Hodgkinson that simply did away with compounding, thus presumably enfranchising perhaps twice, perhaps four times, as many men as the bill would have done when it was introduced.36 Because the act of 1867 did not abrogate many of the clauses of the 1832 measure, this alteration, oddly enough, enfranchised more men in some boroughs under the earlier £10 qualification than did the supposedly more encompassing, new rated-residential franchise. Because occupants of dwellings worth £10 in rent no longer paid their rates through their landlords, there were in Brighton 7,590 new £10 voters, as opposed to 944 new so-called householders; in Manchester, more than half the new voters were so because they now met the £10 standard.37 Not surprisingly, Hodgkinson’s amendment had different effects in different kinds of boroughs – the detailed analysis of one twentieth-century historian suggests that its “full force … was felt” in fewer than half of them.38 This amendment had other unintended consequences. Artisans reportedly chose to go into lodgings rather than live in rented dwellings worth £10 because they would have been required to pay the full rates rather than the reduced rates that their landlords had previously been able to collect from them. So many advantages attached to the superannuated system of compounding – it was convenient for both the parish collectors who did not have to chase after small sums (for the fourth time in Brown’s case in 1855) and for the renters who were given a discount  – that the practice was reinstated in 1869.39 In its effects on the £10 occupier, therefore, the 1867 measure, in Ruskin’s terms, impressed its strength on the earlier one. In that sense, the Second Reform Act was greater than the Great Reform Act because the later one achieved the goals that the earlier one had left unaccomplished. Finally, the registration system that remained in place after 1867 in many ways made it more difficult to vote than it had been before, again rendering the later measure less liberal than the earlier one. After the acceptance of the franchise clauses of the Conservative bill, Disraeli claimed that only approximately 300,000 of the 1,555,000 householders in the boroughs would meet its economic test, presumably because they were exempted from their responsibility to relieve the poor or because they themselves had accepted poor relief during the previous twelve months. Back-bench Conservatives, who were dismayed by their party’s role in sponsoring an apparently liberal reform bill, consoled themselves with similar estimates; as one of them had said earlier, half the potential electors “won’t take the trouble to enfranchise themselves by paying the rates.”40 While such estimates were exaggerated when it came to the question of eligibility – another contemporary prophesied that from 45 percent to 75 percent of householders would qualify41 – such figures underestimated the number

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of enfranchised men who could not vote because they could not afford to register. The problems that the process of registration caused were, ironically enough, compounded by the abolition of compounding; and a select committee of members of the House of Commons was soon appointed to consider how the system might be reformed. The tone of the resulting report, published in 1869, oscillates between the deliberative and the shocked. The grounds for dismay were many. Often incompetent parish authorities created lists that were “seriously incorrect,” with information that was difficult to locate. The “costly and vexatious system of claims and objections” disqualified a “large per-centage of persons entitled to vote.” The time required of claimants to attend revising courts constituted a “severe pecuniary fine,” costing workers days of their weekly wages and in some cases even their jobs. The committee concluded, “The scenes at the Revising Courts in populous boroughs become consequently a scandal to our representative system … Hundreds of working men [spend] days [dealing with] objections of the most trivial and sometimes wholly unfounded character” until they leave the courts in “despair and disgust.” At this point in the report, the committee members themselves seemed to be feeling “disgust” with a system “obviously impossible of execution.”42 From a conservative perspective, such an outcome was all to the good. For Ruskin in particular, the fate of the “golden Hyde Park railings” glowingly described by the laborer in Trollope’s Ralph the Heir was proof of how misguided and literally misplaced were reformers’ ludicrous hopes for inclusion. In an 1873 letter addressed to such men and published in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin explains, “Indeed, that pulling down of the Piccadilly railings was a significant business” because it revealed a complete misunderstanding of the kind of place that demonstrators had entered. Sounding like the Tory who had called in the second decade of the century for “a fence around the Constitution,” a “bulwark” against “spurious rights,” Ruskin quoted a legal authority to stress that “a park must be enclosed” to protect those within its confines. For that reason, it cannot be allowed to fall “into King Mob’s [hands] for parliamentary purposes.” Earlier Ruskin had advised workers to stop hankering after “the lacquered splendours of Westminster,” telling them to set up instead their own parliaments where they would be free to debate, though not to legislate.43 Yet contrary to this vision of such political separatism, the pale of the constitution had been opened; and the visual politics of Punch in 1866 and of the ILN in 1867 had invited their readers to see that, according to a Ruskinian analogy, the strength of the straight lines formed by working-class men had contributed to the stability of the nation.

Conclusion

The Second Reform Act was, in at least one sense, the first. Thanks to the coverage it received in Punch and the Illustrated London News, it was the first expansion of the parliamentary franchise that was recorded by wellestablished institutions of visual journalism. In other ways, however, that reform of the borough suffrage, like much Victorian legislation, was more progressive in intention than in effect. The impulses of the deferential society that Bagehot incisively analyzed and the high value placed on hierarchy that Ruskin saw in every good pictorial design ultimately tempered the changes that it made in the shape of the constitution.1 Yet the 1870s saw a number of significant reforms, including measures protecting workers’ health and the finances of their trade unions, as well as those mandating elementary education and whittling away at the traditional privileges of such institutions as the army and the church.2 Perhaps most important to those interested in electoral reform, 1872 saw the passage of a ballot act, unlike the unsuccessful bill to which Trollope attributed the defeat of his fictional Liberals in Phineas Finn. That novel did not finish its serial run in St Paul’s Magazine until 1869, not until after Trollope, no beneficiary of an enlarged pool of voters, had tried and failed to be elected to Parliament. Worse still, illegal doings at the polls remained unabated, so the borough that he had hoped to represent was disfranchised for the particularly egregious corrupt practices of that election.3 Such developments, Trollope’s defeat aside, were, like the 1867 franchise measure, more liberal in theory than in practice, but they seemed to promise – wrongly, as it turned out – that even more intransigent problems such as those posed by Ireland might find some measure of amendment. One legacy of the debates over the Second Reform Act, for all the insistence then and now on class collaboration, involved the prominence that they had given to military language as a way to describe class divides. Martial metaphors give force to some of the most effective verbal formulations of the 1860s, such as Bagehot’s likening of the “lines of our constitution” to the results of “half-drawn battle[s]” fought by past “combatants” and Disraeli’s characterization of the labor aristocracy as members of the praetorian guard. Conservative commentators continued to use that language to define the nature of their defeat, despite the passage of their 213

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party’s bill, and in some cases to articulate their refusal to end ­hostilities. In the conclusion to the first edition of Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold looked back not only to the falling of the Hyde Park railings, but also to the widespread disturbances that had taken place almost forty years earlier. He quoted words that his father had written in response to the popular agitation that preceded the passage of the Great Reform Act: “As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!” Offering this advice – a more blood-thirsty version of the joke in Punch about soaping up and hosing down the Great Unwashed in Hyde Park – Arnold indignantly called on fellow believers in “right reason” to help him “strengthen the trembling hands of our … Home Secretaries” so that “monster processions in the streets and forceable irruptions into the parks” can be “unflinchingly forbidden and repressed.”4 Even in 1869 the hapless Spencer Walpole could no more escape Arnold’s ire than he had the contempt of Punch. Bagehot, like Arnold, bemoaned the outcome of the political battles of the 1860s. Writing in 1872 the introduction to the second edition of The English Constitution, he looked forward to a future in which the conflict between classes would dominate legislative issues. On those grounds alone, as he had predicted earlier, the year 1867 had given Britain a “greater revolution” than had 1832. Deploring “a political combination of the lower classes” as “an evil of the first magnitude” because it would mean “the supremacy of ignorance over instruction and of numbers over knowledge,” he imagined that the ensuing encounters between higher and lower “orders” would become battles that the former, foolish enough to choose to fight, would inevitably lose to the latter, as they had in 1867. In place of the analogies that he usually drew from the commonplace happenings of daily life, servants in kitchens or carriages on streets, he summed up the effects of the triumphant reform movement in an article for The Economist as if he were Bright speaking in 1848 of a beleaguered garrison: much as democracy is strengthened by the new Reform, it is much more strengthened by the method of attaining that Reform. The Conservative party relinquished the citadel without a fight. A petty tumult in Hyde Park, a few speeches, none of much value – some tears from Mr. Walpole, and the aristocracy gave way. Lord Derby, whose special task [it was] by his own statement to prevent democracy, established democracy. After this triumph, innovators believe that they can have what they wish, and they will attack with the vigour of men who have just won and who mean to win again; while the Conservatives will defend like men who have just lost, and lost not after an heroic struggle, but meanly and by surrender.5

The forces of innovation, supported by those who should have defeated them, will reign now that the “citadel” has fallen. In another reversal of what one might expect from Ruskin, the selfproclaimed “violent Tory of the old school” wrote of the changed

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circumstances  of the 1870s in less hyperbolic terms, turning Arnold’s and Bagehot’s military language into a celebration of physical force that extended even to the realm of art. In Ariadne Florentina, a series of lectures delivered in 1872, he defined the “ethical characters” of wood engraving by declaring, “It is Athletic; and it is Resolute.” He continued to condemn volunteer drills as wasted time, particularly when it was time spent disturbing his peace at Denmark Hill with a noise that sounded like the beating of carpets. Yet he urged all men to undertake arduous “hand-labour” – “ploughing and counter-ploughing” instead of “this volunteer marching and counter-marching.” In Munera Pulveris (1872), he went so far as to insist that most agricultural labor should be done by men of the “upper classes,” who would gain from such efforts health and “repose” from their mental labors. Like the road-building outside Oxford undertaken by his students, Oscar Wilde as improbably among them as Rossetti had been among the early ranks of the volunteers, such endeavors would allow genteel laborers to “feel the pleasures of useful muscular work.” As the Graphic reported in a memorable engraving, Ruskin was, as he claimed in Fors Clavigera, one of the “reddest of the red”6 when he championed a new form of equality between the well-to-do and their supposed social inferiors by turning gentlemen into “amateur navvies,” as the ILN had done in 1862. Elsewhere, however, inequalities became more marked. Those responsible for designing and engraving pictures for the press felt the increasingly evident results of the trends of the 1860s. John Tenniel’s work for Punch in the remaining decades of the century had by 1893 established him as the first “black-and-white” artist worthy of a knighthood.7 Conversely, the trade of wood engraving would be by that time long rendered obsolete by new technologies of mechanical reproduction, although in the near term masters like Swain and the Dalziel brothers continued to prosper. The deskilling of most wood engravers, however, which had begun shortly after the Victorian mid century, quickened its pace before the demise of their craft. Rank-and-file workers in this trade were asked to do more specialized but more rudimentary tasks, such as “skies” or “draperies” or “backgrounds.” As a commentator at the time noted, no one man in a particular engraving shop could execute all the different portions of a single design.8 Slavery, not battle, struck Ruskin as the appropriate metaphor for such developments. In Ariadne Florentina he memorably denounced the abjection of workers in the engraving trade, who were required to make mindlessly “1050 square holes to the square inch”: “Mrs. Beecher Stowe and the North Americans fancy they have abolished slavery!” As only one instance of the degeneration that Ruskin saw all around him, illustrated books and newspapers were the products of an “art industry … enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob.”9

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More promising beginnings in the world of high art continued to go awry. In 1869 a committee of painters was appointed to review the progress or lack thereof in the decoration of the Houses of Parliament – hardly the new palace after more than twenty years in existence  – and they recommended that work on the frescos there be continued. Yet, as one MP pointed out, painting pictures in that medium was like tossing money into the Thames, what with “Blucher nearly obliterated and the Duke of Wellington’s nose dropping off.” Similarly, the long-lived Hayter despaired because he incorrectly thought that his undervalued The House of Commons, 1833 was a “total ruin.”10 To some MPs the increasingly wide divide between history painting and parliamentary politics would have been made welcome by their recent dealings with the Royal Academy. A commission had been appointed in 1863 to investigate its practices, and its 557-page report offered a series of recommendations that would have been transformative, including making the RA a government department and adding to its membership “art-workmen” (artisans of “great excellence in metal, stone, wood, and other materials”).11 Yet once again the RA proved too powerful for the House of Commons, and the academy maintained its independence, succumbing to only the most minor of the commission’s proposed reforms. In 1867 on the occasion of the dinner marking the opening of its annual exhibition, the one at which Poynter’s Israel in Egypt was shown, Punch playfully reported on Lord Derby’s speech. Sounding as if he were channeling the spirits of his colleague Lord Melbourne from back in the days of the First Reform Act and the MP Spooner in 1859, the ageing politician proudly admitted that he knew nothing about art, but he did know that it was a “nuisance when it turn[s] up in Parliament”: those defending its cause invariably want money for such things as murals and schools and museums. In fact, the PM concluded, “Art” should be “tabooed in Parliament altogether, and left to the Cottonocracy” (May 18, 1867: 199–200). How thoroughly Derby was to get his wish is illustrated by the last analytic encounter that I stage in this study, one that brings together the careers, during the last three decades of the century, of Ford Madox Brown and Sir Edward Poynter. This conjunction should be a simple opposition. Poynter, like Hayter but much more successfully so, worked within government institutions, and his rise in the art world was signaled by his early appointment as ARA in 1869, followed by RA in 1876, and finally, the highest status possible, PRA in 1896. That year he was also knighted, before being raised to the rank of baronet just one year later. Poynter’s other honors and governmental positions were many: Slade professor at University College, London; director of the National Art Training School at South Kensington; director of the National Gallery. From none of these loci of power could Brown expect support. As he movingly wrote in his diary for 1854, “What chance is there for me out of all the Bodies, Institutions,

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Art unions & accademies [sic] & Commissions of this country, Classes sects or cotteries, Nobles dealers patrons [or] rich men.” When, as the reviewer for Blackwood’s noted, Poynter was “tak[ing] the world by surprise” with Israel in Egypt at the RA, Brown was exhibiting a painting at the relatively new and decidedly “tolerant” Dudley Gallery, a venue both for the efforts of youthful, “half-fledged artists” and for the “mature work” of painters unlikely to be granted “fair-play … where old vested interests preside.”12 Yet, however differently Brown and Poynter were treated by such “old vested interests,” their artistic endeavors testify to the “taboo” in “Parliament altogether” of painting as a public art. Too young to have suffered from “the fresco ordeal” of the competitions sponsored by the Fine Arts Commission in the 1840s, Poynter was drawn into the project of decorating the Palace of Westminster in 1869 when he designed for it a mosaic depicting St. George. The resulting work made no one happy, least of all the artist himself, who found the technical problems of his medium as challenging as earlier artists had found painting in fresco. As a policeman who worked in the building put it bluntly, St. George was a failure: “the dragon looked like a pig.” Poynter’s second and final design for the Houses of Parliament, this time for an image of St. David, was not completed until 1898.13 Thankfully, Poynter had other, more profitable outlets for his gifts. Perhaps his finest achievement was a commission for the creation of four murals to line the walls of the billiard room of the Earl of Wharncliffe, a project that therefore combined painting and interior design. Exhibited at the RA in the 1870s, these murals typify the trend evident by the 1860s: state sponsorship of art objects intended to glorify the nation by gracing public buildings was being replaced by commissions from wealthy individuals who wanted to install in their homes images celebrating the distinction and power of their families. Poynter completed this domestic mural project by painting a portrait of the Earl of Wharncliffe in his hunting attire and by designing the decorations of the ceiling of the billiard room, thereby confirming the point made by Blackwood’s back in 1867: the talents of “English artists” are now suited to “depict the life of the individual” rather than the “destiny of the nation.”14 While Poynter rarely looked to the MPs of Westminster for direct support of his art, Brown found his buyers, as Derby hoped all artists would, among the industrial and banking magnates of the Cottonocracy. He sold his paintings to men from Leeds and Newcastle and Manchester; he exhibited in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, winning what prizes he was awarded in provincial competitions. Most telling in this regard is the well-known story of Brown’s completion between 1878 and 1893 of twelve murals for the Manchester Town Hall. The arguments that he had with his civic sponsors over subjects, compensation, and the quality of the murals themselves lasted until the year of his death. As Brown lamented, “What

