The Times Great Victorian Lives

INTRODUCTION

Ian Brunskill

Obituaries Editor of The Times

By the middle of the 19th century, when the obituaries collected here began to appear, The Times was well on the way to becoming a British institution, secure in its values, confident of its position and proud of the influence it exercised in the world. That confidence and influence had been hard won. The London press, when The Times was founded (as the Daily Universal Register) in 1785, was notable as much for its venality as for anything else. In the rough and tumble of political life, newspapers and journals were there to fight a corner or settle a score. Precisely which corner or score was not always important, if the price was right.

The Times had dragged itself on to higher ground. Thomas Barnes, Editor from 1817 to his death in 1841, began to build the paper into a significant independent force in British politics. His successor, John Thadeus Delane, whose obituary is reprinted here, consolidated the work; at the height of his 36-year editorship, the paper’s prestige was considerable, its power much feared – and its support could not be bought.

In 1854 Delane gave a ringing summation of the paper’s understanding of its role. Attacked in Parliament by the Leader of the Opposition, he replied the next morning in a leading article: ‘We hold ourselves responsible, not to Lord Derby or the House of Lords, but to the people of England, for the accuracy and fitness of that which we think proper to publish…This journal never was, and we trust never will be, the journal of any Minister, and we place our own independence far above the highest marks of confidence that could be given us by any servant of the Crown.’

That defiant firmness of judgement and independence of thought lent significant weight to the paper’s obituary coverage. In an area where the risks of personal bias and parti-pris are great, Delane saw that The Times’s unique authority gave it a valuable advantage over less high-minded rivals. He determined to make the most of it, expanding the paper’s reporting of important deaths to the point where obituaries became an essential and enduring element of The Times’s editorial core. Other papers’ efforts came nowhere near.

Delane was aware that he lived in an age both fascinated by historical greatness and well stocked with remarkable personalities of its own. He saw that the demiseof a prominent national figure would capture the public imagination as nothing else could. It was worth covering in depth and, if necessary, at considerable length. The death of the Duke of Wellington, he told his deputy, ‘will be the only topic’.

Readers seemed to agree. Wellington’s obituary, all 47,000 words of it, dominated The Times over two days in September 1852; such was the demand that it was republished as a pamphlet for separate sale. Similarly, in 1865, when the paper’s circulation stood at 65,000, the publication of Palmerston’s obituary on 18 October added more than 11,000 copies to the daily sale.

In its early days, the paper’s approach to obituary coverage had been haphazard. Notable deaths had been recorded, from the French Revolution onwards, but there was no great consistency of quality or tone. If The Times found itself without an obituary of an important person who had died, it was not above plagiarism, or simply reprinting a notice from another publication (as it did with the life of General Lee, included here). All this changed under Delane. There was no attempt to be comprehensive, and nothing like the daily obituary column of modern times, but Delane made sure that The Times would rise to the big occasion in matchless style.

In doing so, he was able to call on the remarkable editorial team that he and his predecessor had assembled. Some of these ‘Men of The Times’ were to be found each night at ‘the office’ in Printing House Square, writing leading articles and editing reports; some wrote to order from Oxford and Cambridge colleges and country rectories; some were critics whose engagement showed the paper’s commitment to serious coverage of music, literature, theatre and the visual arts; some were diplomatic specialists, at home in Europe’s embassies; some were foreign correspondents in the field. Together with the Editor’s own contacts in the corridors of power, and those of the Walter family, hereditary ‘chief proprietors’ of The Times, they made up a formidable intelligence network, and among them were some formidable minds.

A leading role in the paper’s obituary coverage was for many years taken by Charles Dod, founder of Dod’s Parliamentary Companion and, as head of the Times gallery staff at Westminster, responsible for setting new standards in the reporting of parliamentary debates. After Dod’s death in 1855, much work on obituaries was done by the versatile Scottish man of letters Eneas Dallas; one of the paper’s most prolific book reviewers and author of a well-regarded study of poetry, The Gay Science, Dallas also volunteered to report from inside Paris when the French capital was under siege. Among the many obituary notices in which Dallas’s was the sole or principal hand were those of Dickens, Palmerston, the Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich, Thackeray, the historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Albert, the Prince Consort.

