LONDON; THE EARLY VICTORIANS

LONDON was full of great men and concerned with many matters of high importance, when William Booth arrived with his Bible during the autumn of the year 1849.

This work-seeking youth, almost friendless and penniless in the multitudinous city, was presented with no immediate opportunity for setting the Thames on fire, could indeed see nowhere any provision made by which he might even earn bread enough to keep his soul in his body. If Nottingham could cheerfully do without him, London was certainly able to keep its anvil ringing with no help from his arm.

The times were serious enough. Palmerston, declaiming the false gospel of a bullying patriotism, was dragging the nation to the edge of war with France, and perhaps Russia, over the matter of a Portuguese Jew in Athens;

Newman — with a brilliance and charm of style surpassed only by his indifference to history and science — was urging the Anglican Church of England towards a path which led backward and not forward;

Carlyle was thundering his gospel of moral earnestness to an age which had lost respect for authority and was mindful only of commercial earnestness; the ruinous condition of Ireland had brought into existence the deadliest of all social evils — secret societies and bands of conspirators who sought to gain their ends by physical violence:

and deep down among the dim and squalid millions of industrial England, the ignorant, degraded, overburdened, socially despised and politically neglected wealth-getters of this troubled England, there was unrest deeper than ocean and fiercer than flame.

It was an age in which only science held a taper into universal darkness. Everywhere else that one looked this darkness reigned and deepened. It reigned and deepened over religion, which had lost the creative sense of joy, which was more concerned with words than life, and was here surrendering to the tyranny of tradition and there donning the vesture of the ethical philosopher.

It reigned and deepened over the great art of architecture which had played the traitor to beauty and sold itself with both hands to utility and vulgar ignorance.

It reigned and deepened over the whole field of politics which was saturated with corruption and surrounded on every side by the barriers of privilege.

It reigned and deepened over the immense region of industry, where men who made a profession of religion, side by side with those who more honestly rejected religion, brutalized and destroyed their fellow-creatures, using up even the lives of children, in galloping efforts to lay up treasures upon earth.

It reigned and deepened over the arts of the painter and musician, where a contemptible ideal of prettiness usurped the appeal of truth, beauty, and righteous passion.

It reigned, too, even in the kingdom of literature where the revolt of Shelley, the mournful and despairing classicism of Keats, had yielded room to a conventional and ignoble propriety oblivious of beauty and fatal to truth.

It reigned and deepened, too, over the entire field of national production and national life — visible in the ugliness of domestic furniture, in the frightful monstrosities of national monuments, in the painful conventions of respectable society, and in the appalling ignorance, destitution, and degradation of the masses.

One looks in vain, even from the giants of that age, for any recognition of this universal darkness. From the first page of his Apologia to the last Newman is concerned with a reconstruction of traditionalism, and says not a single word either about the progress of science or the ignorance and suffering of the common people.

Macaulay, who retired into private life at this time, and had just published the first volumes of his auriferous history, never wrote one word which was in the nature of an alarum; “he did little,” says Morley, “to make men better fitted to face a present of which, close as it was to him, he seems hardly to have dreamed.”

Tennyson began in a mild and picturesque manner to suggest the need for social reformation, but he never wore the mantle of Shelley, and he ended as an honest obscurantist. Thackeray contented himself by sneering at the foibles of a very few rich and vulgar people. Dickens, when he became a reformer, struck his hardest blows at religious hypocrisy, and ranged himself on the side of a port-wine philanthropy, which, if it excelled the Bumbledom of his times, was nevertheless absolutely destructive of self-respect.

Gladstone opposed the Factory Acts. Shaftesbury cried out that he got no help from religious people in his great work for the humanization of industry. Carlyle, with his gospel of moral earnestness, approached nearer, perhaps, than any other recognized great man of the times to the real danger of society, but he cried loudest for those very qualities and energies of the English character which were then most actively in existence and most conspicuous in stimulating an unsocial individualism.

For the rest, the middle classes were committed to the gospel of energy, not to the gospel of intelligence; they were hot in pursuit of riches, perfectly self-satisfied, and only passionate when a murmur of discontent or any rumbling of threatening storm came to them in their comfortable parlours from the disreputable under-world of poverty and sin.

They liked to read (says Stopford Brooke) about pain and trouble in the past; they hated to read about it in the present. When suffering was known to be over, and made no claim on them — to read of it gave a pleasant flavour to their luxury and to their degraded peace.

Therefore they accepted with a barren gratitude Mrs. Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and others who wrote graceful, pathetic, perfumed stories, and pretty lyrics about spring and love and sorrow, and little deeds of valour, and such religion as their society could accept; religion which promised them in heaven a pleasant extension of their agreeable life on earth.