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chance remains of a Common Council deciding reasonably on matters of art?”15 Most revealing of the rupture between public art and parliamentary politics was the identity of the proposed subject that created the most controversy: the massacre of Peterloo. The representation of this early episode in the fight for an extended franchise caused “heated debate” among the members of the City Council because it was seen as “still politically live,” as Julian Treuherz explains. To no one’s surprise, the painting of this subject was vetoed.16 The mural project, on which Brown labored for more years than he had dedicated to the completion of Work, yielded some vividly imagined scenes, whose meanings, however, remain largely mysterious.17 Like Eastlake writing on fresco or Ruskin on the educative virtues of wood engraving, Brown believed that “Subjects for Art have to be ‘selfexplanatory.’”18 Although these murals did not attain such simplicity, this commission did offer Brown the chance to have put on permanent public display his special brand of history painting, a goal that he had sought in vain in 1845 from the Fine Arts Commission and again from the Ministry of Works in the 1870s.19 The town fathers of Manchester had finally done what the British government refused to do. Finally, this mural project, as if to provide what is almost the last word in this study, also gave Brown an opportunity to make the current Earl of Derby experience personally a reversal of the effects of the taboo that his father had longed to see in place in 1867. When the artist was told in 1879 that his services were needed to show his paintings to the Conservative aristocrat who, as Lord Stanley, had urged Disraeli in 1867 to introduce a franchise reform bill, Brown simply refused. As he recorded in a letter, “To-day Sir Joseph [Heron] and the Mayor wanted to bring Lord Derby to see the work. However, that was too much. I could not be shown as one of the sights, so his lordship had to go through unenlightened as to my noble self. One must draw the line somewhere.”20 If only momentarily, Brown effected an exchange, turning “his lordship” into the inferior of the artist’s “noble self.” Brown knew whereof he spoke. In a culture all about lines, as the political controversies of the previous decades had demonstrated, they have to be drawn somewhere. What matters most, in both picturing and enacting suffrage reform, is where those lines are placed, whom they exclude – as Lord Derby might have had to realize during his visit to Manchester – or whom they include. When Punch was still in its infancy, it looked forward to the year 2000 when readers would be finding in its pages evidence about the past that was then the paper’s present. In the final reversal that I point to here, it might be more accurate to say that people who now look back at Punch and, along with it, the ILN will discover prophecies of their present. In that sense, the Second Reform Act is again the first, the one that not only established but also foretold the continued prominence of a particular and even peculiar form of visual politics based on often startlingly

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heterogeneous images. From this perspective, the most lastingly ­significant feature of Punch and the ILN is the mingling or mixing of a wide variety of topics of apparently incommensurate significance. Although these papers in the 1860s also demonstrated the growing dominance of image over word,21 the diversity of their subjects, as they were recorded in both words and images, created odd juxtapositions – pictures of industrial disasters and portraits of the rich or distinguished, the opening of Parliament and pretty little girls, trophies and wayward urchins, household objects and national icons. The seemingly countless representational encounters that resulted from such heterogeneity define the innovative form of these illustrated newspapers and therefore the nature of the political messages that they conveyed. Without its visual depictions of the volunteers and the conventions that it developed to depict crowds, the ILN could scarcely have served as the effective champion of franchise reform that it became. Without its barrage of jokes about the upending of hierarchy in episodes from everyday life, Punch could not have made working-class character so incisively the politically charged subject that it came to be in its pages. This form of visual politics now has influence, not in streets or meeting halls or parks, but on all kinds of digital screens. It determines the way in which people learn about debates over public policies and electoral campaigns when those debates are conducted, as almost all of them are, primarily through images that are televised, appear on Web sites, or replicate endlessly in the blogosphere. The formula that the ILN and Punch pioneered, the concatenation of the incongruous, was arguably kept alive in magazines like the New Yorker, where du Maurier-like cartoons grace pages on which the text treats conflicts in the Middle East or the cost of mittens on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. More generally and more recently, the form of journalistic visuality that these two Victorian weeklies pioneered during the 1840s and 1850s and 1860s becomes stronger and more diverse with every passing day. Now as then, matters conventionally deemed serious coexist with the trivia that help to shape how those matters are understood: on shows featuring the talking heads of the 24/7 news channels and Web sites like YouTube, video reports on national and international politics – not to mention images of war, poverty, and disease – vie for attention with pictures of products, celebrities, petty crimes, and curiosities. What kinds of political messages are now being sent by floods of heterogeneous images entering the consciousnesses or, more likely, ­passing seemingly unnoticed before viewers’ eyes week after week is a question that will not be answered soon. One thing, however, is clear: in the words of Trollope’s worker, Punch and the Illustrated London News were the first to “make ’em see” in quite this way.

Notes

Introduction Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. Miles Taylor (Oxford University Press, 2001), 34. All references to The English Constitution cite this reprinting of the first book edition of 1867, rather than the shorter and rearranged second edition of 1872. On the 1872 text, see Norman St. John-Stevas, ed., The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 15 vols. (London: Economist, 1965–86), 5: 162–63. On Bagehot’s theories, see Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford University Press, 1995), 171–77; Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago University Press, 1998), 101–15. 2 The literature on Victorian visuality is vast. For overviews, see Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, eds., Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830– 1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 2. Classic studies include Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 3 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 107–16, 80–99, ch. 6. 4 For examples of analysis of similar images, see Peter W. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); three studies by Brian Maidment: Reading Popular Prints 1790–1870 (Manchester University Press, 1996); Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870 (Manchester University Press, 2007); “The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving,” in The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (London: Palgrave, 2009), 17–39; Tim Barringer, “Images of Otherness and the Visual Production of Difference: Race and Labour in Illustrated Texts, 1850–1865,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 34–52; and Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997). On the Victorian periodical press, see Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, “Pictures from the Magazines,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, 1

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ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 2: 559–82; Lyn Pykett, “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan, 1990), 4, 11; Margaret Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” also in Investigating Victorian Journalism, 29–30; Andrew King, “A Paradigm of Reading in the Victorian Penny Weekly: Education of the Gaze and the London Journal,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 80–85; Brake and Demoor, “Introduction,” The Lure of Illustration, 1–13. 5 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 15: 162–63, 117–18; 6: 132. See Elizabeth K. Helsinger on Ruskin’s “reading” of works of art (Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], ch. 7). Bagehot, English Constitution, 7, 9. 6 Particularly relevant are Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chs. 8 and 9; and Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), ch. 9; Homans, Royal Representations, ch. 3. Cf. Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in NineteenthCentury Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 13–19. 7 Ruskin, Works, 15: 162. 8 Thomas Erskine May, A Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings, and Usages of Parliament, 5th edn. (London: Butterworths, 1863), 2. 9 On popular constitutionalism as the “master-narrative of nineteenth-century English politics,” see Vernon, Politics and the People, ch. 8. This image is reproduced and commented upon by Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 349–50. 10 Punch and the ILN are cited in the text by date and page number. For the historiography of both acts, see Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 (London: Palgrave, 2009), 1–9; Vernon, Politics and the People, 1–6. For the geographical limitations of most accounts, see Eric J. Evans, Parliamentary Reform in Britain, c. 1770–1918 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 31–32. 11 These numbers are the estimates offered by Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 424; Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870, 3rd edn. (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 483; D. G. Wright, Democracy and Reform, 1815–1885 (Harlow: Longmans, 1970), 140; K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 253; Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832–1885 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), 281. 12 Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 84; Wright, Democracy and Reform, 50, 81; Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The

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Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 380, n1; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 281, 282. 13 Parry, Rise and Fall, 78; Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 238. For a comparable shift in Russell’s views, see Parry, 5, 76, 209. 14 Quoted by Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 254. Wahrman rightly counsels against conflating such “representations” and “social reality” (18, 6, 356, 381; ch. 11 passim). 15 On the importance of redistricting and the county franchise, see S. J. Thompson, “‘Population Combined with Wealth and Taxation’: Statistics, Representation and the Making of the 1832 Reform Act,” in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (New York: Routledge, 2011), 205–23; Parry, Rise and Fall, 5, 81–84, 212; Wright, Democracy and Reform, 49–50, 80; Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 434–35; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 67–79; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 45, 332–36; F. B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 219–25, 238; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London: Longmans, 1959), x–xi; Robert Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 259–61. 16 For arguments against assertions that the 1832 act had as its goal or effect the enfranchisement of middle-class men, see Parry, Rise and Fall, 86; Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 432–34; M. G. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1973), 152. 17 MP in 1830s quoted by Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–1850 (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1953), 88; MP in 1860s quoted by Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 201. For Disraeli’s use of the term household suffrage, see Seymour, Electoral Reform, 258. 18 Public General Acts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1832), 2 Wm. IV, c. 45. 19 F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 168. 20 John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd edn. (London: John Churchill, 1855), 38. 21 Public General Acts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Anno Regni Victoriae, Britanniarum Reginae, Tricesimo (1867), 30 & 31 Vict. c. 102. For “ordinary occupier,” see Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 252. On the borough qualifications of both acts, see Seymour, Electoral Reform, 34–44, 258–72. 22 Gladstone, Hansard, 175: 325; Palmerston quoted by Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 433. 23 Grey quoted by Matthew McCormack, ed., Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8; Gladstone quoted by Lowe, Hansard, 182: 2089. On the standard set by Grey and Gladstone, see Matthew McCormack, “‘Married Men and the Fathers of Families’: Fatherhood and Franchise Reform in Britain,” Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43–54. See also Anna Clark,

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“Gender, Class, and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–1928,” in Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 239; Vernon, Politics and the People, 311; Keith McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man,’” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98–99; Wright, Democracy and Reform, 34–35. 24 Bright, Hansard, 186: 637. See Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 117; Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 268–75; Pamela K. Gilbert, The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), chs. 2 and 3. 25 Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class (312) citing R. Harrison, Before the Socialists (133). For a working-class perspective on such similarities, see [Norwich Operative], A Voice from the Millions! (1847), reprinted in History of the Suffrage 1760–1867, ed. Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), 4: 379–96. 26 Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, ch. 7; Gilbert, Citizen’s Body, ch. 1; Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 238–39. For different views on the relation between individuals and numbers, see Gilbert (20–21) and Elaine Hadley, “Re-Living Liberalism,” Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 313. 27 Poster quoted by John Hostettler and Brian P. Block, Voting in Britain: A History of the Parliamentary Franchise (Chichester: Barry Rose, 2001), 179; Macaulay quoted by Wright, Democracy and Reform, 118; cf. Earl Grey quoted by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 817; Brougham and Poor Man’s Guardian quoted by Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 322. 28 Palmerston quoted by Ian Machin, The Rise of Democracy in Britain, 1830–1918 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2001), 56. 29 Bagehot, English Constitution, 33, 41, 9; Ruskin, Works, 15: 116–17. Cf. Bagehot, “‘True Liberalism’ and Reform,” Works, 6: 357–60. 30 Ruskin, Works, 15: 176. 31 The second edition of A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861); John Jackson and W. A. Chatto include a footnote (584) from the first edition of 1839 to explain that skies are “now” typically “engraved by means of a machine invented by Mr. John Parkhouse.” On ruling machines and tint tools, see Bamber Gascoigne, How to Identify Prints: A Complete Guide to Manual and Mechanical Processes from Woodcut to Inkjet, 2nd edn. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), sec. 62. Geoffrey Wakeman points out that ruling machines are as much “hand-operated devices” as “drawing instruments” (Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution [Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973], 28). Cf. Frankie Morris, Artist of Wonderland: The Life, Political Cartoons, and Illustrations of Tenniel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 108. 32 Cf. Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engraving. 33 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50. Cf. Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table

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Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010), 3–4, 44–45. 34 Altick, Punch, 35, 37. These figures are all estimates. Cf. Leary, Punch Brotherhood, 160–61; Alvar Ellegård, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain ii. Directory,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 13 (1971), 20; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 394. Altick gives helpful comparative figures: the Penny Magazine sold 40,000 in 1843, and The Times, 40,000 copies a day in 1850 (Punch, 35–36). On the technological and legislative changes that made such sales possible, see Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 8–11. 35 Linton quoted by Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 187. 36 Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences, intro. James Thorne, 3 vols. (London: Knight, 1873), 3: 247, 264. 37 ILN, September 29, 1860: 285; Punch quoted by Altick, Punch, xviii; on the ILN, Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 9. On texts from the 1860s that treat images as an “index of society,” see Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 372, 404; ch. 8, passim; on Ruskin, see Haskell, 309–30. See also Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), especially 187–88; Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird, eds., History beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge, 2009), especially the essays by Sarah Barber, “Fine Art: The Creative Image,” 15–31, and by Frank Palmeri, “The Cartoon: The Image as Critique,” 32–48. 38 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), ch. 2; Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), ch. 2. 39 On the cost of these prints, see H. T. Dickinson, Caricatures and the Constitution, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), 15. 40 William Makepeace Thackeray, “Pictures of Life and Character by John Leech” (1854) in The Oxford Thackeray, ed. George Saintsbury, 17 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 2: 710. See Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, M. Dorothy George (London: British Museum, 1978), 11: xx– xlvii. On the decline of such satire, see Altick, Punch, 3–4, 9; Frank Palmeri, “Cruikshank, Thackeray, and the Victorian Eclipse of Satire,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 44 (2004): 753–77; Leary, Punch Brotherhood, 11–12, 39–41. 41 Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland, 1988), chs. 6 and 7; Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 19–20; H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887), 2: 295, 299; Brake and Demoor, Lure, 2–3. 42 See, for example, the 1840 broadsheet recording the wedding of Victoria and Albert reprinted by Louis James, Print and the People 1819–1851 (London: Allen

Notes to pages 14–21

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Lane, 1976), 345. On Punch’s relation to earlier comic journals, see Bourne, English Newspapers, 2: 298–99. 43 Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trűbner, 1893), 302–4. See Altick, Punch, ch. 1, on the paper’s influence. 44 Thomas Wright, Our New Masters (London: Strahan, 1873), 313. Bagehot quoted by Alastair Buchan, The Spare Chancellor: The Life of Walter Bagehot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 86; English Constitution, 17, 18, 46, 101, 33. Punch seems to be the only paper besides The Times to which Bagehot refers in The English Constitution: according to Miles Taylor, Bagehot’s two comments on “our great satirist” (24, 76) probably refer to Punch (208, 211). 45 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 290, 7, 139. 46 For a good account of the conditions prevailing in 1842, see Altick, introduction to Past and Present, which he rightly calls an “occasional piece” (xi). See also Altick, Punch, ch. 7; Parry, Rise and Fall, 141–42. 47 See two different collections: Martin Hewitt, ed., An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Ian Inkster et al., eds. The Golden Age: Essays in British Social and Economic History 1850–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). See contemporaries and subsequent historians on this period as a time of relative prosperity and social consensus: London Times of 1865, reprinted in G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 109, cf. 83; W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (New York: Norton, 1965), 17, 48–49, 331; Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, 1783–1867: The Age of Improvement (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), ch. 8; Ian Inkster, “Introduction: A Lustrous Age?” in Golden Age, 2, 5; and in a more qualified form, Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 13, 67, 234, 278; Harold Perkin, “‘Nor all that Glitters …’: The Not so Golden Age,” in Inkster et al., Golden Age, 9, 21, 24; Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 120. On Burn’s conception of “the age of equipoise,” see Hewitt, “Prologue,” Age of Equipoise?; Roland Quinault, “Democracy and the Mid-Victorians,” in Age of Equipoise? 109–21. 48 Bagehot, English Constitution, 25; Ruskin, Works, 15: 191. 49 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Westport: Greenwood, 1975), 317; The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 54. 50 See my Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11–12. Cf. Bailey, Popular Culture, 43, 45. Mary Cowling treats at length the cross-class meetings depicted in Frith’s Derby Day (The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art [Cambridge University Press, 1989], 319–27). 51 Buchan, Spare Chancellor, 206–7. 52 Brontë quoted by Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 60. 53 Brian Howard Harrison, The Transformation of the British Political System, 1860–1995 (Oxford University Press, 1996), 15. 54 Bagehot, English Constitution, 8. 55 Ruskin, Works, 15: 196–98. 56 Ibid., 35: 13; cf. 34: 507 and 36: 239.