From 1868 much responsibility was taken by Edward Walford, antiquary, biographer and prolific author, a former Editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the compiler of such reference works as Hardwicke’s Titles of Courtesy and the Shilling Baronetage and Knightage. Obituaries of leading statesmen might be furnished by Henry Reeve, a hugely influential figure both at The Times and behind the scenes in political life; known by his Times colleagues, not entirely affectionately, as Il Pomposo, he had risen from humble beginnings to become an intimate of Government ministers and royalty. The Reverend Thomas Mozley – pupil, friend and brother-in-law to John Henry Newman and himself a participant in the Oxford Movement and the upheavals it wrought in the Victorian Church of England – was responsible for the lives of such leading Tractarians as John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey. W. H. Russell, the great foreign correspondent whose vivid dispatches from the Crimea brought home to the British public the realities of war, supplied obituaries of military men. Leonard Courtney, a leader writer who had read mathematics at Cambridge, wrote on scientists; Tom Taylor, the paper’s art critic, covered painters; Antonio Gallenga, a colourful Italian exile turned foreign correspondent, accounted for several of his compatriots.

It is only thanks to the paper’s meticulously kept archive and the published volumes of its official history that we can know now in such detail who did what. None of these authors received a byline. Anonymity was, and would long continue to be, the Times’s watchword. The self-effacing Thomas Barnes had his own death marked only by a two-line announcement which made no reference to the fact that he had, for 24 years, been Editor of The Times.

The Times obituaries were the paper’s verdict, not the individual author’s, however well-informed or personally distinguished he might be. Delane made sure of this. He was away when Palmerston died, but he instructed his deputy to retrieve the prepared obituary from ‘the little basket which hangs over the davenport in my breakfast room’-he had revised it himself at home in Searjants’ Inn.

Delane saw to it that most of the important notices were prepared well ahead of time, and regularly updated as required. There are tales – reassuring to a 21st-century obituary editor – of copy being frantically written in the office late at night, or even in the train up to town from Ramsgate, when the paper had for some reason been caught unprepared. On the whole, however, as I hope this collection confirms, the major obituaries published in the 19th-century Times were the products of authoritative inside knowledge, and of long and careful thought. Here are the lives of some of the leading figures of the 19th century as they were recorded and judged by one of the defining institutions of the age, a paper that, as a correspondent once remarked approvingly to Delane, contrived somehow or other to be ‘always in at the Death!’

Professor Andrew Sanders

Readers of this collection of Victorian obituaries will discover a series of reasoned, and often admirably critical, assessments of public lives. They were all written before the age of Hollywood stardom and the emergence of the cult of celebrity fostered by the popular media. Victorian obituarists and biographers who dealt with public achievements did not see it as their business to probe into the private circumstances of their subjects; nor did they suppose that their readers would be interested in them reporting issues that they probably assumed were little better than backstairs gossip. Theirs was an age when ‘A’ and ‘B’ lists of celebrities were still determined by Burke’s Peerage and the Almanach de Gotha, and when very few people outside princely houses were famous for merely being famous. Fashions were both worn and created exclusively by the upper classes, and ‘sport’ was still largely regarded as the genteel matter of hunting, shooting and fishing. W. G. Grace, a Bristol doctor by profession and a gentleman cricketer by calling, was essentially an admired amateur. The idea that Mrs Grace might somehow be a ‘celebrity’ merely by association with her husband’s sporting prowess would have seemed preposterous. This present selection of thoughtful obituaries offers a sample of the ‘innumerable biographies’ that Thomas Carlyle thought formed the essence of history. It serves to illuminate a range of cultural, social and political issues of the Victorian century by offering a select view of public life expressed in exclusively Victorian terms.