Men like Maurice and Kingsley were at work with new ideas for politics and religion; Ruskin was there, and Matthew Arnold was coming, with broader and truer notions of philosophy and art; George Eliot had a message for those who needed none; John Stuart Mill was laying the foundations of a more reasonable political economy; Cobden and Bright were fast preparing the way for a fresher and kinder outlook on the nations of the world; but the general condition of the English people was one of frank materialism and aggressive complacency, a condition in which the “obese platitudes” of respectability were accepted as the highest wisdom and the unspeakable miseries of the poor were regarded as the judgments of God or the inevitable fruits of political economy.

It is difficult for a modern mind to conceive truly of the England of that period. Humanitarianism, which has become with us, if not a passion and a religion, at least good manners, was then regarded as the misguided hobby of a few fussy and mischief-making philanthropists who turned their backs on the stables of Augeas to plant mustard and cress on the banks of the cleansing rivers.

Little concern was shown by the churches or the chapels for the bodies of men. No shame was felt for such a term as “ Ragged Schools.” There was no system of national education, factory legislation permitted children to work for ten hours a day, there was no real inspection of these insanitary places, no idea of housing reform, no provision for poverty but the execrable Poor-House.

Few agencies existed for ministering to the physical needs of the poor, the mental needs of the uneducated, the spiritual needs of the sunken masses, the most elemental natural needs of perishing children. Politics had not even glanced at domestic legislation; the phrase social conscience had not been invented; men were satisfied with, accepted as a God-ordained system of human government, a state of individualism which trod millions underfoot for the enrichment of tens.

Such a phrase as “Tory Democracy” would have had no meaning for Sir Robert Peel, and little meaning, if any, for the Gladstone of that day. Nearly every suggestion for bettering the condition of the poor was regarded as blasphemous republicanism and treated with a wrathful disdain.

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Tory and Whig desired office for the sake of patronage, and there was no difference in the blindness of the one and the other, no difference in the deadness of their imaginations to the evils of the time. Religion, politics, art, even literature, struck no blow for justice and advance.

One spirit was at work destined to exert an influence on the world more far-reaching, and more revolutionary, than any which had preceded it; a spirit which has now overspread the whole world and still shows no sign of abating its force: a spirit which is at once responsible for infinite misery and yet carries with it almost the chief hope left to humanity — the spirit of mechanical science, the spirit of practical science applied to the physical needs of human life.

At the time when William Booth came to London railways were in their infancy, and the greatest achievement of manufacturing science was the spinning jenny. But a new door had been opened on existence. The promise of riches offered by this new field to ambitious men had thrown the whole weight of human intelligence on the side of science; nor did it need any impulse from the thesis of Darwin to urge men forward on this fresh trail to the ancient goal of material welfare.

Little was now to be left to Providence, less and less as time went on; men took their own lives in their hands and pressed forward on the road of discovery, seeking everywhere for light on their path, too eager for the prize to heed voices so distant and so faint as the voices of faith and tradition.

It was a new world for the human race; and ancient precedents lost their authority when the frontier was crossed. Mechanical science is not so much an enemy to religion as a rival. Men not only give their lives but lose their hearts to this lavish employer of their brains.

A Greek counted himself abased if he permitted his knowledge of science to be applied to trade; the English only reverence science when it serves a physical purpose.

And the modern Englishman, surrounded on every side by the multitude of fast multiplying contrivances of physical science, finds it difficult to believe that it is not along this path of increasing wonder and more magic discovery that the generations of men are destined to travel on the way from the darkness of Ignorance to the light of Knowledge.

From the mechanical toy to the bicycle, and from the bicycle to the dynamo driving light and power over hundreds of miles, science offers so potent and possessing a fascination to the question-asking mind of humanity, so constant and increasing an occupation for faculties that clamour to be used, so many and so great services to a physically enfeebled generation, that the human race, weary of exertion, sceptical of tradition, dulled and exhausted by uninteresting toil, and eager for amusement, sets here its affections and gives here its loyalty and reverence.

Stronger than all the other adversaries in the path of William Booth when he arrived in London was this spirit of physical science, then beginning to diffuse itself over the nation. And as we shall presently find, it was a spirit whose value he failed to see and whose danger he rather despised than attacked. Not greatly concerned with Nature, and perhaps even less with literature and art, William Booth resolutely turned his back upon science, and, like St. Paul, determined to know nothing but Christ, and Him crucified. He came to London with the Bible, and from London he carried that Bible throughout the world.