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Notes to pages 21–24

57 For other analytic encounters, see my Common Scents, passim. On the lack of a clear distinction between words and images, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See also Meisel, Realizations, ch. 4; Curtis, Visual Words, chs. 1 and 2; Robert L. Patten, “Serial Illustration and Storytelling in David Copperfield,” The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 91–92; Herbert F. Tucker, “Literal Illustration in Victorian Print,” in Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Maxwell, 163–208; Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). On the use in paintings of various kinds of text, see Richard D. Altick, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985); Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), ch. 3; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton University Press, 2008). On Pre-Raphaelite instances, see Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, 150. 58 Cf. Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 4–12. 59 Holman Hunt quoted by Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting: Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene (London: Andreas Papadakis, 2000), 147. 60 Ruskin, Works, 15: 79. On Ruskin’s complex attitudes toward engraving, see Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton University Press, 2000), 195; Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 74–79. 61 Barringer, “Images,” 35. For a typical dismissal of these media, see Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, 175. 62 The term facsimile men is from M. H. Spielmann’s account of Swain’s shop (The History of “Punch” [New York: Cassell, 1895], 248); the term mechanical is quoted by Fox, Graphic Journalism, 60–61. For the processes involved in wood engraving, see Raymond Lister, Prints and Printmaking: A Dictionary and Handbook of the Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1984), ch. 4; Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, ch. 2; Morris, Artist of Wonderland, ch. 10. For twentieth-century dismissals of commercial wood engraving, see Lister, 34; Rodney K. Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1985), 154; Celina Fox, “The Engravers’ Battle for Professional Recognition in Early Nineteenth Century London,” London Journal 2 (1976): 8–9; Wolff and Fox, “Pictures,” 563–64; Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1987), 53–54. In many nineteenth-century and some twentiethcentury accounts, including Ruskin’s, the terms woodcut and wood engraving are used interchangeably, a fact that can lead to significant confusion. 63 Linton quoted by Fox, Graphic Journalism, 59. William M. Ivins, Jr., How Prints Look: Photographs with Commentary, ed. Marjorie B. Cohn, rev. edn. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 160. Leech and Tenniel typically both praised and blamed the engravers of their images: Simon Houfe, John Leech and the Victorian Scene (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1984), 134; Spielmann, History of “Punch,” 252; Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 114–15, 117.

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64 Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 80–81. For definitions of illustration that assert its primacy, see Richard Maxwell, “Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book,” Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Maxwell, 1–2; Patten, “Serial Illustration,” Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Maxwell, 91–92; cf. Meisel, Realizations, ch. 2. 65 Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engraving, 549. Cf. Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 317. Sinnema also points out that the same men were often designers and engravers, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 53. 66 Engen, Dictionary. 67 Ibid., 252; Fox, “Engravers’ Battle,” 3–8. 68 Census of Great Britain. 1851. Population Tables II. Ages, Civil Conditions, Occupations and Birth-place of the People (PP, 1854), 1: cxxxii, cxliii. See also Gordon Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750–1950 [London: Leicester University Press, 2000], 10, 103). 69 For the perspective of working-class participants, see Frances Elma Gillespie, Labor and Politics in England, 1850–1867 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1927), ch. 9; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, ch. 3; and McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man,’” in Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, ch. 2; Paul Foot, The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined (London: Viking, 2005), part 1. Like the conception of the middle classes constructed during the debates on the 1832 Reform Act, “a charged and contingent historical invention” (Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 408), ideas about the working classes in the 1860s were often imaginative formulations responsive to the needs of the moment. Cf. Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 5–7. On types, see Mary Cowling, Artist as Anthropologist, 190– 208, 272–316; on visual stereotypes, see Bailey, Popular Culture, 50. 70 Classic accounts of relations between art and politics are T. J. Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic 1848–1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), which points out that the years on either side of 1850 were a time when “the State, the public, and the critics saw political sense and intention” in art (9); and John Barrell’s The Political Theory of Painting from Reynold to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), which relates the “republic of the fine arts” to “civic humanism” (1). Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd extend Barrell’s argument into the nineteenth century (“Introduction,” Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000], 3–4). See also Nicholas M. Pearson, The State and the Visual Arts: A Discussion of State Intervention in the Visual Arts in Britain, 1760–1981 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), ch. 2–6; Gordon Fyfe, Art, Power, and Modernity, ch. 1 and 4. 71 Ruskin, Works, 19: 137. 72 T. S. R. Boase, “The Decoration of the New Palace of Westminster, 1841– 1863,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 17 (1954): 357. 73 Ruskin, Works, 15: 118. 1  Art as politics: lines in theory and practice 1 R. C. Terry, A Trollope Chronology (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1983), 66. Cf. N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 334; John

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Notes to pages 27–31

Sutherland, ed., Phineas Finn, the Irish Member (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 3, 5–37. 2 Trollope, Phineas Finn, the Irish Member, ed. Jacques Berthoud (Oxford University Press, 1991), 1: 153. 3 Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 338. On whether Monk’s letter represents Trollope’s views: see Hall, Trollope, 335; Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, 211. 4 Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 335–36. 5 Gladstone, Hansard, 186: 487. 6 Hutton, Studies in Parliament: A Series of Sketches of Leading Politicians (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 7. 7 Ruskin, Works, 22: 363; 33: 356. On the lines that constitute both words and images, see G. Curtis, Visual Words, ch. 1, especially his point about “wood engraving with its essence of line” (17). 8 “Art and Politics,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 100 (1866): 194. Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 128; Hoock, “Reforming Culture: National Art Institutions in the Age of Reform,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 266–70. On Victorian analogies between art and politics, see William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979), 4–7; Hoock, “Reforming Culture,” 268–70. 9 Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity, 91; Barlow and Trodd, “Introduction,” Governing Cultures, 8. See also Sidney C. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy 1768–1986 (London: Robert Royce, 1986), passim. 10 Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Their Connexion with Manufactures (PP, 1836), ii, viii. 11 Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Their Connexion with Manufactures, Minutes of Evidence, 169. See Colin Trodd, “Representing the Victorian Royal Academy: The Properties of Culture and the Promotion of Art,” in Barlow and Trodd, Governing Cultures, 56–65; Pearson, State and the Visual Arts, 8–10; Hoock, King’s Artists, 29, 34; Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity, 77–78, 82. 12 Archer Shee quoted by Hoock, King’s Artists, 305 and Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity, 82. 13 Carlyle quoted in Trollope, The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. N. John Hall, 2 vols. (Stanford University Press, 1983), 1: 305 n4; Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? ed. Stephen Wall (London: Penguin, 1972), 480. For comparisons of Bagehot and Trollope, see John Halperin, Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (London: Macmillan, 1977), 17–18; Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851–67 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), ch. 4; Sutherland, Phineas Finn, 737; Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, 210. 14 My thanks to Catherine Roach for pointing out this shift. For a very different reading of Monk’s theories, see Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 276–78. 15 Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 336. Trollope added in manuscript to Monk’s criticism of “they who are adverse to change” the words “and [they] forget the present in their worship of the past” (1: 336) as a way perhaps of countering the reactionary tendencies in this letter (Chauncey Brewster Tinker Manuscript Collection, 468, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, Yale University). Cf. Sutherland, Phineas Finn, 728.

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16 Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, ch. 6; Kristin Zimmerman, “Liberal Speech, Palmerstonian Delay, and the Passage of the Second Reform Act,” English Historical Review 118 (2003): 1176–1207. 17 Quoted by Katherine Coombs, The Portrait Miniature in England (London: V&A Publications, 1998), 117; cf. Graham Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures, rev. edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 173, 175–76. 18 Ruskin, Works, 15: 176. 19 See George Henry Lewes, “Seeing is Believing,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 88 (1860), 381. On the shift from mechanical to organic conceptions to vision, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Wolfgang Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 110–11. Crary’s stress on nineteenth-century theories about the fallibility of sight requires qualification. See Flint, Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 14–19, 25; Susan R. Horton, “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Christ and Jordon, 1–26. 20 Sir David Brewster, “The Sight and How to See” [“Vision in Health and Disease”], North British Review 26.51 (November 1856): 158. Recent scientific research has confirmed Brewster’s speculation. See Reinhard Niederée and Dieter Heyer, “The Dual Nature of Picture Perception: A Challenge to Current General Accounts of Visual Perception,” in Looking into Pictures: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pictorial Space, ed. Heiko Hecht, Robert Schwartz and Margaret Atherton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 90: “the perceived depth pertaining to perceived pictorial space is markedly more distinctive or pronounced, when pictures are viewed monocularly.” 21 Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 201. 22 Ruskin, Works, 15: 27–28n; cf. 215, n1. Cf. Niederée and Heyer, “Dual Nature,” 85. 23 Ruskin, Works, 19: 139. Again, recent research confirms Ruskin’s theories: lines occasion powerful physical acts of mental construction through still largely mysterious processes. See Niederée and Heyer, “Dual Nature,” 79–80; John M. Kennedy, Igor Juricevic, and Juan Bai, “Line and Borders of Surfaces: Grouping and Foreshortening,” in Looking into Pictures, ed. Hecht, Schwartz, and Atherton, 321. 24 Cleric quoted by Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 86. Psalms xvi.6. 25 See, for instance, Russell, Hansard, 5: 219. 26 Hansard, 5: 231; 5: 552–53; 3: 676. 27 Hansard, 7: 41; 5: 1353. Seymour, Electoral Reform, 318, 60– 61. Times quoted by Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 172. See also Nancy LoPatin-Lummis, “The 1832 Reform Act Debate: Should the Suffrage Be Based on Property or Taxpaying?” Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 320–45. 28 Gladstone, Hansard, 175: 324; Lowe, Hansard, 182: 145; Disraeli, Hansard, 186: 647–48. The term still appears in current histories of reform: see Catherine Hall, “The Nation Within and Without,” 180, 233. Bagehot, Works, 6: 387. 29 See Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 349–50. 30 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), cover.

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Notes to pages 36–41

31 Among the many comments on this formation, see Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 49; Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991), 123; Gregory Dart, “The Reworking of Work,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 72, 85; Martin A. Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 96. 32 Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London: Noel Carrington, 1947), 148. Cf. G. Curtis, Visual Words, 81; versus Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown, 123. 33 For John Bull, see Catalogue, George, 11: BM 15707. For these objects, see M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature, 1793–1832: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 5, 175, 13, 16, 69, 217, 224; H. T. Dickinson, Caricatures and the Constitution, pl. 132 (BM 16404); Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 149. 34 For these engravings, see Catalogue, George, 7: BM 8424; 11: BM 15549; 10: BM 13559. 35 Bagehot, English Constitution, 189–90. 36 F. S. P. Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, Election Committees, and Registration, 10th edn. (London: Stevens and Sons, 1865), 164–77. 37 David Power, The Law of Qualification and Registration of Parliamentary Electors in England and Wales (London: S. Sweet, 1847), 23, 57–58. 38 This confusion was not remedied by the Second Reform Act: see Gladstone, Hansard, 182: 46; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 67, 201; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 255 n3. One handbook gives completely contradictory definitions of this term: Edward W. Cox, The Law and Practice of Registration and Elections (London: J. Crockford, 1851), 2, 80. 39 Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, 70, 65–66, 89; Power 25, 41, 50. 40 Oldfield, Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland, reprinted H. J. Hanham, ed., The Nineteenth-Century Constitution 1815–1914: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 260–61. Cf. Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 15–22, 110–24. 41 Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, ed. Elisabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1998), 436. Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 21. See Seymour, Electoral Reform, 24–35, 285; Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 27; Parry, Rise and Fall, 86. 42 Maurice Cowling, 1867, 53; J. R. Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 15. 43 August 17, 1831, Lord Althorp, Hansard, 6: 171 Macaulay quoted by Wright, Democracy and Reform, 117; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 34; Mill, Considerations of Representative Government, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 32 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), 19: 471. 44 Seymour, Electoral Reform, 146. Cf. Philip Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2002), 192–94. 45 Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, 59; Electoral Returns. Boroughs and Counties, 1865–66 (PP, 1866), 175. For other borough-to-borough variations, see John

Notes to pages 41–47

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A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 46 Bagehot, Works, 6: 328. 47 Seymour, Electoral Reform, 38. 48 Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, 181–87; cf. Salmon, Electoral Reform, ch. 6. 49 Electoral Returns, 82, 213. 50 Brown, The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 115, 133, 80 n29; Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown, 78; Brown, Diary, 132, 142. 51 Abstract Returns of the Number of Houses of the Value of £.10 and Upwards, in England and Wales, Returning a Member or Members to Serve in Parliament; and of the Number of Persons Omitted from the Lists of Voters in 1846 for Nonpayment of Assessed Taxes (PP, 1847), 9, 3; Electoral Returns, 175, 125. 52 I have ignored here a host of complications. The boundaries of electoral districts, for instance, did not always correspond to those of parishes; the borough of Finsbury included within its borders parts of five parishes (Public General Acts, 2 Wm. IV, c. 45, Schedule O). A boundary commission was created to reduce some of this chaos: Report of the Boundary Commissioners for England and Wales (PP, 1868). 53 On compounding, see Homersham Cox, A History of the Reform Bills of 1866 and 1867 (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 126–28; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 171–72, 195–200; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 149, 262–71; cf. Maurice Cowling, 1867, 234–37. 54 Electoral Returns, 125–26. 55 Ibid., 125, 34–36. 56 Seymour, Electoral Reform, 150–52. 57 Return of the Number of Houses Compounded for by Landlords, of the Annual Value of £.6, £.7, £.8, £.9, and £.10, and Upwards, in each Parish in the Metropolitan Boroughs; and the Number of Persons upon the Parliamentary Register 1859 and 1860, in Respect of the Occupation of such Houses (PP, 1860), 3. 58 The following account draws upon and at times simplifies those in: First Reform Act, Public General Acts, 2 Wm. IV, c. 45; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 111–32; Report from the Select Committee on Registration of Voters (PP, 1869), especially iii; Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, 127–56; Power, Law of Qualification, 89, 102, 126; Salmon, Electoral Reform, ch. 1. See also David Cresap Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976), 300–309. 59 Seymour, Electoral Reform, 121; Wolferstan, Rogers on Elections, 156. 60 Electoral Returns, 125; cf. Vernon, Politics and the People, 99–101. For the approximately 70 percent of otherwise eligible men who did not register, see Salmon, Electoral Reform, 22; LoPatin-Lummis, “The 1832 Reform Act Debate,” 340. 61 Peel quoted by Seymour, Electoral Reform, 125; Russell paraphrased, 141. See Brock, Great Reform Act, 326. Cf. Seymour, Electoral Reform, 161–64; Salmon, Electoral Reform, 22, 27. 62 Bagehot, English Constitution, 91, 99; Ruskin, Works 15: 117, 163; Bagehot, 73. 63 Bagehot, English Constitution, 34; Ruskin, Works, 15: 206; Bagehot, 10, 104. 64 Bagehot, English Constitution, 35, 34. 65 Bagehot, English Constitution, 10, 34, 99, 34, 9. Hilton extends Bagehot’s “theatre of politics” (Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? 31–37); cf. Robert Colls,