The first obituary reprinted in this present collection is that of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby school and the fosterer of much of the earnestness that shaped Victorian Britain. Two years after his death, a substantial biography of Arnold was published by his former pupil, Arthur Stanley. It was a book that had achieved something of the status of a classic by the end of the century. The problem with Stanley’s life of Dr Arnold, and indeed with any piously uncritical Victorian biography, lies now in the fact that Arnold – together with three other ‘Eminent Victorians’-had been debunked by that slick master of innuendo, Lytton Strachey. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians first appeared in 1918 and, in the often cynical and disillusioned post-First World War world, it had an immediate appeal. Strachey knew that a military metaphor for his historical method was appropriate: he described how an ‘explorer of the past’ had now to ‘attack his subject in unexpectedplaces; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined’. The achievements and reputations of Strachey’s four ‘eminent’ Victorians have long since recovered from his tactical assaults, but, since 1918, both the strategies and the ‘art’ of biography have undergone a radical shift. Twentieth and twenty-first century biographers are generally disinclined either to describe the heroism of earnestness or to overlook moral shortcomings and sexual peccadillos; they also tend to suffer neither fools nor would-be saints gladly.

It is, however, in the pre-Stracheyan context that we must both place and understand Victorian obituaries. Most obituarists, prompted by a sense of the historical significance of biography, readily recognised that the lives of their subjects had a social context. Nineteenth-century Britain had been required to redefine itself and its role models in order to cope with the changes brought about by industrialisation, urbanisation and an increase in literacy. As a ‘newspaper of record’, The Times acknowledged its responsibility in recording the impact of these social readjustments. As the readers of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History realised, heroism had to be re-examined in the light of the idea of the self-made man; they would also have appreciated that the evolving concept of heroism in Victorian Britain could not remain an exclusively male prerogative. The first generation of Victorian women included professional writers of the first eminence, but it is significant that neither the Brontë sisters nor Charlotte’s biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, were deemed worthy of an obituary notice in The Times. In the period after 1865, however, partly as a result of John Delane’s resolution to enhance the status of his newspaper, the lives and achievements of professional women, as opposed to the mere social prestige accorded to titled women, were to find their proper place in the The Times’s obituary columns.

From what was called ‘The Age of Reform’ onwards, new avenues of expression for both men and women were slowly broadening out. Some of the obituaries included in the present collection remind us of the opening up of government and its institutions to those who did not form part of the old Establishment: Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew, not only rose to the highest political office, but he also made determined efforts to open up the House of Commons to those practising Jews who were unable to take the requisite Christian oath of allegiance to sit in the House. The campaigns in the 1880s of the avowed atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, mark a further shift away from the confessional narrowness which had defined the State at the beginning of the century. The issue of women’s suffrage (which seems to vex John Stuart Mill’s obituarist) was not to be resolved until after the Great War, but it is clear from the enterprise of Harriet Martineau, George Eliot and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that social, educational and professional liberation for women were seen as the proper precursors to the achievement of full political rights.