If any man is tempted on this account to regard him only as a narrow and an intolerant Hebraist, let it be remembered that with no mean courage and after no inglorious battle did he keep his Bible in the streets of London and carry it to a world-wide victory.

He arrived in London as a seeker of work, the son of a poor and struggling mother in the provinces, with no influence, with no money, and with no friends. And at the very outset of this new adventure in his wayfaring he was met by one of those tragic disappointments of faith and affection which deject the courage of the bravest and embitter the feelings of the kindest.

In the notes made for his autobiography he set down under the title of “London” the one word “Loneliness!” This word stood for infinitely more than that sensation of solitude and depression which overwhelms a man in coming for the first time under the cold skies and into the unfriendly roar of a vast city utterly indifferent to his existence.

It stood, too, for something even more than what he calls “that sickening impression” produced in the mind of “a young enthusiast for Christ” by the manifest iniquities and thousandfold degradations of a godless multitude.

It stood for tragedy and bitter grief.
There was only one house in London to which he could go, the house of his eldest sister, the beautiful Ann who had been an influence for good on his boyhood, and who had stood by his side in the streets of Nottingham singing the hymns of those outdoor services. With whatever feelings he went to the house of his beloved sister, he was speedily brought face to face with disenchantment and horror.

He found that her husband, one of his old school-fellows, had adopted a truculent agnosticism, was a loud-voiced and contemptuous materialist, a man who heartily despised religion, and regarded every species of piety as so much cant and make-believe.

Moreover, he discovered that this disagreeable person had contracted the disease of alcoholism, and that he had not only infected his sister with his odious notions concerning religion, hut also with the destroying germ of his horrible vice. Instead of welcome and encouragement, he met with ridicule and contempt. His sister was kind enough to let him argue and plead with her, but his brother-in-law had not patience enough even for this amenity. He was coldly treated, contemptuously used, and speedily dismissed. Instead of a happy and restful home, he found a household overshadowed by ruin of every kind.

The rich brother-in-law, swiftly impoverishing himself, was a blacker shadow in that home than the struggling and speculating Samuel Booth had been in the darkening home of Sneinton. Signs of approaching trouble were everywhere visible, and soon both husband and wife, in spite of all the exertions of William Booth, passed from prosperity to ruin and presently from ruin to death.

This painful discovery at the first step in London threw the young venturer into a state of deep dejection. It deepened to ocean depth his sensation of solitude, and darkened his horizon with clouds blacker than night. He was now quite friendless and homeless. No agency existed to which he could go for assistance, no brotherhood or society where he could count upon kindness and welcome. He was solitary in London, solitary and poor, with nothing but his Bible for consolation.

And it was necessary for him to have bread that he might live, even in dejection and poverty.
He has described his feelings at this time, not very intimately, and perhaps with the preacher uppermost, but the words afford at least some idea of the difficulties which confronted him.

The sensations of a new-corner to London from the country are always somewhat disagreeable, if he comes to work. The immensity of the city must especially strike him as he crosses it for the first time and passes through its different areas. The general turn-out into a few great thoroughfares, on Saturday nights especially, gives a sensation of enormous bulk. The manifest poverty of so many in the most populous streets must appeal to any heart. The language of the drinking crowds must needs give a rather worse than true impression of all.

The crowding pressure and activity of so many must always oppress one not accustomed to it. The number of public houses, theatres, and music-halls must give a young enthusiast for Christ a sickening impression. The enormous numbers of hawkers must also have given a rather exaggerated idea of the poverty and cupidity which nevertheless prevailed.

The Churches in those days gave the very uttermost idea of spiritual death and blindness to the existing condition of things; at that time very few of them were open more than one evening per week. There were no Young Men’s or Young Women’s Christian Associations, no Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, no Brother-hoods, no Central Missions, no extra effort to attract the attention of the godless crowds.

To any who cared to enter the places of worship, their deathly contrast with the streets was even worse. The absence of week-night services must have made any strangers despair of finding even society or diversion. A Methodist sufficiently in earnest to get inside to the “class” would find a handful of people reluctant to bear any witness to the power of God.

One is tempted to ask whether any young enthusiast for Christ ever stood before a door so fastened and close-barred as that which confronted William Booth at his first entrance into London. Certainly to few men has the future presented itself with a more hopeless promise, a more deadly indifference, than it did at this fateful juncture to this young enthusiast from Nottingham.

If ever he prayed earnestly for light and guidance surely must it have been at this period, when he stood friendless, all but penniless, and with a wounded heart in the streets of London.

Chapter 8

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