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Notes to pages 48–65

“After Bagehot: Rethinking the Constitution,” Political Quarterly 78 (2007): 518–26. Moore derides Bagehot’s theories (Politics of Deference, 435). 66 Ruskin, Works, 15: 116–17, 164–211. 67 Ibid., 96, 91. 68 Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 336–37. 69 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, intro. Ernest Mandel; trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 1: 135. For studies of representations of workers, see Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution; Barringer, Men at Work; Huneault, Difficult Subjects, especially 105–10; Maidment, Dusty Bob. 70 R. Arthur Arnold, The History of the Cotton Famine: From the Fall of Sumter to the Passing of the Public Works Act (London: Saunders, Otley, 1864), 74–75. 71 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, London Journal, May 9, 1863: 297. See Mary Cowling, Artist as Anthropologist, 121–36. 72 Engen, Dictionary. Palmer is listed among the “high class engravers” of the “present day” in Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engraving, 557. 73 Caroline Arscott, “Convict Labour: Masking and Interchangeability in Victorian Prison Scenes,” Oxford Art Journal 23 (2000): 124. 74 Arnold, History of the Cotton Famine, 394–422. See Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 181–84. 75 Hansard, 175: 325, 324. 76 See my “Shooting Niagara? Carlyle and Punch in the Late 1860s,” Carlyle Studies Annual 18 (1998): 28. 77 My thanks to Tim Barringer for this point. 78 Quoted by R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 115. 79 Melbourne quoted by Haydon, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Tom Taylor, new edn., ed. Aldous Huxley, 2 vols. (London: Peter Davies, 1926), 2: 572. 2  Pictures on displ ay Sir George Hayter, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Great Historical Picture of the Interior of the British House of Commons, in St. Stephen’s Chapel, at Westminster, in 1833 (London: 1843), vi. 2 Henry G. Clarke, A Critical Examination of the Cartoons, Frescos, and Sculpture, Exhibited in Westminster Hall (London: H. G. Clarke, 1844), vi; cf. John, James, and William Linnell, The Prize Cartoons (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, [1846?]), 5. On this exhibition as the first of its kind, see Emma L. Winter, “German Fresco Painting and the New Houses of Parliament at Westminster, 1834–1851,” Historical Journal 47 (2004): 316; Barlow and Trodd, “Introduction,” Governing Cultures, 5. 3 Art-Union 7 (1845): 293. 4 Daniel Maclise and William Dyce, respectively: Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise: Irish Artist in Victorian London (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), chs. 6 and 7, 260–61; and Marcia Pointon, William Dyce 1806–1864: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 101–15, 143–44, 178. 5 Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford University Press, 1980), 317. 6 Hayter quoted by Richard Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 2 vols. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1973), 1: 526. See also Barbara Coffey Bryant, 1

Notes to pages 66–70

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“Hayter, Sir George (1792–1871),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn. (www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/12785). 7 Hayter quoted by Barbara Coffey, An Exhibition of Drawings by Sir George Hayter 1792–1871 and John Hayter 1800–1895 (London: Morton Morris, 1982), 10. See Joseph Coohill, who identifies Hayter’s view of reform as “organic and orderly” (“Sir George Hayter and The 1833 House of Commons: Politics and  Portraiture in the Reform Period,” British Art Journal 7.3 [Winter 2006/2007]: 58). 8 Hayter quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 528, 526. 9 Hayter, Descriptive Catalogue, v, vi. 10 Parry, Rise and Fall, 78–89. 11 Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1, 8–9. Cf. Vernon, Politics and the People, 298–305; Jonathan Fulcher, “The English People and their Constitution after Waterloo: Parliamentary Reform, 1815–1817,” in Re-Reading the Constitution, ed. Vernon, 61–64; G. H. L. Le May, The Victorian Constitution: Conventions, Usages, and Contingencies (London: Duckworth, 1979), 1–2. 12 A Fable for Ministers, the Grey, Its Rider – & the Wild Fire (1832; Catalogue, George, 11: BM 17032); The Constitution (1770; Catalogue, Stephens, 4: BM 4430); Ayez Pitié de Nous!! (Catalogue, George, 7: BM 9002); The Battle of the Petitions (1829; Catalogue, George, 11: BM 15687). 13 Russell quoted by Robert Saunders, “Lord John Russell and Parliamentary Reform, 1848–67,” English Historical Review 120 (2005), 1294. 14 May, Treatise on the Law, 424. 15 Hayter, Descriptive Catalogue, v, vi. 16 Quoted in review of What the People Ought to Do, Monthly Review (July 1832): 424. For accounts of this debate, see Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 664–71; cf. 24–31; 429–31; Evans, Forging of the Modern State, ch. 24; Evans, Parliamentary Reform, ch. 4. For different positions, see John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1972), 254– 63; Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 324, 346, 348; Seymour, Electoral Reform, ch. 10; O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties, 394–93; Vernon, Politics and the People, 31–45; Salmon, Electoral Reform, 3–11, 238–48; Roberts, Political Movements, 17–21, 161–63; Burns and Innes, “Introduction,” Rethinking the Age of Reform, 46–54; Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 210–13; Thomas Ertman, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and British Democritization,” Comparative Political Studies 43 (2010): 1000–1022; LoPatin-Lummis, “1832 Reform Act Debate,” 343–45. 17 George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 247; Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 387. 18 Hayter, Descriptive Catalogue, vi. 19 Evans gives the figures of 483 Whigs to 175 Tories (Forging of the Modern State, 487) as does Hilton (Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 422), but this estimate of the extent of Whig victories is probably high since it includes advocates of Irish repeal and Radicals.

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Notes to pages 70–84

20 Hayter quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 526. 21 Hayter, Descriptive Catalogue, vi, vii. 22 See the pitiless caricature of Marcus Curtius, in both word and image, that appeared in Punch (May 6, 1843: 192) and the praise from the ILN (April 8, 1843: 250). See John Barrell on this painting as a “protestation” against the FAC that embodies Haydon’s ideals about history painting (“Benjamin Robert Haydon: The Curtius of Khyber Pass,” Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700–1850, ed. John Barrell [Oxford University Press, 1992], 265–70; 261–62, 270–76). Hayter, Descriptive Catalogue, vii. 23 Benjamin Robert Haydon, Description of Two Pictures, i. The Banishment of Aristeides, and ii. The Burning of Rome by Nero (London: Wilson and Ogilvy, 1846). For Haydon’s account of Hayter’s painting, see The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–63), 5: 259. 24 Haydon quoted by Eric George, The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786–1846 (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 210. 25 Haydon, Description of Haydon’s Picture of the Reform Banquet (London, 1834); Clarke Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon: Historical Painter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1952), 197. 26 Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, 196. 27 Coohill, “Sir George Hayter,” 60. Cf. Asa Briggs, Making of Modern England, 270. 28 Hayter quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 529. 29 Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, 107. 30 Altick, Shows of London, 413, 251, 260–61, 409–10. 31 George, Life and Death, 209; Fraser’s quoted by Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, 196–97. Coffey, Exhibition, 12. 32 “Sir George Hayter’s Historical Pictures,” Times, April 4, 1843: 3; Athenaeum, April 8, 1843: 340–41. 33 “Sir George Hayter’s Historical Pictures,” Times, 3. 34 Ruskin, Works, 15: 187. 35 Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, 2 vols. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), 1: 599. 36 For the sale of Hayter’s painting, see Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 528–30; and Coohill, “Sir George Hayter.” My account differs from theirs in its focus on the party politics involved during the years 1859 and 1860. 37 Victoria quoted by Delia Millar, “Royal Patronage and Influence,” The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, ed. John M. Mackenzie (London: V&A Publications, 2001), 32. Hayter quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 526. 38 Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 529. Hayter quoted by Ormond, 1: 526. 39 “The Reform Parliament,” Times, August 11, 1858: 7. 40 Disraeli quoted by Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 38. See Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, ch. 4. 41 Hansard, 155: 894; Second Report of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery (PP, 1859), 2. See Lara Perry, “The National Portrait Gallery and Its Constituencies, 1858–96,” in Governing Cultures, ed. Barlow and Trodd, 147–48. 42 Confusingly, however, a vote was taken, and a tie of “Ayes 82, Noes 82” was broken by the chair (Hansard, 155: 891–95). As Coohill notes, it is “very

Notes to pages 84–86

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difficult to ascertain” exactly when and how the painting was sold, though, contrary to his assertion (“Sir George Hayter,” 61, n25), the figure of £2000 set aside for its purchase does appear in the government estimates for the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 1860, as “the Sum proposed to be Voted in the Year 1859” (Estimates, &c. Civil Services; For the Year Ending 31 March 1860 [PP, 1859], no. 34, Miscellaneous, Special, and Temporary Objects, 47; cf. General Abstract of the Grants to Be Proposed for Civil Services for 1859, Compared with Similar Charges for 1858 [PP, 1859], 6). 43 For Wellington see Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, 279. Palmerston quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 530. Art Journal, September 1, 1859: 289. For the placement of the painting in the new Parliament buildings, see the Report from the Select Committee on Public Institutions (PP, 1860), 71. 44 Hansard, 155: 894. Spooner, reported by The Times, July 28, 1859: 6. 45 Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, 204; cf. George, Life and Death, 255. 46 Ruskin, Works, 7: 450; 22: 261. Blackwood’s quoted by M. H. Port, “The Houses of Parliament Competition,” in The Houses of Parliament, ed. M. H. Port (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 21. 47 Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (PP, 1842), 3; Charles Eastlake, Appendix, Third Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (PP, 1844), 35; Albert, memorandum circa 1844, quoted by Clare A. P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840–1940: Image and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2000), 33. For Albert’s plan, see Willsdon, ch. 2. On the political meaning of the old palace, see Paul Barlow, “‘Fire, Flatulence and Fog’: The Decoration of Westminster Palace and the Aesthetics of Prudence,” Governing Cultures, ed. Barlow and Trodd, 70. On the royalist tendencies of the new palace, see David Cannadine, “The Palace of Westminster as Palace of Varieties,” in The Houses of Parliament: History, Art and Architecture, ed. Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding (London: Merrell, 2000), 11, 19–20; and Roland Quinault, “Westminster and the Victorian Constitution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 2 (1992): 80–86. On the adjudication of the interests of Whigs versus Tories and royalists, see Willsdon, Mural Painting, 29–44; and for the balancing of aristocratic and democratic values, see Barlow, “‘Fire, Flatulence and Fog,’” 71–82. 48 Report from the Select Committee on Fine Arts (PP, 1841), iii, vi, iv, 14; cf. Port, “The Houses of Parliament Competition,” 28. Janet McLean characterizes the competing impulses of the FAC as “ideals of free enterprise” versus “gentlemanly paternalism” (“Prince Albert and the Fine Arts Commission,” in The Houses of Parliament, ed. Riding and Riding, 214). Cf. Colin Trodd on the conflict between patronage and commercial models in conceptions of the Royal Academy: “Representing the Victorian Royal Academy,” in Barlow and Trodd, Governing Cultures, 59–65. 49 Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 292. 50 On the status of royal commissions, Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 602–4. Royal commissions “were appointed in reality by the Cabinet … an agency of the House of Commons” (Hugh McDowall Clokie and J. William Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in British Politics [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1937], 73, 25, 74); cf. Frankel, States of Inquiry, ch. 4; Parry, Rise and Fall, 180–82, 207. Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of British Painters (1866; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 468.

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Notes to pages 87–90

51 Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (1842), 5. 52 Third Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (1844), 9. 53 Boase, “Decoration,” 338. 54 David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton University Press, 1978), 343; Boase, “Decoration,” 344; Cope, Appendix, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Consider the Agreements Made by the Fine Arts Commission with Artists in Respect to Wall-Paintings for the Palace of Westminster (PP, 1864), 8. On artists’ “rights,” Henry G. Clarke, Critical Examination of the Cartoons Designed in Pursuance of Notices Issued by Her Majesty’s Commissioners of the Fine Arts (London: H. G. Clarke, 1843), 53. On artists’ frustrations and even suffering: see, e.g., Weston, Daniel Maclise, 249–56; Pointon, William Dyce, 101–15. For contemporary accounts, see: Haydon, Description of Two Pictures, 14; Clarke, A Critical Examination (1844), vii–viii, 52; and Redgrave and Redgrave, Century of British Painters, ch. 34. 55 Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts, 8; Seventh Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (PP, 1847), 9, 11, 10. In the event, what the FAC planned was not carried out; see William Vaughan, “‘God Help the Minister Who Meddles in Art’: History Painting in the New Palace of Westminster,” The Houses of Parliament, ed. Riding and Riding, 233, 235–36; Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake, appendix D, section 3. 56 Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (1842), 5. On the number of attendees, see E. Winter, “German Fresco Painting,” 327; Altick gives half that figure (Punch, 674). 57 Robert L. Patten gives George Cruikshank the honor of having designed the first cartoon, a “picture plus dialogue or punch line printed underneath the cut,” although the artist did not use the term (George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2 vols. [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992], 2: 504). 58 Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (PP, 1835), 9. 59 For accounts of the influence of French art, see Barlow, “‘Fire, Flatulence and Fog,’” 75–76; and J. W. M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815–1914 (Manchester University Press, 1988), ch. 2. On the role of German art, see Altick, Punch, 676–79; Boase, “Decoration,” 322–23, 352, 356; E. Winter, “German Fresco Painting,” passim; and Vaughan, German Romanticism, ch. 6; on the combined influences to the two national arts, see Willsdon, Mural Painting, 44–50, 56–57. 60 Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 146. 61 Report from the Select Committee on Fine Arts (PP, 1841), iv. Eastlake apparently based his conception of medieval fresco painting on the murals of the Painted Chamber in the old palace of Westminster, but a twentieth-century authority concludes that he was “almost certainly” wrong (Paul Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster [London: Society of Antiquaries, 1986], 32; cf. xii). See also Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake, 59–70. On the condition of these murals, see Andrea Fredericksen, “Parliament’s Genius Loci: The Politics of Place after the 1834 Fire,” The Houses of Parliament, ed. Riding and Riding, 100. 62 Quoted by Port, “Houses of Parliament Competition,” 30. 63 For contemporary characterizations of the different national styles, see Vaughan, German Romanticism, ch. 2; David Scott, British, French, and German Painting (Edinburgh Printing and Publishing, 1841), 56; Benjamin Robert Haydon, Thoughts on the Relative Value of Fresco and Oil Painting

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(London: Henry Hooper, 1842), 2–3; Eastlake, testimony in Report from the Select Committee on Fine Arts (1841), section 577. On the “craze” of the 1840s, see Vaughan, German Romanticism, ch. 6; cf. E. Winter, “German Fresco Painting,” 305–8; Weston, Daniel Maclise, 193–94. Holman Hunt quoted by Vaughan (German Romanticism, 204). Vaughan summarizes the features of the German manner as “simplicity, linearity, balance and frontality” (German Romanticism, 155). 64 Foggo, “History of Fresco,” in Clarke, Critical Examination (1844), 57, 56; Barlow and Trodd identify Foggo as the author of this “History of Fresco” (see “Introduction,” Governing Cultures, 25, n14); see also 3–4, 10–11. For the shared Anglo-Saxon heritage of the two peoples, see Vaughan, German Romanticism, 205. For a different perspective on the national implications of fresco, see Willsdon, Mural Painting, 44–50. Haydon, Thoughts, 11. 65 Report from the Select Committee on Fine Arts (1841), vii; Twelfth Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (PP, 1861), 8; Second Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (PP, 1843), 63. 66 Ruskin, Works, 22: 364; 19: 154–55. 67 See Vaughan on the origins of the Nazarene manner and its employment in the German book trade, whose products were well known in Britain (German Romanticism, ch. 4, especially 125–54). He also connects the German manner and wood engraving, which emphasizes “the linear aspects of [a] design” (162; see ch. 5, passim). 68 Report of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts (1842), 8. For the 1847 print, see Altick, Punch, 677. 69 F. Knight Hunt, The Book of Art: Cartoons, Frescoes, Sculpture, and Decorative Art, as Applied to the New Houses of Parliament (London: Jeremiah How, 1846), 182, 91. A. P. Oppé defined the “battle that raged between oil and fresco” as “a contest between the white picture and the dark” in which the 1843 FAC competition dealt a “death-blow” to chiaroscuro (“Art,” in Early Victorian England 1830–1865, ed. G. M. Young, 2 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1934], 1: 144–45). 70 Haydon quoted by George, Life and Death, 268; cf. Olney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, 239. Willsdon asserts that the German “tendencies” were not “notably evident in the entries of 1843” (Mural Art, 47), but Vaughan points out – rightly, I think – that the adoption of the German manner was evident but not wholesale (German Romanticism, 177). 71 Haydon, Diary, 5: 460. 72 Ruskin, Works, 15: 83. 73 Vaughan reproduces this study in German Romanticism (214) and notes that it is more Germanic in style than Brown’s 1844 entry (218). For a contrasting view, see Tim Barringer, “The Effects of Industry: Ford Madox Brown and Artistic Identities in Victorian Britain,” in Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite, ed. Tim Barringer, Angela Thirlwell, and Laura McColloch (London: D. Giles, 2008), 25. 74 Brown’s narrative reprinted in Hunt, The Book of Art, 181. 75 Ruskin, Works, 15: 83, 81, 80. Cf. Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engraving, 585. 76 Jackson and Chatto, Treatise on Wood Engraving, 589. 77 An exhibition guide calls the cartoon Christ Judging Adam and Eve and condemns it (Henry G. Clarke, A Hand-book Guide to the Cartoons Now Exhibiting in Westminster Hall [London: H. G. Clarke, 1843], no. 33).