It is significant too that a good number of the men and women commemorated in this volume were classic Victorian examples of what Samuel Smiles famously described as ‘Self-Help’. Smiles (1812-1904), who wrote a life of George Stephenson in 1857 and who would go on to publish Lives of the Engineers in 1867, first issued his bestselling Self-Help in 1859. Smiles saw the spirit of self-help as ‘the root of all genuine growth in the individual’, which constituted ‘the true source of national vigour and strength’, and his aim was to provide role models for a newly aspirant class of what the Victorians referred to as ‘mechanics’. This body of skilled working men was to form a vital part of the emergent lower middle class, who, once enfranchised from 1867 onwards, began to change the political balance of power. What Smiles recognised was that the true gentleman was manifest in all classes as the ‘honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting and self-helping’ citizen. This was in marked contrast to the upper-class definition of gentlemanliness, but Smiles clearly struck a profound note in a society where national wealth substantially came from trade and manufacture rather than from land. Writers and artists as well as men of science, invention and commerce were the new heroes, and this is reflected in The Times. Although his obituarist did not know the true extent of Dickens’s rise from childhood adversity, the novelist had, by the time of his death, emerged as the quintessential product of Victorian social mobility fostered by the application of an innate genius; The Times also recognised the achievement of other notable meritocrats who had risen above the humble circumstances of their birth – men and women such as George Stephenson, Thomas Carlyle, Michael Faraday, David Livingstone, George Eliot and Thomas Cook. Its 19-century obituary columns also honoured the philanthropical energy of men who had either made their money as enterprising manufacturers (Sir Titus Salt) or as City business men (Sir Moses Montefiore).

Victorian society was, however, far from class-less. Britain’s traditional ruling class remained entrenched and The Times remained duly deferential to those who had been born great. Its obituary of Queen Victoria herself (arguably the most influential woman of her generation) is so substantial and detailed that its very length precludes its inclusion in such a selection as this. The Queen’s tastes, antipathies and patronage are nonetheless evident in many of the other obituaries reprinted in this collection. This is equally true of Prince Albert, whose untimely death in 1861 occasioned lengthy and adulatory tributes, which often skirted over the widespread unpopularity Albert had experienced earlier in his life, and whose obituary notice is not included here. To give a full flavour of each person’s life and of the period, each obituary has been included here in its entirety, though they vary hugely in length. In order to include as wide and representative a selection as possible in the space available, it has been necessary to omit some fulsome tributes paid to others – from members of the Royal Family, to the upper clergy of the Church of England, Oxbridge dons, admirals and generals and lawyers and medical men who seem to posterity not to have made such a lasting contribution to the advancement of their professions. One celebrated British army officer, Lord Lucan, is included for the part he played in the debâcle of the Charge of the Light Brigade; he also forms part of a loosely linked group of obituary subjects (Delane, Tennyson and Florence Nightingale) who all share a connection with The Times’s critical reporting of the Crimean War. It has proved impossible, again due to its length, to include the death notice of the greatest soldier of the century, the Duke of Wellington, who died in 1852. Wellington’s career, both as a soldier and as a politician, also substantially fell outside the Victorian age, but his great funeral procession through London was perhaps the most memorable state occasion of the period. One great military figure remembered here, Robert E. Lee, ended his days regarded as an ignominious figure by a good many of his fellow Americans. His rehabilitation as a man of honour and a great strategist may have begun with the kind of posthumous tribute of which The Times’s is a fine example.

Four Prime Ministers, all of them accorded very long obituaries in The Times, firmly merit inclusion here: Peel, Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone all made profound contributions to the history of parliamentary government in the United Kingdom. Each of them also extended Britain’s international influence and resolutely established the country as, for the most part, a highly respected European power-broker. The substance of the political careers of all four would probably demand tributes of a similar expansiveness nowadays. So might the lives of a number of foreign heads of state, or heads of government. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which so appalled his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, did not occasion what could strictly be described as an obituary, but The Times’s reporting of the event captures something of its immediate impact and perceived long-term import. Though it is not included here, the shocked telling of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II is comparable, and an account that suggests how alien Russian affairs may have seemed to British readers of The Times in 1881. The former Emperor Napoleon III received a surprisingly generous obituary notice, despite the fact that he had so often been dismissed by the British press as a charlatan during his reign, while his arch enemy, Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of the new German Empire which he had forged into existence, earns the extraordinarily flattering compliment that he was ‘one of the rare men who leave indelible marks on the world’s history’. Pope Pius IX’s demise in 1878 might well have elicited a similar adulatory comment, but his obituary dwells instead on the Pontiff’s manifest disappointments, diplomatic shortcomings and political failures, as much as on the great changes he both wrought and witnessed in the Roman Catholic Church.

