Fairness is what A.N.Wilson can most appropriately be praised for in this monumental study, now in paperback, of the era when the UK ruled a large part of the earth.
His long chapter on the Indian Mutiny of 1857 is typical. All his instincts, you feel, are on the side of the Indians. The sepoys who were the first to refuse to use the new cartridges that they feared were greased with the fat of animals their religions forbade them to touch -- and 85 of whom were severely humiliated for their refusal -- turned out to be the most loyal to the British of all the Indian troops in the widespread insurrection that subsequently broke out. Wilson, moreover, even refuses to call it a mutiny, putting the word in "inverted commas" and suggesting it may best be seen as the start of the Indian struggle for independence, finally won 90 years later.
Yet his is essentially a balanced view. The atrocities committed were equal on both sides, he thinks, and elsewhere writes of the
development of higher education in India under the British, and the number of Indians attending British universities. And he wonders whether, in retrospect, the imperial mantle ever really suited the British at all.
Much of Britain's enormous wealth in Victorian times derived from Asia. Hong Kong, originally acquired as a port through which to sell opium into China, quickly became the entrepot for the whole world's trade with the Celestial Empire. And George Gordon, hero (in British eyes) of Khartoum, was always known as "Chinese Gordon" following his perceived role in helping end the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864.
If there is a single theme in this big book it's Wilson's search for an alternative radicalism to Karl Marx's. Once the British national tone becomes one of "an alarming triumph song," he is left with the feeling that "only in its dissentient voices is redemption found." Why there was no revolution in Britain, when the inequalities of wealth were so huge and the condition of the poor so very terrible, is one of his constant concerns.
His heroes turn out to be the Christian radicals such as Henry Manning, later cardinal, whose image the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen of Greenwich, a trades union, stitched so lovingly onto its processional banner; and Josephine Butler, campaigner against legislation that effectively victimized the women, but not their male customers, involved in licensed prostitution in areas surrounding military barracks.
Wilson's championing of Christian social activists is not unexpected. He has all his life been involved in some way with Christianity. He's written biographies of Jesus, St. Paul, John Milton (author of Paradise Lost) and the 20th century Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. And the book that preceded The Victorians was God's Funeral, about the extensive loss of faith in Christianity among educated Europeans in the latter part of the 19th century.
Unbelief was far more widespread among the ruling elite than is popularly supposed, Wilson insists. The Duke of Sussex, for instance, uncle of Queen Victoria, had drawn a hand in a prayer book he owned pointing at the Athanasian Creed and written "I don't believe a word of it." Novelist George Eliot was only one of many eminent non-believers.
Wilson is also something of a sexual radical. His 1998 novel Dream Children portrayed a relationship between an adult man and a distinctly under-age girl without any obvious censure. And in The Victorians there is plenty of detail on the sexual proclivities of leading figures.
RSS