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78 Mrs. S. C. Hall, “Two Visits to Westminster Hall,” Art Union 5 (1843): 219. 79 Hunt, The Book of Art, 117. Sly was responsible for the view of the Thames on the ILN’s first masthead (Engen, Dictionary, 239). 80 Mary Cowling in Artist as Anthropologist (chs. 6 and 7) frequently uses Punch and the ILN as sources of visual analogies to Frith’s art. See also Houfe, John Leech, 128; G. Curtis, Visual Words, 58–62. 81 William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 105–7. 82 Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 126. 83 David H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 221. 84 See, for instance, “Everybody’s Column” (April 17, 1847: 266). On the first two issues of the ILN, see Bourne, English Newspapers, 2: 118–20. 85 In a later instance of sniping, Punch published “A Cut for an Illustrated Paper,” a parody of the pictures that the designers for the ILN were sending back from Paris during the revolution of 1848 (July 22, 1848: 39). See Sinnema for another instance of criticism of the ILN published in Punch (Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 25–26). 86 See below, Chapter 3, n44. 87 Houfe, John Leech, 29; Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, rev. edn. (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1996), 24. 88 Altick, Punch, 675. Altick does not offer evidence for this identification, but his speculation that the image in Punch was probably designed before the Westminster Hall exhibition opened does explain its conflation of the exhibition in Westminster Hall and that of the RA. 89 Altick, Punch, 675. Cf. Linnell, The Prize Cartoons, 6. 90 Times, July 3, 1843: 4 (cf. Punch, July 13, 1843: 30); Alan Palmer, Crowned Cousins: The Anglo-German Royal Connection (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 108–10. 91 Palmer, Crowned Cousins, 104; John Wardroper, Wicked Ernest: The Truth about the Man Who Was Almost Britain’s King (London: Shelfmark, 2002), 235–36, 232; Palmer, 109. 92 Ruskin, Works, 15: 80; the ILN quoted by Jane R. Cohen, Dickens and His Original Illustrators (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 143. 93 Leary, “Punch” Brotherhood, ch. 1. Poor Man’s Guardian quoted by Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 212. 94 Altick, Punch, 669. I am indebted to Catherine Roach for my understanding of this genre as a subset of a larger category, the picture-within-a-picture: see her articles “The Artist in the House of His Patron: Images-within-Images in John Everett Millais’s Portraits of the Wyatt Family,” Visual Culture in Britain 9 (2008): 1–20; and “The Foundling Restored: Emma Brownlow King, William Hogarth, and the Public Image of the Foundling Hospital in the Nineteenth Century,” British Art Journal 9 (2008): 40–49. 95 Brandon Taylor asserts that the uniformed figure represents the Duke of Cumberland (Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public 1747–2001 [Manchester University Press, 1999], 57), but the exhibition catalogue and contemporary reviews offer no proof of this identification. For the listings of the miniature by Bone and the painting by Schmidt, see The Exhibition

Notes to pages 108–121









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of the Royal Academy (London: W. Clowes, 1843), nos. 1090 and 8. On the delay caused by Sussex’s death, see Art-Union, May 1, 1843, 121. Punch does not reproduce in “Substance and Shadow” an image of the painting of Sussex, who, according to the Art-Union, is pictured as so uncomfortably seated that he is in danger of falling off his chair (“The Royal Academy’s Seventy-fifth Exhibition, 1843,” June 1, 1843: 161). 96 This painting seems to be a portrait of Ashley John George Ponsonby, b. 1831, son of the first Baron de Mauley of Canford and Lady Barbara Ashley Cooper, the only heir of the fifth Earl of Shaftesbury (De Mauley of Canford, Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, www.burkes-peerage.net). 97 Leech, “The Family of Mr. and Mrs. Blenkinsop,” Portraits of Children of the Mobility Drawn from Nature (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), pl. 4. Dickens also seems to have been inspired by the text of Portraits: there Sir William Grindham tells his daughter when she evinces concern for this poor family, “There are places, you know, on purpose for them” (30). 98 Dickens, A Christmas Carol (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 118–19, 42. 99 Vaughan, German Romanticism, 225; cf. Willsdon, Mural Painting, 51. 100 “The House of Commons in the Royal Academy,” London Review, May 30, 1863: 576. 101 E. Winter, “German Fresco Painting,” 328–29; Boase, “Decoration,” 349. Willsdon explains that plans to complete the decorations in the Palace of Westminster between 1906 and 1913 were funded by private donations from peers or painters or, in one case, by the Royal Academy; and Sir Frank Brangwyn’s attempt to finish Maclise’s work in the Royal Gallery, supported by a gift from Lord Iveagh, was halted when in the 1930s the House of Lords rejected the paintings already completed (Mural Painting, 268; 95–96, 108, 143, 162). Cf. McLean, “Prince Albert,” 222–23. 102 M. Danby Seymour, Hansard, 155: 1385. 103 Brown, Diary, 98. 104 Haydon, Description of Two Pictures, 13, 12, 14. The proof copy is in the collection of the Rare Books Department of the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University. 105 Punch (October 11, 1845: 161); for the placement of painting and print, see Gordon Tidy, A Little about Leech (London: Constable, 1931), 87. 3  Redrawing the franchise in the 1860s: lines around the constitution



Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 99, 114, 99. Warner, contra Bagehot, explains that endowing a “public” with agency is “an extraordinary fiction” (123). 2 See Sinnema on the ILN’s consistency, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 219, 207. 3 Thomas Carlyle, Shooting Niagara: And After? (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867), 12; cf. Spencer Walpole, The History of Twenty-Five Years, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), 2: 267; George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), 377. 4 Bagehot, Works, 6: 375; Ruskin, Works, 17: 541; Trollope, Phineas Finn, 1: 332. Cf. Parry, Rise and Fall, 216, 207; Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, 8–9; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, ch. 8. 1

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5 For traditional histories, see Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill; Maurice Cowling, 1867. For brief surveys, see Parry, Rise and Fall, 207–17; Briggs, Making of Modern England, ch. 10; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, 1968), ch. 13; Evans, Parliamentary Reform, ch. 6; and Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, “Introduction.” For accounts of earlier histories, see Maurice Cowling (313–15), Himmelfarb (333–35, 363–67), and R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 129–35. For other factors, see Parry, Rise and Fall, 209; Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 246–53; Evans, Forging of the Modern State, 433–34; Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192–204; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, ch. 5; Anna Clark, “Gender, Class, and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–1928”; Freda Harcourt, “Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–68: A Question of Timing,” Historical Journal 23 (1980), 99–104: Zimmerman, “Liberal Speech.” For evaluations of traditional explanations of the 1867 act, see Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, 7–20; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 265–78. 6 See Gladstone’s chief argument for reform in 1866 (Hansard, 182: 873; 183: 148). For this argument, see Harcourt, “Disraeli’s Imperialism,” 104–8; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, ch. 1; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 113– 15, 119–23; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 6–7, 163–67. For qualifications of it, see Ian Inkster, “Introduction: A Lustrous Age?” 4; Robert Allen, “The Battle for the Commons: Politics and Populism in the Mid-Victorian Kentish London,” Social History 22 (1997), 61–77; Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 240–42. Parry argues that such views are “imprecise romantic explanations” (Rise and Fall, 207). Cf. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 8–10; Patrick Joyce, “The Constitution and the Narrative Structure of Victorian Politics,” in Re-Reading the Constitution, ed. Vernon, 188. Margot C. Finn points out the ways in which middle-class radicals were as much changed by their exposure to popular views as the reverse (After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 [Cambridge University Press, 1993], 189, 244–54); cf. Roberts, Political Movements, 63–68, 74–78; Gilbert, Citizen’s Body, 45–46. See Hall, McClelland, and Rendall for the sources of the class-quiescence theory, Defining the Victorian Nation, 13–20. 7 Maidment, Dusty Bob, 34. 8 Daily Telegraph, July 28, 1866: 4. See Roland Quinault, “Democracy and the Mid-Victorians,” in An Age of Equipoise? ed. Hewitt, 115–17. For a participant’s account, see Henry Broadhurst, Henry Broadhurst, M. P.: The Story of His Life from a Stonemason’s Bench to the Treasury Bench Told by Himself (London: Hutchinson, 1901), 34–40. For later acccounts see Walpole, History of TwentyFive Years, 2: 170–77; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 128–32; Evelyn L. Pugh, “J. S. Mill’s Autobiography and the Hyde Park Riots,” Research Studies 50 (1982): 3–8; Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 52–56; Keith McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man,’” 72–77; Catherine Hall, “Rethinking Imperial Histories: The Reform Act of 1867,” New Left Review 208 (1994): 11–12; Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 265–68. For historians who downplay the significance of the riots see Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 248–49; Evans, Forging of the Modern State, 436; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 126; Briggs, Victorian People, 194; Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, 344–47; Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, 239; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 227–28. Lord Derby told the members of

Notes to pages 123–134

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the House of Lords on August 3, 1866, that 265 policemen had been injured, some forty or fifty of them being permanently disabled (Hansard, 184: 1988). 9 Robert Cecil Cranborne, “The Conservative Surrender,” Quarterly Review (1867): 556; cf. Walpole, History of Twenty-Five Years, 2: 194. 10 Sir Walter Bartellot, Hansard, 183: 1396; Bright, Hansard, 98: 472. 11 Gladstone, Hansard, 175: 324; 186: 490. Conceptions of inclusion and exclusion continue to characterize accounts of reform in the 1860s; see Hall, “The Nation Within and Without,” 179; McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness,’” 77; Roberts, Political Movements, ch. 1. On the Reform League’s membership card, see Vernon, Politics and the People, 322–23. 12 Laurence Oliphant, Hansard, 184: 1399. 13 Handbook to London as It Is (London: John Murray, [1868], 28); John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis (London: David Bogue, 1855), 585. 14 Daily Telegraph, July 24, 1866: 3. See Pugh, “J. S. Mill’s Autobiography,” 3. 15 Sheridan Gilley, “The Garibaldi Riots of 1862,” Historical Journal 16 (1973), 707–17. Marx quoted by Vernon, Politics and the People, 213. According to Vernon, the Hyde Park riots reveal how “radical uses of public spaces could challenge official definitions of the constitution” (214). See also Vernon on public meetings in Victorian culture (208–30) as an instance of the “politics of culture” (ch. 6) and the “politics of sight” (107–16). Cf. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 261. 16 William Thomas, who exhibited as a watercolorist, went on to found The Graphic in 1869 (Engen, Dictionary). G. H. Thomas was also employed by the ILN (Christopher Wood, Victorian Painters, 2nd edn. [Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1978], 1: 521). 17 Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 2: 276. 18 George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or, the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Richard Marsh, 1862), 198–200. 19 Anthony Dyson, Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth-Century Engraving Trade (London: Farrand Press, 1984), 5–6. 20 See Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, passim, especially chs. 1 and 6; and Wolff and Fox, “Pictures from the Magazines,” 561–62. Cf. Fox, Graphic Journalism, 281–84. 21 McClelland reproduces these three images without comment (“‘England’s Greatness,’” 72–74); in that form, the two originally smaller images dwarf the larger one. 22 Vivien Jones, “‘The Coquetry of Nature’: Politics and the Picturesque in Women’s Fiction,” in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137; see also the introduction to this collection. Malcolm Andrews, “The Metropolitan Picturesque,” in Politics of the Picturesque, 283. See also Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), ch. 2; Nead, Victorian Babylon, 31–33; R. Mitchell, Picturing the Past, 14–17. See Sinnema on the picturesque as it underwrites the “political vision” of the ILN (Dynamics of the Pictured Page, ch. 1). 23 Mary Cowling, Artist as Anthropologist, 333–41. Summing up the meanings of about “fifty Tenniel cartoons” on reform, Morris concludes that they do not “really” say “anything at all” (Artist of Wonderland, 276). Although her account

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of Tenniel’s working-class figures (ch. 20) treats a number of the images analyzed here, they are typically commented upon in a single sentence, as is the case with “No Rough-ianism” (279–80). 24 McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness,’” 72. On artisans or the labor aristocracy versus so-called unskilled workers, see Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 8–9; Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, 238–40; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 111–12; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 48–59; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 113–19; Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 196–97; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, ch. 1. For the strategic and intermittent use of this role by members of the working classes, see Bailey, Popular Culture, ch. 2. 25 Ruskin, Works, 33: 369. Cf. his contradictory views on Tenniel, 22: 357. 26 Ruskin, Works, 15: 94, 190. See Gillian Forrester, Turner’s “Drawing Book”: The Liber Studiorum (London: Tate Publishing, 1996), 136–37. Ruskin reproduces only the etched state of the completed print. I am grateful to Gillian Forrester for locating in the Yale Center for British Art the print from which Ruskin apparently had this facsimile made (B1977.14.8199). Labeled “From Collections of Charles Turner and Mr. Ruskin,” it is a first-state etching with the artist’s penciled instructions to the engraver. 27 Rodney Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1991), 103, 27, 61. For opposing views on this issue, see Spielmann, History of “Punch,” 463–64, 468; and Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 111–12. See Spielmann (464) for reproductions of some of Tenniel’s finished drawings and Morris (113) for a wood block on which he designed a cartoon. 28 Lowe, Hansard, 182: 147–48; James Winter, Robert Lowe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 140–44. 29 Mary Cowling, Artist as Anthropologist, 124–29; L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 121, 126. Curtis mainly credits Tenniel’s response to Fenianism for the typical simian and prognathous features of caricatured Irishmen (35–45). For the debate over Curtis’s claims, see Roy Douglas, Liam Harte, and Jim O’Hara, Drawing Conclusions: A Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations, 1798–1998 (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1998), ch. 5; Morris, Artist in Wonderland, 303; R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, 1993), 192; Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland 1750–1930 (Cork University Press, 1997), ch. 3; Donald M. MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora in Britain, 1750–1939, 2nd edn. (London: Palgrave, 2011), 165–67. 30 John Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 40, 45; C. Hall, “Nation Within and Without,” 204–20. For accounts of Fenian activity, see: Newsinger, chs. 2–4; Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872: A Sense of Insecurity (London: John Calder, 1982), ch. 1. 31 Kingsley quoted by Elsie B. Michie, Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 49. On Irish population, see C. Hall, “Nation Within and Without,” 230; MacRaild, Irish Diaspora, 49. 32 Arnold, “Anarchy and Authority,” Cornhill Magazine 17 (1868): 44. Engen, Sir John Tenniel, 22. 33 Lord John Manners quoted by Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 130.