When it came to foreign politicians and revolutionaries who spent their lives in exile The Times obituarists are far more guarded and ambiguous in their opinions. As the death notice of Lajos Kossuth implies, here was a man past his political peak. Kossuth, with Mazzini and Garibaldi, had been much admired by mid-century British liberals, and his obituary – representative of all three – demonstrates the combination of political inconsistency, frustrated energy and old-age compromise, common enough characteristics in unfulfilled politicians, that appeared to disconcert the three obituarists. It will probably surprise modern readers that both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels receive such short shrift from their obituarists (the tribute to Marx, who died in London, was actually contributed by the paper’s Paris correspondent). Both men were long-term residents in England and both were familiar to a tight-knit international community of socialist thinkers but neither, The Times seems to suggest, possessed much immediate relevance to an exclusively British political world view. The fact that the major theoretical works of both had, at the time of their deaths, yet to appear in articulate English translations may well have contributed to this feeling of relative indifference.

William Morris, one of the rare contemporary Englishmen to acknowledge Marx’s importance – though his overt and conspicuous involvement with socialist politics is given the briefest of mentions – emerges from his Times obituary as ambiguous in quite another way. If there are anomalies in Morris’s career they lie in the balance of his distinctive achievement as a poet and his work as a craftsman and designer. Morris’s marriage is barely alluded to and his wife’s long association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti is passed over without mention.

Morris’s obituary is representative in this way – in most cases the irregular domestic circumstances of the writers, musicians and painters whose obituaries appear in this collection are left unmentioned. This may be the result of an ignorance of the facts, or a matter of tact, but for the most part we may be left to assume that the private lives of artists were always regarded as challenging conventional views of sexual and marital morality. Only in the case of the once-provo cative Oscar Wilde does an obituary see a fall from social grace as salutary; it views him as the kind of artist whose essentially flippant approach to life made him prone to overstep the mark.

In nearly all cases of those Victorians accorded obituaries in The Times, the secrets kept behind closed doors, and of their hearts, were left to be revealed not just before the Court of Heaven but by inquisitive, and sometimes prying, post-Victorian biographers.

All obituaries have been taken directly from The Times and therefore use the original spelling and punctuation throughout.

THOMAS ARNOLD

Pioneer educator and historian: ‘A death more to be mourned as a public loss…could scarcely have occurred.’

15 JUNE 1842

WE ANNOUNCED ON Monday the death of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, D.D., head master of Rugby School, which took place at Rugby on Sunday morning last, after a few hours’ illness of a disease of the heart. He had been master of Rugby school 15 years. Dr. Arnold had latterly devoted the whole of his time unoccupied by scholastic duties to his lectures on Modern History and to his History of Rome, and was contemplating a retirement, in the course of a few years, to his favourite residence at Fox-how, in Westmoreland. Dr. Arnold had, we believe, attained the age of 52. He was born at Cowes, Isle of Wight, and was the son of the late Mr. William Arnold, collector of Her Majesty’s Customs of that port. He was educated at Winchester school, and thence went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was afterwards Fellow of Oriel. Dr. Arnold married a daughter of the late Rev. John Penrose, and has left behind him a numerous family. On Sunday morning Dr. Arnold was seized with pain and oppressed breathing, indicating to his medical attendants some sudden and severe affection, most probably of a spasmodic nature, in the heart. A loss more precious to his family, his friends, his country – a death more to be mourned as a public loss – could scarcely have occurred. Dr. Arnold had a sharp attack of fever some little time since, but appeared to have recovered from it. His father died early in life, and from a similar disease, we believe.

Arnold, born in the same year as Keats and Carlyle, only narrowly made it into the Victorian era. He died, prematurely, just short of his forty-seventh birthday while still in post as headmaster of Rugby School. He was, nevertheless, one of four Eminent Victorians selected to have their posthumous reputations sapped by Lytton Strachey in 1918. Arnold had transformed the moral and educational ethos of Rugby, an achievement variously celebrated in the work of two strikingly contrasted expupils: Arthur Penryn Stanley (whose influential Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold D.D. appeared in 1844) and Thomas Hughes’s enduringly popular Tom Brown’s Schooldays by an Old Boy (1857).

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Composer: ‘He will be lamented wherever his name was known or his art be loved.’

4 NOVEMBER 1847

IT IS WITH no ordinary regret that we have received intelligence of the premature and most unlooked-for death of Dr. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He expired at Leipsic, on Thursday last, after a short illness, which brought on paralysis of the brain. The triumphant reception which he had met with in London last spring, and the magnificent productions which were then heard under the directing influence of his genius, will never be forgotten by those who witnessed them. Never had the great musician of our time appeared to be more full of life, energy, and creative power. But upon his return to Germany in the beginning of May, these brilliant recollections were damped by the death of a favourite sister, who had just fallen a victim to the same form of cerebral disease. Dr. Mendelssohn retired to Interlachen, in Switzerland, for the summer months, where although he had shaken off the fatigues of the London season, this family affliction seemed to have given him some foreboding of his own impending fate. He returned to his duties at Leipsic, but very few weeks elapsed before his imperishable labours were terminated for ever. He had not yet completed his 39th year, having been born on the 3rd of February, 1809.

We shall leave it to others to tender an appropriate homage to the musical works of this great composer, and to celebrate his memorable achievements in that art of which he was so perfect a master. But the people of this country owe, and will surely pay, no slender and indifferent tribute to his memory, for he loved England as heartily as his own home; and from early youth to the splendid maturity of the last season he has found amongst us several of his warmest friends and many of his proudest distinctions. The genius of Shakspeare awakened in the youth of 17 years the inimitable fancy and grace of the overture to the Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he afterwards produced at the Conservatoire in Paris and at the Philharmonic Concerts in 1829. The poetry of Oesian and the stern scenery of the Scotch Isles inspired the Halls of Fingal. And, above all, the Church music of England and the great oratorios, which are the objects of our traditional veneration, led his mind to those awful conceptions which he realized in St. Paul and in Elijah. The latter work was first produced by its author at the Birmingham festival of last year, and in the English tongue. Of the thousands who have already been excited or touched by its sublime choruses and its affecting melodies, none could have imagined that those were the last strains of their illustrious author’s life, and that the genius which seemed already to have approached so nearly to an heavenly inspiration was about to leave us for ever. Like Mozart, like Raphael, the beauty of youth seemed in Mendelssohn to have exhausted the fullness of life; and his career has terminated in its glory, before it had concluded the abundant labours of a perfect artist’s existence.

From early childhood Felix Mendelssohn was already the wonder and the pride of the musical schools of Berlin. At eight years old he was already one of the most accomplished pianoforte players of the age; and his musical science kept pace with his astonishing power of execution and of ear. In boyhood he was profoundly versed in the works of Sebastian Bach, and the severer masters; and throughout his life his mind was keenly alive to all that was great in intellect or beautiful in poetry. Goethe had affectionately greeted his early promise, and never was the promise of a marvellous precocity more amply fulfilled.

A more striking proof of the great general cultivation and refinement of Felix Mendelssohn’s mind could hardly be given than in his masterly adaptation of the resources of his art to several of the most sublime and terrible creations of the Greek drama. His music to the Œdipus Colonus and the Antigone was as nearly akin to the genius of Sophocles as if his imagination had been nurtured in the traditions of classical antiquity. In like manner his sacred oratorios were penetrated with the spirit of the Bible. He was wont to construct and combine these great epics himself from the sacred volume, which was the subject of his constant and devout meditation. In St. Paul, it was the nascent energy of the Church of Christ, impersonated in the Apostle of the Gentiles, which inspired his imagination. In the Elijah, it was the servant of God labouring in his appointed course, against the perversity of the world, and the infirmities of his own imperfect nature, until he had perfected the work which was given him to do. But in all these productions, whilst the execution is that of a great musician, the conception belongs to the highest range of poetry.