Notes to pages 142–153

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34 Cf. Carlyle, Shooting Niagara, 13. 35 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. R. J. White (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 199. 36 Altick, Punch, 128–37; cf. Leary, Punch Brotherhood, 47. 37 R. H. Hutton, “The Political Character of the Working Class,” in Essays on Reform (London: Macmillan, 1867), 36. 38 Ruskin, Works, 33: 359, 357. 39 Ibid., 15: 164. 40 Ibid., 33: 359. 41 Such an arrangement is also a theatrical convention (Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 39). 42 See Punch, December 9, 1865: 229; February 4, 1865: 47. 43 Tenniel quoted by Spielmann, History of “Punch,” 461; cf. Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 38. Knight, Passages, 3: 268. Cf. Vaughan, German Romanticism, 217; Roger Simpson, Sir John Tenniel: Aspects of His Work (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 27, 55, 69; Engen, Sir John Tenniel, 4–9. 44 For reviews of Tenniel’s cartoon, see Simpson, Sir John Tenniel, 33–35. On the effect of Tenniel’s involvement with the Westminster project, see Engen, Sir John Tenniel, 17–21; Vaughan, German Romanticism, 206; Simpson, Sir John Tenniel, pt. 1; Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 36–40, 43–45; and Michael Hancher, “Tenniel’s Allegorical Cartoons,” The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem, ed. Ayers L. Bagley, Edward M. Griffin, and Austin J. McLean (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 140–43. 45 T. J. Gullick, Pictures in the Westminster Palace (1865), quoted by Boase, “Decoration,” 358; and Simpson, Sir John Tenniel, 52. 46 For a commentary on both painting and parody, see Vaughan, “‘God Help the Minister,’” 233–34. 47 Ibid., 232. 48 Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 34; Cobbe, “What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?” (1862), reprinted in “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors”: Victorian Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton, 2nd edn. (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 70. For classical precedents of Brown’s navvy, see Barringer, Men at Work, ch. 1. For the status of the Apollo Belvedere in Victorian culture, see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 45. 49 Gladstone quoted by Engen, Sir John Tenniel, 115. 50 The exception to this rule is Patten’s George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2: 396–401, 452–57. 51 For the number of MPs in the force, see Ian F. W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester University Press, 1991), 192. For numbers of enrollees, see Hugh Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: A Social and Political History, 1859–1908 (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 1, 105; Beckett, 168. For the size of the regular army, see Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1980), 36. For the French threat and the volunteers, see: Cunningham, 5–7; Beckett, 143–45, 164–65; Robert Potter Berry, A History of the Formation and Development of the Volunteer Infantry, from the Earliest Times, Illustrated by the Local Records of Huddersfield and its Vicinity from 1794 to 1874 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1903), 120–21; Patricia Morton, “Another Victorian Paradox: Anti-Militarism in a Jingoistic Society,” Historical Reflections 5 (1981): 171–72.

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52 Gladstone, Hansard, 182: 59; and Lowe, Hansard, 183: 1639; 188: 1540; 182: 2118; cf. Carlyle, Shooting Niagara, 50. 53 Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 176; Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 78. 54 Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 12–13, 63, 113; government circular quoted by Berry, History of the Formation, 150. 55 On the number of paintings of volunteers at the Royal Academy, see Hichberger, Images of the Army, 154–55. On Wells’s painting, see Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 238–39, which cites the account in the Art Journal of the “manly bearing” of its “heroes.” 56 Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 78. Cf. Morton, “Another Victorian Paradox,” 183. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2: 453; Ford M. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), 166. 57 Hichberger, Images of the Army, 156. 58 Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 22–27; Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 176. On 1839, see Hostettler and Block, Voting in Britain, 229. 59 Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 178; Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 123; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 11–12. 60 Typographical Circular quoted by Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 104. This view is prominent in the accounts offered by Cunningham (Volunteer Force, 27–30), Morton (“Another Victorian Paradox,” 185–89), and Beckett (Amateur Military Tradition, 177–79). See also Gray, 102–4, 141–43. 61 Duke of Cambridge quoted by Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 10; cf. Spiers, Army and Society, 164. 62 Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 175. 63 Bagehot, English Constitution, 34. 64 This attribution alters the dating of Palmer’s affiliation with the ILN in Engen’s Dictionary, where it is limited to 1864–66. 65 Times, April 4, 1843: 3. 66 Trollope, Autobiography, 294. 67 Linda Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (1986): 113–15. 68 Berry, History of the Formation, 384; Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 191. 69 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn., 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1987), 2: 604. 70 Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 170. 71 Morton, “Another Victorian Paradox,” 181; Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 52–54; Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 83; Times quoted by Morton, 186. 72 Cunningham explains the process involved in commissioning officers, but he notes, “No instance has come to light of a working man seeking a commission” (Volunteer Force, 52, 55). For Roebuck’s and Tansley’s roles, see J. F. C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 1854–1954 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 51, 83; John Roebuck, “Reminiscences of an Old Student,” in The Working Men’s College Records of its History and its Work after Fifty Years, ed. J. Llewelyn Davies (London: Macmillan, 1904), 82; C. P. Lucas, “George Tansley,” in The Working Men’s College, ed. Davies, 131–32, 137. Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Trial (Phoenix Mills: Alan Sutton, 1996), 96. 73 Ruskin, Works, 15: 170.

Notes to pages 165–185

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74 Ibid., 15: 198–99. 75 Hichberger, Images of the Army, 10, 37–38; Barlow, “‘Fire, Flatulence and Fog,’” 75–76. 76 Hichberger, Images of the Army, 40–44. 77 Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 70. 78 Beckett, Amateur Military Tradition, 191–92; Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 81–82; Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, ch. 3. 79 Ranelagh quoted by Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 23. 80 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave (London: Penguin, 1996), 319. As Mary Cowling points out, the reputation of navvies was being rehabilitated in the 1850s, but plenty of texts from that decade and the twenty years that follow suggest the continuing predominance of negative attitudes toward them (Victorian Figurative Painting, 174–76). 81 Charles James Lever, Barrington (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863), 216, 217; Spiers, Army and Society, 48, 52–67. Cf. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 4–8. Hichberger dates the transformation of the image of the British common soldier from “wastrel” to upright “warrior” between 1856 and 1865 (Images of the Army, 159). 82 Wolseley quoted by Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 97; cf. Hichberger, Images of the Army, 59, 159. 83 F. J. Furnivall, “The Social Life of the College,” in The Working Men’s College, ed. Davies, 59; Roebuck, “Reminiscences,” 78, 83. 84 Broadhurst, Henry Broadhurst, 38–39. 85 French rebels had appeared in the ILN’s extensive coverage of the events in Paris in the spring of 1848. See Fox, Graphic Journalism, 309, pl. 95; Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, fig. 6. Sinnema draws attention to the relation between Liberty in Delacroix’s painting and the dissolute rebel in one of these images (66–68). 86 Broadhurst, Henry Broadhurst, 37. He does not, however, claim that the “mob” in the park was in any way orderly (38). 87 These two figures partake of characteristics of both the “young gent” and the criminal (see Mary Cowling, Artist as Anthropologist, ch. 6). 88 Austen Layard, Hansard, 184: 1401; Mill, Hansard, 184: 1411. 89 T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales, 900–1966 (London: Constable, 1967), 151. 90 Ruskin, Works, 15: 165–66. 91 Hutton, “Political Character,” 41; Gladstone, Hansard, 182: 59, 873. 92 Bright, Hansard, 98: 472. Ruskin, Works, 15: 176. 4   Within the pale Bright quoted by Finn, After Chartism, 249. See Gillespie, Labor and Politics, 260; Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 202; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 270. 2 See Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 264–65; cf. Vernon, Politics and the People, 107, 116, 208–14. 3 Trollope, Ralph the Heir (New York: Dover, 1978), 124. Marx quoted by Briggs, Victorian People, 195–66. 4 For these meetings, see Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 186–90; Gillespie, Labor and Politics, ch. 9; Maurice Cowling, 1867, ch. 7; Finn, After 1

246

Notes to pages 185–210

Chartism, 246–48; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, ch. 3; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 259–75. 5 R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 86. 6 Lord Ellenborough quoted by Richter, Riotous Victorians, 57; Bright quoted by Trevelyan, Life of John Bright, 364. 7 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 264. 8 Times quoted by Finn, After Chartism, 247. 9 C.R. is presumably C. Robinson, an artist who apprenticed in lithography and was trained at the Finsbury School of Art before working at the ILN in the early 1860s, where he both drew and engraved images (Engen, Dictionary). 10 Ruskin, Works, 15: 169, 170–71. 11 Ibid., 15: 196, 198. 12 R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 91. 13 Gillespie, Labor and Politics, 250–51; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 246; Vernon, Politics and the People, 208–30. 14 Pugh, “J. S. Mill’s Autobiography,” 10–11. 15 Bradlaugh quoted by R. Harrison, Before the Socialists, 91, 93. 16 Ibid., 94. 17 This point is only one of a number of identifications that I owe to Tim Barringer. 18 Bright, Hansard, 98: 472. 19 Leary points out that the cartoon also responds to a suggestion in the Spectator (Punch Brotherhood, 48). 20 “The Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions,” Blackwood’s Magazine 102 (1867): 83. 21 Ibid., 83–84. 22 Patrick Connor, “‘Wedding Archaeology to Art’: Poynter’s Israel in Egypt,” Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture, ed. Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1985), 119. 23 See Lionel Lambourne, Ernest Griset: Fantasies of a Victorian Illustrator (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). Spielmann, History of “Punch,” 537–38. By 1869 Griset had left Punch. 24 Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2: 376. 25 See Jane Rendall for a comprehensive account of this development, “The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867” in Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, 130–39. 26 Joseph Grego, A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering in the Old Days (London: Chatto and Windus, 1886), pl. facing 367. Leary, Punch Brotherhood, 54–55. 27 Madge Dresser, “Britannia,” Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 3: 40. 28 Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 139–40; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 262. 29 MacRaild, Irish Diaspora, 179, 124–27; see above Chapter 3, n30. 30 Disraeli, Hansard, 188: 1607, 1609–10; Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), ix. 31 Spielmann, History of “Punch,” 250. See Leary on the role of Shirley Brooks in this trend (Punch Brotherhood, ch. 5). 32 For full accounts, see Seymour, Electoral Reform, ch. 9; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, ch. 8.

Notes to pages 210–216

247

33 On Gladstone: Seymour, Electoral Reform, 266; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 210–11; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 243–45. On Bright, Maurice Cowling, 1867, 15; cf. 56, 286. 34 John Davis and Duncan Tanner, “The Borough Franchise after 1867,” Historical Research 69 (1996): 327. 35 Bagehot, Works, 6: 324–25; Maurice Cowling, 1867, 172; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 257. 36 The estimates for this figure vary widely from fewer than 200,000 to as many as 500,000. See Maurice Cowling, 1867, 44, 380 n1; Seymour, Electoral Reform, 270. Cf. H. Cox, History of the Reform Bills, 201. 37 Return Showing, with Respect to each of the Parliamentary Cities and Boroughs in England and Wales, the Population in 1861; the Total Number of Electors on the Register Now in Force, Distinguishing those Entitled to Vote as Householders under the Representation of the People Act, 1867 from those Entitled to Vote as £10 Occupiers; and the Number of Electors Who Voted at the Last General Election (PP, 1869), 1–2. See also Seymour, Electoral Reform, 284; cf. Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 239–40. 38 Maurice Cowling, 1867, 44–45. 39 Seymour, Electoral Reform, 355–57. 40 Disraeli, Hansard, 188: 1113; Conservative MP quoted by Smith, Making of the Second Reform Bill, 159; cf. H. Cox, History of the Reform Bills, 202. 41 H. Cox, History of the Reform Bills, 200–201, 210. 42 Report from the Select Committee on Registration of Voters, v–vi, iv. 43 Ruskin, Works, 27: 493–94; 17: 327. Sidmouth quoted by Vernon, Politics and the People, 302. Conclusion 1 For opposing views, see Vernon, Politics and the People, 336–38; Roberts, Political Movements, 21–24, 164. Cf. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 192; Parry, Rise and Fall, 216–17; Evans, Parliamentary Reform, ch. 7; Foot, Vote, 158–61; Saunders, Democracy and the Vote, 1. 2 Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 591–609; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 148–61, 198–217; Parry, Rise and Fall, ch. 10. See also Angus Hawkins, “‘Parliamentary Government’ and Victorian Political Parties, c.1830-c.1880,” English Historical Review 104 (1989): 643, 662–69. 3 Trollope, Autobiography, 297–306. 4 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stephen Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 135–36. 5 Bagehot, Works, 6: 379, 390–91. 6 Graphic, June 27, 1874: 612–14, reproduced in Barringer, Men at Work, 72; Ruskin, Works 27: 122. 7 Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 83–85. 8 Quoted by Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity, 112. 9 Ruskin, Works, 22: 360, 469. See Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 78–79. 10 Port, Houses of Parliament, 182. Hayter quoted by Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits, 1: 530. 11 Cf. Hutchison, History, 115; Hoock, King’s Artists, 305; Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity, 91–99.

248

Notes to pages 217–219

12 Alison Inglis, “Poynter, Sir Edward John, first baronet (1836–1919),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online May 2010 (www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35600); Brown, Diary, 96; “Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions,” 83, 97; Julian Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals,” Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester: Ten Illustrations of Patronage and Practice, ed. John G. H. Archer (Manchester University Press, 1985), 179. 13 Port, Houses of Parliament, 181. 14 Willsdon, Mural Painting, ch. 10. For this project, see Alison Inglis, “Sir Edward Poynter and the Earl of Wharncliffe’s Billiard Room,” Apollo 126 (1987): 249–55. “Royal Academy and Other Exhibitions,” 84. See above, Chapter 2, n101. 15 Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown,” 181, 205. See also Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, chs. 15–18. 16 Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown,” 174. 17 For different readings, see Paul Barlow, “Local Disturbances: Ford Madox Brown and the Problem of the Manchester Murals,” Re-framing the PreRaphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Ellen Harding (Aldershot: Scholar, 1995), 81–97; Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown”; Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 330–31; Julie Codell, “Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay, Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History,” Art History 21 (1998): 324–66. 18 Brown quoted by Treuherz, “Ford Madox Brown,” 174. 19 Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown, 143, 174. 20 Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 336. In the published version of Derby’s diaries, the entry for May 30, 1879, notes his visit to the Town Hall but not any response to Brown’s murals: The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826–93) between 1878 and 1893: A Selection, ed. John Vincent (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2003), 132. 21 G. Curtis, Visual Words, 118–19. Cf. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 196–97; Roberts, Political Movements, 167; Vernon, Politics and the People, 336. For opposing views, see Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, 161–62; Patten, “Serial Illustration,” 92; and G. Curtis, 119–21.