In all the relations of life, Felix Mendelssohn has left few men of lesser genius who can equal him in the humbler graces and the more private virtues. He was affectionate, generous, and true beyond the common virtue of men. In his profession he leaves no equal, but no enemy, almost no rival; his many and early triumphs had never for an instant impaired the simplicity of his character, or the unassuming cordiality of his manners. His conversation was unusually animated, and even brilliant; never more so than when he had shaken off his customary pursuits, to revel in those natural beauties which he passionately enjoyed, to animate his household circle with his pleasantry, or discourse on the subjects which could elevate and excite his mind. To those who had the happiness of living in habitual intercourse with him, this most unhappy loss is one to which all the sympathy of the world can bring but a slight alleviation; but he will be lamented wherever his name was known or his art beloved.

In 1847 the Musical Times paid tribute to Mendelssohn as an ‘adopted son of England’ and as ‘probably the first who opened a regular musical inter-communication between Germany and England’. Mendelssohn’s commitment to his British audiences had been at its most conspicuous in the spring and summer of 1846. His final and triumphant engagement had taken place on 18 August when he had conducted the first performance of his oratorio Elijah at Birmingham, the city which had commissioned the work. Mendelssohn, a pioneer in the revival of interest in the music of Bach, was also celebrated in his own time as the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He had received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1835.

GEORGE STEPHENSON

Inventor and engineer: The ‘Father of Railways.’

12 AUGUST 1848

IT IS WITH much concern that we announce the decease of Mr. George Stephenson, the celebrated engineer. He died at his establishment in Derbyshire on Saturday last, aged 67. Few men have obtained, or deserved, a higher reputation. He rose from the humblest life from the elasticity of his native talent overcoming the obstacles of narrow circumstances and even confined education. In his profession he was as happy and ingenious in his discoveries as generous in imparting the benefit of them to the world. In the history of railroad enterprise and movement the name of George Stephenson will live.

This relatively short notice of Stephenson, who had died on 12 August at Tapton House, Chesterfield, is fulsome in its praise but singularly brief in detail about his considerable engineering achievements. His death was ascribed to a cold caught while inspecting the beloved green-houses which he had erected on his estate in the hope of eclipsing those of Chatsworth. The most adulatory contemporary study of Stephenson’s career, Samuel Smiles’s Life of George Stephenson, was to appear in 1859.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Poet: ‘Few poets have exercised greater influence in his own country.’

23 APRIL 1850

IT IS WITH feelings of much regret that we announce today the death of William Wordsworth. The illustrious poet breathed his last at noon on Tuesday by the side of that beautiful lake in Westmoreland which his residence and his verse had rendered famous. We are not called upon in his case to mourn over the untimely fate of genius snatched away in the first feverish struggles of development, or even in the noonday splendour of its mid career. Full of years, as of honours, the old man had time to accomplish all that he was capable of accomplishing ere he was called away. It may well be, that he had not carried out to completion many of his plans, but it is a natural incident to humanity that execution falls far short of design. What a man could not accomplish in something like half a century of a poetical career under all the favourable conditions of unbroken quiet, moderate but sufficient means, and vigorous health, may fairly be supposed to have been beyond his reach. Therefore, as far as concerns the legacy of song William Wordsworth has bequeathed to his country, we have nothing to regret. Removed by taste and temperament from the busy scenes of the world, his long life was spent in the conception and elaboration of his poetry in the midst of the sylvan solitudes to which he was so fondly attached. His length of days permitted him to act as the guardian of his own fame, – he could bring his maturer judgment to bear upon the first bursts of his youthful inspiration, as well as upon the more measured flow of his maturest compositions. Whatever now stands in the full collection of his works has received the final imprimatur from the poet’s hand, sitting in judgment upon his own works under the influence of a generation later than his own. It is sufficiently characteristic of the man, that little has been altered, and still less condemned. Open at all times to the influences of external nature, he was singularly indifferent to the judgment of men, or rather so enamoured of his own judgment that he could brook no teacher. Nature was his book, he would admit no interpretation but his own. It was this which constituted the secret of his originality and his strength, at the same time that the abuse of the principle laid him open at times to strictures, the justice of which few persons but the unreasoning fanatics of his school would now be prepared to deny.