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Index

1840s 15–16, 101 1860s 16, 152 Aberdeen, 4th Earl of 79, 81 “Abstract Representation of Justice, An” (fig. 2.5) 93 Albert, Prince 85, 86, 88, 89 Allan, Sir William 167 “Allegory of Hyde Park, An” (fig. 3.6) 141 Altick, Richard D. 103, 142 analogies, conceptual, see art and politics, analogical relation of; volunteer force, analogous to enfranchisement analogies, verbal linking art and politics 27–28, 31–32, 49, 90 see also Parliament, Members of, as artists; Phineas Finn military 153, 182–83, 208, 213–15 anti-Semitism, 120, 199–200 Apollo Belvedere 152 Armitage, Edward 150 Army, British 122, 142, 171–72, 191, 193 Arnold, Matthew 140, 158, 170, 214 Arnold, Thomas 214 Arscott, Caroline 55 art, 15–16, 22, 72, 85–86, 194 and politics analogical relation of 2–3, 11–12, 31–32, 45–49, 60, 88, 121, 173–74 conflicts between 29–30, 60, 61 conjunctions of 1, 26 public 2, 61–63, 85–96, 114–16, 216–18 see also Fine Arts, Royal Commission on; engraving, wood; painting Art Journal 84 Art-Union 96 artisans 12, 143, 170, 184 as electors 117, 130–31, 206, 211 as individuals 9, 206 as volunteers 153, 161 artists 22–25, 153, 161 see also engravers Arts and Manufactures, SelectCommittee on (1835–36) 29 Athenaeum 77–78 Bagehot, Walter 3, 15, 17, 152 career of 18–19, 46

political orientation of 19 political views of 41, 120, 210, 214 political/visual theories of 1, 2–3, 11, 35, 37–38, 45–46 compared with Ruskin 2–3, 11, 45–46, 214–15 social theories of 10, 19–20 on theatricality 47, 159 Ballot Act 213 Barnum, P. T. 57–58, 115 Barringer, Tim 22 Barry, Charles 85, 90 Barry, James 98 Beales, Edmond 141, 142, 192, 201 Beaufort House 186 Bewick, Thomas 24 binaries 2, 9, 17, 18, 64, 117, 150 see also class system, definitions of; encounters, comparative Birmingham Union 69 Blackwood’s 85, 197, 199, 217 “Block on the Line, A” (fig. 3.7) 143–49 Bone, William 107–08 Book of Art, The 92–96 boroughs, varieties of 39–40, 211 see also franchise, borough Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 52 Bradlaugh, Charles 192 Brewster, Sir David 32–33 Bright, John 9, 40, 42, 59, 184, 186, 210 images of 58, 142, 143, 197 Britannia 138–39, 204–07 see also “Check to King Mob”; “Fenian-Pest, The”; “Leap in the Dark, A” Broadhurst, Henry 173, 175 Brontë, Charlotte 19 Brougham, Henry 9 Brown, Ford Madox 23, 42, 63, 112 career of 114, 157, 216–17 Work 23, 36–37, 152, 156, 170, 171 see also “Abstract Representation of Justice, An” Browne, Hablot K. 52, 110 Bull, John 143 Bunyan, John 36 Burdett, Sir Francis 79, 81 Burlington House 170 Burton, Decimus 127

266

Index Cambridge, Duke of 103, 104 Canterbury, archbishop of see Howley, William Carlyle, Thomas 30, 120 Past and Present 15, 101, 114 Shooting Niagara 58, 142 Cattermole, George 110 Chartists 11, 16, 140, 184, 187, 194 Chatto, W. A. 24 “Check to King Mob” (fig. 4.7) 204–07 class system 33, 47 definitions of 17, 130 as “muddle” 17, 76 classes 11, 18 barriers/distances between 52–53, 98–99, 100, 125–28, 136 collaboration of 11, 121, 207, 208–09 conflict between 4–5, 19–20, 36–37, 104–06, 109, 130, 208–09, 213–14 physical distinctions between 34–35, 125–28, 136, 147–48, 175–76 Cobbe, Frances Power 152 commissions, royal 86 Commons, House of (political body) 103 see also Parliament, Members of; debates, parliamentary franchise composition 3, 12, 66, 118, 143 simplicity of 90, 91–92, 185, 218 compounding 43–44, 211 Connor, Patrick 199 Conservatives 83–84, 195, 197–99 constitution 3, 12, 66, 90 British 3, 49, 79, 85, 90, 118 definition of 3, 32, 66–67 as object or place 5, 36, 37, 67–68, 122, 214 as pale 123–24, 173, 182, 183, 192, 195, 207, 209, 212 as tripartite 67–69, 78, 81 Cooper, Thomas Sidney 167 Cope, Charles West 88, 112, 150 Copley, John Singleton 175 Cornhill 30 corruption, political 7, 213 cotton famine 50–53, 55–57 “Cotton Famine: Distributing Tickets …, The” (fig. 1.1) 50–53 Cruikshank, George 100, 101, 110, 113, 157, 202 Cumberland, Duke of 103–04, 108 Cunningham, Hugh 157 “Curse, The” (fig.2.4) 92, 95–96 Daily Telegraph 13, 122, 124, 142 debates, parliamentary franchise 7, 8–10, 27, 28, 34–35, 57–58, 137, 153 see also Lowe, Robert, versus Gladstone; Disraeli, Benjamin, versus Gladstone deference 47–48, 213 see also hierarchy Delacroix, Eugène 174 Delaroche, Paul 90, 99 democracy 31, 32, 60, 69, 85, 163, 210 symbols of 187, 192 demonstrations, political 184–85, 204–06

267

of July 1866 see Hyde Park riots of December 1866 185–91, 200 of May 1867 191–95, 200 Denison, Evelyn 114 Derby, 14th Earl 6, 122, 186, 191, 204 image of 197 Derby, 15th Earl 218 Dickens, Charles 52, 72, 99, 110–11, 202 Christmas Carol, A 111–12 Disraeli, Benjamin 14, 104 early support of reform 83 versus Gladstone 35, 197–200, 210 images of 142, 143, 148, 197–200, 204 as political leader 6, 83, 122, 208–09, 211 target of anti-Semitism 120, 199–200 “D’Israel-i in Triumph” (fig. 4.3) 197–200 District Provident Society of Manchesterand Salford 51 Doyle, John (HB) 203 Doyle, Richard 92, 136 Dresser, Madge 204 drill, military 156, 157, 159, 162, 163, 183, 187, 215 du Maurier, George 33, 146 Durham, C. J. 53 Dyce, William 63, 87, 112 Earl, George 13 Eastlake, Charles 86, 90, 91, 115 Egyptian Hall 76, 78, 115 Elcho, Lord 156, 163 Elements of Drawing, The 2–3, 17, 20, 26, 33 see also Ruskin, on governing lines, laws of composition, visual/political theories of Eliot, George 52, 69, 170 elite 32, 47, 75–76, 98–99, 100, 125, 169–72, 215 Ellenborough, Lord 186 encounter, comparative 7, 125–28, 218, 219 as analytic approach 2, 21–22, 63 see also Bagehot, compared with Ruskin; Illustrated London News, compared with Punch; Reform Act, First, compared with Second Reform Act definition of 17–18 representations of 19–20, 59, 92, 105–06, 117–18, 135–52, 173, 180, 190–91, 203, 214 Engen, Rodney 136 English Constitution, The 2–3, 17, 30 see also Bagehot, Walter, political/visual theories of, on theatricality engravers 23–25, 215 engraving, wood 1–2, 215 compared with fresco 91–92 compared with painting 2, 21–22, 26, 53, 55, 75, 81, 115–16 styles of 92–97, 109, 117–18 techniques of 11–12, 24, 28, 34, 95, 148, 215 exchange 17–21, 218 as analytic approach 21–22 between Bagehot and Ruskin 2–3, 11, 20–21, 45–46

268

Index

exchange (cont.) between First and Second Reform Acts 209–11 between images 113, 128, 133–34, 206–07 between Punch and the ILN 183, 209, 218 of class characteristics 136, 208 definition of 18 within images 143, 169–72, 175, 191, 195, 197–99 representations of 158, 162 with viewer 142, 152, 168, 182 executions 124 “Exhibition of the Cartoons inWestminster Hall” (fig. 2.6) 96–100, 101, 113 “Fenian-Pest, The” (fig. 3.5) 138, 204, 207 Fenians, 137–38, 170, 175, 206 Fine Arts, Royal Commission on the 25–26, 86–96, 149, 166–67 1843 Westminster Hall exhibition 61–63, 88–89, 91, 96–114 see also “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall”; “Substance and Shadow” as commission of inquiry 86–96 composition of 88 failures of 63, 84, 114 selection of artists 85–88, 115, 149–50 Fine Arts, Select Committee on (1835) 89 Fine Arts, Select Committee on (1841) 85–86, 165 “First Assembling of the First Reformed Parliament, 1833” (fig. 2.3) 79–82 Foggo, George 90 format 12 landscape 51, 55, 68, 95, 111, 185 portrait 37–38, 95, 111 Forster, W. E. 58 Fortnightly 30 franchise, borough 5–6, 7, 130–31 ancient-rights 39–40, 44 exclusions from 38–39, 41–42, 123, 177 fixed-line 210 see also Gladstone, W. E., and fixed-line franchise qualifications for 7–8 monetary 38, 39–41, 44, 163, 210, 211–12 occupancy 38–44 rate paying 7–8, 40–44, 211 registration 44–45, 211–12 respectability 8–10, 49, 55–57 see also boroughs, varieties of Fraser’s 77 Frith, W. P. 12, 13, 98, 100, 106, 156, 168 frontality 99, 109–11, 113, 197, 206 Furnivall, J. C. 172 Gaselee, Sergeant Stephen 197 gestures 135, 140, 150–52, 174, 207 Gilbert, John 100 Gladstone, W. E. 28, 49, 152 early support of reform 8–9, 35, 55–57, 59–60, 123–24, 137

and fixed-line franchise 137, 208, 210 images of 143, 148, 197, 199 as political leader 6, 82, 83, 120, 122 versus Lowe 153, 182 government, dignified and efficient, see Bagehot, political/visual theories of, on theatricality Graphic 13, 215 gravers 11–12, 115 see also lines, curved Great Exhibition (1851) 124 “Great Reform Demonstration on Monday Last, The” (fig. 4.1) 187–91 “Great Reform Demonstration, The” (fig. 3.13) 179–80 “Great Room of the Royal Academy, The” (fig. 2.8) 107–08, 113 Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl 6, 9, 77, 85 image of 73, 74 see also Reform Banquet, The Grey, Henry, 3rd Earl 6 Griset, Ernest 201–02 Grosvenor, Earl 170 Guildhall 73 Guildhall Art Gallery 197 Hall, Catherine 121 Hall, Mrs. S. C. 96 Hamilton, Sir Charles 64–65 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 23, 29, 42, 60, 114 career of 76–77, 85, 91, 92, 100 death of 115 on high art 72 self-portraits of 71, 72–73, 98–99, 204 see also Reform Banquet, The Hayter, Sir George 76–77, 98 career of 65, 216 political orientation of 2, 20, 69–70 self-portrait of 64–66, 74 see also House of Commons, 1833, The heroes, military 150–52 Hetherington, Henry 35 Hickel, Karl Anton 70, 81 hierarchy 4, 68, 147–49, 213 see also class system Hodgkinson, Grosvenor 211 Horsman, Edward 58 Houghton, Arthur Boyd 157 House of Commons, 1833, The (fig. 2.1) 10, 23, 64–65, 114, 216 exhibition of 25–26, 61–63, 76–78, 103 formal features of 66–70 political message of 79, 81–82 sale of 66, 82–84 Howley, William 79, 81 Hunt, F. Knight see Book of Art, The Hunt, William Holman 10, 90, 161 Hutton, R. H. 28, 143, 182 Hyde Park 122, 124–28, 155, 192 see also Hyde Park riots; reviews, military Hyde Park riots 117, 123, 124, 129–31, 140–42, 182–83, 184–85, 214 see also “Great Reform Demonstration, The”; “Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane, The”; “No Rough-ianism”

Index Illustrated London News 12–13, 104 compared with Punch 88–89, 100–01, 107–09, 112–13, 209 graphic conventions of 53, 120, 128–29, 130, 131–33, 209, 218–19 images of demonstrations in 186–91, 193–95 see also “Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane, The”; “Reform Meeting in Hyde Park, The” images of exhibitions in; “Exhibition of the Cartoons in Westminster Hall”; “Great Room of the Royal Academy” images of politicians in, see “First Assembling of the First Reform Parliament” images of volunteers in 154–56, 158, 159–62, 164–71 see also ”Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton, The”; “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park, The”; “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last, The” images of working-class men in 50–55, 153–54, 187–91, 193–95 see also “Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane, The”; “Reform Meeting in Hyde Park, The” notices of art exhibitions in 77, 78–82, 88–89, 91, 96–100, 106–09 political influence of 10, 14, 29, 115–16 political orientation of 14, 26, 183, 184, 209 reform “chronicle” in 120, 122, 154–55, 208–09 self-definition of 69, 113 Illustrated Times 178–80 see also “Great Reform Demonstration, The” illustration, book 52, 110–12, 202 images formal features of 11–12, 46, 64 heterogeneity of 1, 129, 130, 219 illusion of three-dimensionality of 92, 95, 104–05 two dimensions of 32 viewers’ relation to 21, 46, 47, 78, 91, 112 in ILN 52–53, 77–78, 98–99, 100, 113, 117, 128, 167, 174, 177, 181–82, 194–95 in Punch 38–39, 108, 112, 113, 117, 136, 152 see also words versus images individuals 74–75, 156–57, 217 images of 79–81, 100, 121, 157 versus numbers 9–11, 32, 73, 77–78, 153, 209 see also Punch, graphic conventions of Ingram, Henry 15 Irish Republican Brotherhood 137 Irish, stereotypes of 137–40, 171 Israel in Egypt (fig. 4.4) 197, 199 Jackson, John 24 Jerrold, Douglas 100 Keene, Charles 146, 208 Knight, Charles 13, 125, 149

269

labor, manual 12, 23–25, 37, 50, 53, 170, 215 Landseer, Edwin 87, 108–09 law, electoral 28 case 38–39, 41, 44 statute 7–8, 37–38, 44, 45 layout 53, 131–33, 143, 146, 148, 187–91 “Leap in the Dark, A” (fig. 4.6) 134, 187–91 Leech, John 22, 115, 125, 140 career of 101, 111, 146 style of 22–23, 101, 104–05, 111 see also “Substance and Shadow” Leigh, Percival 111 Leighton, Frederic 59 Lever, Charles 121 Liberals 83–84, 197–99 lines in art and politics 27–29, 33–35, 218 curved 32, 53, 95, 133, 168, 194 curved versus straight 11–12, 125 separating classes 50–55, 136 within an image 22, 48–49, 80, 90, 93–95, 125–28, 180 in House of Commons, 1833, The 79 in ILN 96–97, 159, 160–61, 166, 167, 173–74, 175, 190 in Map of Society Island, A 4–5, 35–36 in Punch 101, 104–05, 135, 136 in military 158–59, 160–62, 166, 167, 175 in politics 35–36, 37–38, 49 straight 183, 187, 210, 212 Linnell, John, James, and William 112 Linton, Eliza Lynn 13 Linton, W. J. 24 London Review 114 London Working Men’s Association 185 Lords, House of 24 as political body 9, 35 Louis Philippe 166 Lowe, Robert 59, 187 versus Gladstone 35, 57, 137, 153, 182 images of 58, 197 Lyndhurst, John Singleton Copley, 1st Baron 79, 81 Macaulay, T. B. 9, 40, 68 Maclise, Daniel 63, 112, 150 Maidment, Brian 22, 121 Manchester City Council 217–18 Manchester Town Hall 217 Mandler, Peter 69 Map of Society Island, A (fig. 0.1), 3–5, 31, 35–37, 45 Martin, John 29, 76 Marx, Karl 50, 125, 185 May, Thomas Erskine 3 Mayne, Sir Richard 185 McClelland, Keith 121, 135 McConnell, William 127 Mecklenburg Strelitz, Duchess of 103–04 Melbourne, 2nd Viscount, 60 “Members of the South Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps” (fig. 3.11) 169–72

270

Index

middle classes 4, 7, 9 values of 8–9, 121, 155–56, 158 Mill, J. S. 39–40, 176, 203 image of 197 Millais, John Everett 58, 161 Milton, John 200 “Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane, The” (fig. 3.1) 117–18, 121, 122, 128, 130–33, 173–82 compared with “No Rough-ianism” 117–18, 133–34, 183 Morpeth, 7th Earl of Carlisle, 85 Napoleon III 152 National Portrait Gallery 75, 83, 114 National Rifle Association 154 navvies (excavators) 152, 169, 170–71 “amateur navvies” 170–71, 176, 215 Navy, Royal 171 Nazarenes 90, 150 “No Rough-ianism”(fig. 3.2) 117–18, 121, 122, 124, 128, 130, 148–49, 168, 195 context of 129–30, 134–36, 137–38 and history painting 149–52 compared with “The Mob Pulling down the Railings in Park-lane, The” 117–18, 133–34, 183 and seriality 207 superiority of Working-Man 142, 206–07, 208 numbers 9–10, 23, 35, 36–37, 140, 153, 184 of electors 9–11, 12, 31, 153–54, 183, 208–09, 214 of figures in images 12, 98–112, 128 in House of Commons, 1833, The 74–75 in ILN 33, 55, 118, 120, 155–56, 169–72, 173–75, 176–77 of MPs 68, 73, 77–78 versus units 79–81, 155–56 see also individuals, versus numbers O’Connell, Daniel 74, 75 “Old Oak of the Constitution, The” 67 Oldfield, T. H. B. 39 oppositions see binaries; encounters, comparative Ormelie, Lord 65, 74, 92–93 painting 2, 21–22, 26 battle 166–67, 168–69 fresco 63, 86, 88, 89–93, 112, 216 genre 97, 99, 168–69, 174–75 “German manner” 89–91, 92–94, 96, 112 frontality of 99, 206 group portrait 97–100 history 71–72, 86, 149, 174, 199, 206 graphic conventions of 99, 112, 150–52, 184–85 mural 217 see also Fine Arts, Royal Commission on; painting, fresco; painting, history

national characteristics of 89–91, 96 portrait 31–32, 57–59, 107–09 portrait-miniature 31, 32 Palmer, J. 160 Palmer, W. J. 53 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount 8–9, 10, 23, 84, 155 Parks Regulation Bill 192 Parliament, Members of as artists 27–28, 31–32, 55, 57–59 images of, see “Block on the Line, A”; “First Assembling of the First Reformed Parliament”; House of Commons, 1833, The; “D’Israel-i in Triumph”; Reform Banquet, The; “Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition, The” as workers 142–46, 195 Parry, Jonathan 66 Patten, Robert 202 Peel, Sir Robert 6, 45, 67 Penny Magazine 13 perspective 69–70, 81–82, 95, 104 Peterloo 187, 218 Phillip, John 114 Phineas Finn 27–28, 31–32, 35, 86, 114 depiction of reform movement 27–28, 60, 120, 123, 213 “Physical Force v. Intellect” (fig. 3.7) 146–48 Picture of Great Britain in the Year 1793, A 37 picturesque 55, 77, 133 Pitt, William 67 police 117, 140, 190, 192, 206 images of 141, 177–78, 180, 193 Political Pyramid of Our GloriousConstitution, A 37 politicians, images of see Parliament, Members of, images of; ILN, images of politicians in; Punch, images of politicians in politics of everyday life 9, 23, 36–37, 125–28 institutional, weakness of 103, 109, 142 visual 1, 3, 218–19 Poor Law Commission 86 Poor Man’s Guardian 3–5, 9, 35, 105 “Portrait of the Hon. Ashley Ponsonby” (fig. 2.9) 108–09 Poynter, Edward 23, 197, 199, 216–17 see also Israel in Egypt press 15, 30 “Professor Byles’s Opinion of the Westminster Hall Exhibition” (fig. 3.8) 150 property 8 Psalms 34 Pugin, A. W. N. 85 Punch 12–13, 124, 187–90 compared with the ILN 88–89, 100–01, 107–09, 112–13, 209 images of exhibitions in 101–14 see also “Substance and Shadow” graphic conventions of 57, 120, 128–29, 146, 195–97, 200, 208, 209, 218–19

Index images of politicians in 195–200, 201 see also “Block on the Line, A”;“D’Israel-i in Triumph” depictions of volunteers in 157, 208 images of working-class men in 55–59, 134–52, 200–02 see also “No Roughianism”; “Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition, The” notices of art exhibitions in 77, 88–89, 91, 101 political influence of 10, 14, 29, 115–16 political orientation of 14, 26, 183, 184, 207–08, 209 prejudices of 199–200, 203 reform “narrative” 120, 122, 142 use of the word cartoon 89 pyramids 4, 36–37, 67 Quarterly Review 123 Radical Tottering Pyramid Inverted, The 37 Ranelagh, 7th Viscount 170, 186 rates, poor 40, 41–42, 43–44, 211 see also franchise, qualifications, rate paying Read, Serjeant-Major 172 Redgrave, Richard 86, 87, 107 Redgrave, Samuel 86 redistricting 7 reform, franchise analogous to volunteering see volunteer force, analogous to enfranchisement visual arguments against 52, 55, 59 visual arguments for in ILN 131–33, 154, 169, 183, 191 in Punch 152, 208 Reform Act, First (1832) 34–35, 120 effects of 1, 6–7, 10, 210, 211 on elite 69, 82 on working classes 76, 88, 114 historiography of 10–11, 69 passage of 5, 6, 72–73, 203 provisions of 7–8, 38–45 compared with Second Reform Act 6–10, 209–11 Reform Act, Second (1867) 35 causes of 37, 120–21, 123 effects of 1, 6–7, 184, 209–12, 213, 214 compared with First Reform Act 6–10, 209–11 historiography of 120–21 passage of 6, 176, 203–04, 208, 210 acceptance before 195, 197–99, 202, 209 provisions of 7, 8, 40, 44 Reform Act, Third (1884) 6 Reform Banquet, The (fig. 2.2) 71–73, 76 Reform League 124, 131, 182, 184, 187, 191–92, 206 and Hyde Park riots, 122, 125, 140, 141 “Reform Meeting in Hyde Park, The” (fig. 4.2) 193–95 registration see franchise, qualifications, registration

271

Registration of Voters, Select Committee on 212 Rendall, Jane 121 representation 3 see also composition, constitution Retzsch, Moritz 93–94 reviews, military 124, 159–62, 172, 176–77 revolution 125, 185, 192 Richie, John 127 rights, popular 124–25, 192, 195 “Riot in Hyde Park, The” (fig. 3.4) 131–33 riots 125, 127, 131, 137, 168 see also Hyde Park riots Roberts, David 98 Roebuck, John 164 “Rotten-Row” (fig. 3.3) 125–28 “roughs” 117 see also working classes, stereotypes of Royal Academy 29–30, 103, 156, 170, 216 1843 exhibition of 103, 106–09 images of 106–08, 113 see also “Great Room of the Royal Academy, The” “Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield, The” (fig. 1.2) 53–55, 155–56 Ruskin, John 3, 17 aesthetic theories of 11, 33, 93, 135 art criticism of 76, 85, 104, 146, 148–49, 215 career of 18–19, 30 compared with Bagehot 2–3, 11, 45–46, 214–15 on governing lines 48–49, 135, 160, 207 on laws of composition 48, 79 consistency 74, 166, 176, 202 continuity 55, 161, 175, 191 contrast 52, 58, 74, 121, 135, 161 harmony 75, 133 interchange 20, 191 principality 49, 121, 135, 147, 180–81 repetition 58, 68, 133, 166, 170, 175, 191, 207 symmetry 175, 191 political orientation of 19 political views of 120, 212 social theories of 10, 215 visual/political theories of 2–3, 26, 45–46, 48–49 see also Ruskin, on governing lines; Ruskin, on laws of composition on wood engraving 28–29, 34, 91, 95, 136, 214–15 Russell, Lord John 30, 35, 45, 67 images of 65, 74, 142–43 as political leader 6, 122 support of reform 82, 83 St. Stephen’s Chapel 61, 65, 67–68, 70, 78 Sala, George Augustus 127–28 satire, graphic, conventions of 5, 13–14, 37, 67, 113 Schmidt, Louis 108 Selous, Henry Courtney 98, 114 seriality 120, 121–22, 134 of images 128–34, 154, 176, 207 see also ILN, reform “chronicle”; Punch, reform “narrative” Shee, Sir Martin Archer 29–30, 107

272

Index

“Sheffield outrages” 206 Siddons, Sarah 76 Sinnema, Peter W. 22, 24, 131 “Sketch Taken in Park Lane, A” (fig. 4.5) 201–02 Sly, Samuel 97 Small Tenements Act 43 Smith, J. Orrin 101 South Kensington Museum 32 Spielmann, M. H. 202, 209 Spooner, Richard 83–84 Standard 197 statistics, electoral 41–42, 45 Stephen, James Fitzjames 142 “Substance and Shadow” (fig. 2.7), 63, 101–14 Suez Canal 199 suffrage, manhood 9 Sussex, Duke of 108 Sutton, Charles Manners 79, 81 Swain, Joseph 24–25, 136, 197, 215 Tansley, George 164 Tavistock, Marquess of 68 Tenniel, Sir John 22, 33, 125, 140 depictions of Britannia 204 career of 101, 149–50, 215 styles of 101, 136, 149, 197, 206, 207 see also “Block on the Line, A”; “Check to King Mob”; “D’Israel-i in Triumph”; “Fenian-Pest, The”; “Leap in the Dark, A”; “No Rough-ianism”; “WorkingMan, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition, The” Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 163 Thackeray, W. M. 14, 99, 150, 165 Thomas, G. H. 125–28 Thomas, William 125 Thomas, William Cave 87, 92 Tillemans, Peter 70 Times, The 13, 15, 35, 77–79, 83, 103, 164, 187 tint tool 11–12, 115, 120 see also lines, curved versus straight; lines, straight Tories 67, 69–70, 73, 77, 81, 82 trade unions 186, 187 Treuherz, Julian 218 Trollope, Anthony 25, 30–32, 106, 162, 184–85 career of 38, 64, 213 see also Phineas Finn Turner, Charles 135–36 Turner, J. M. W. 135–36 Vaughan, William 112 verdicality 135, 194 Vernon, James 121 Victoria, Queen, 1, 82, 84, 85, 104 images of 159, 187–90, 204 “Visit of the Queen to Wolverhampton” (fig. 4.1) 187–91 vision, theories of 32–33 volunteer force 152–73 compared with army 153 as comic 154, 157, 167

composition of 153, 159–62 individuals in 153, 155–56, 158 working-class men in 145, 162–64, 172, 173, 176–77, 187 development of 153, 155, 157–58, 159–62 images of see “Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton, The”; “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park, The”; “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last, The” middle-class values of 155–56, 158 Napoleonic 163, 164 paintings of 156 as peacemakers 168, 190 analogous to enfranchisement 118, 153, 154–55, 158, 163–64, 169, 172–73, 182–83, 208 spectators of 167–69 “Volunteer Review and the Sham Fight at Brighton, The” (fig. 3.10) 164–69 “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park, The” (fig. 3.9) 160–61 “Volunteer Review in Hyde Park on Saturday Last, The” (3.11) 176–77 Walpole, Spencer 140–42, 191, 192, 201, 214 War Office 155, 162, 164 Warner, Michael 120 Watts, George Frederick 150 Wellington, 1stDuke of 6, 84, 104, 171 images of 65–66, 67, 68–69, 74, 79, 81 statue of 127, 155, 176, 194 Wells, Henry Tamsworth 156 Westminster Hall 96, 155 Westminster, Palace of 24, 85, 114, 212 decoration of 26, 63, 149, 216, 217 see also Fine Arts, Royal Commission on the Wharnecliffe, Earl of 217 Whigs 67, 69–70, 73, 78, 81, 82 Wilde, Oscar 106, 215 Wilkie, Sir David 99, 175 William IV 67, 203 Williams, Joseph Lionel 24 Williams, Raymond 17 Wolseley, Sir Garnet 171 Wolverhampton 190 women, enfranchisement of 202–03 words versus images 45, 49, 79, 96, 219 working-class men 123, 170, 171 physical strength of 7, 11, 136, 142, 147–48, 177, 178, 182–83, 208 stereotypes of 25, 55–59, 129–30, 134–35, 137, 138, 146, 149, 182, 202 respectability of 49–60, 121 see also ILN, images of working-class men in; Punch, images of working-class men in “Working-Man, from the Royal Westminster Exhibition, The” (fig. 1.3) 55–59, 92 Working Men’s College 164, 172 Wright, Thomas 15 Yonge, Charlotte Mary 164

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN N I N ETEENTH -CENTU R Y L I TERA TURE A N D CULTURE General editor gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill Miriam Bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Pat ten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology Sally Shut tleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Pamel a K. Gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison Byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home Monica F. Cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation Suz anne Keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia

16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth Gail Marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Deborah Vlock 2 0. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance John Gl avin, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicol a Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry Mat thew Campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Paul a M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House Hil ary M. Schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology Jan-Melissa Schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World El aine Freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study Thad Logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Dennis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 Pamel a Thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature Nicol a Bown, Birkbeck, University of London

34. George Eliot and the British Empire Nancy Henry, The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body Anna Krugovoy Silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust Ann Gaylin, Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 Anna Johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 Mat t Cook, Keele University 4 0. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical Hil ary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Judith Johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicol a Bown, Birkbeck College, London Carolyn Burdet t, London Metropolitan University and Pamel a Thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination Gautam Chakravart y, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People Ian Hay wood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds Richard Noakes, University of Cambridge Sally Shut tleworth, University of Sheffield and Jonathan R. Topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Janis McLarren Caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico

49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller Ivan Kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Patrick R. O’Malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain Simon Dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal Helena Michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture Nadia Valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Julia Wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination Sally Ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle Marion Thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing David Amigoni, Keele University 6 0. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Daniel A. Novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 Tim Watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Michael Sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman Cheryl Wilson, Indiana University 6 4. Shakespeare and Victorian Women Gail Marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood Valerie Sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America Cannon Schmit t, University of Toronto 6 7. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction Amanpal Garcha, Ohio State University

68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination Stefanie Markovits, Yale University 6 9. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction Jill L. Matus, University of Toronto 7 0. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s Nichol as Daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajić, Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism Aaron Matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing Adel a Pinch, University of Michigan 74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine 75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Visible City, Invisible World Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York 76. Women, Literature, and the English Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 Judith W. Page, University of Florida Elise L. Smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society Sue Zemka, University of Colerado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century Anne Stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain Janice Carlisle, Yale University