But we feel this is not a season for criticism. There is so much in the character, as well as in the works of William Wordsworth, to deserve hearty admiration, that we may indulge in the language most grateful to our feelings without overstepping the decent limits of propriety and plain sincerity. We would point out, in the first place, one of the great excellencies of the departed worthy. His life was as pure and spotless as his song. It is rendering a great service to humanity when a man exalted by intellectual capacities above his fellow-men holds out to them in his own person the example of a blameless life. As long as men are what they are it is well that the fashion of virtue should be set them by men whose rare abilities are objects of envy and emulation even to the most dissolute and unprincipled. If this be true of the statesman, of the warrior, of the man of science, it is so in a tenfold degree of the poet and the man of letters. Their works are in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Their habits of life become insensibly mixed up with their compositions in the minds of their admirers. They spread the moral infection wider than other men, because those brought within their influence are singularly susceptible of contamination. The feelings, the passions, the imagination, which are busy with the compositions of the poet, are quickly interested in the fashion of his life. From ‘I would fain write so’ to ‘I would fain live so’ there is but a little step. Under this first head the English nation owes a deep debt of gratitude to William Wordsworth. Neither by the influence of his song, nor by the example of his life, has he corrupted or enervated our youth; by one, as by the other, he has purified and elevated, not soiled and abased, humanity. If we may pass from this more general and important consideration to a more limited sphere of action, we would point out the example of the venerable old man who now lies sleeping by the side of the Westmoreland lake to the attention of all who aim at high literary distinction. To William Wordsworth his art was his all, and sufficed to him as its own rich reward. We do not find him trucking the inspirations of his genius for mere sums of money, nor aiming at political and social distinctions by prostituting the divine gift that was in him. He appears to have felt that in the successful cultivation of his art he was engaged in a laborious, if in a delightful occupation. Could he succeed, he was on the level of the greatest men of his age, although he might not have a single star or riband to hang up against the wall of his rustic cottage, nor a heavy balance at his banker’s as evidence of his success. These things are but the evidence of one species of triumph, the poet, the dramatist, the historian, should aim at distinctions of another kind.

If we think the present occasion an unfit one for cold criticism, we may without impropriety devote a few brief sentences to the excellences of the compositions of the Poet of Rydal Mount. There must be something essentially ‘English’ in his inspirations, for while few poets have exercised greater influence in his own country, on the continent his works are little known even to students who have devoted much time and attention to English literature. In Germany, for example, you will find translations at the chief seats of literary society of the poetry of Scott, Byron, Moore, and Shelley: Southey and Coleridge are less known; the name of Wordsworth scarcely pronounced at all. Of France the same thing may with truth be said. In either country there may be rare instances of students of the highest order, of a Guizot, a Merimée, a Humboldt, a Bunsen, who are well acquainted with the writings of Wordsworth, and share our insular admiration for his beauties, but such exceptions are few indeed. There must, therefore, be some development of ‘English’ thought in Wordsworth which is the secret of his success amongst ourselves, as of his failure in securing an European reputation. It is certain that some of the great poets whose names we have mentioned have left it upon record that they are indebted for the idea of some of their most beautiful passages to the teaching and example of Wordsworth, and yet the scholars have charmed an audience which the master could not obtain. It is probably the case that in no country of Europe is the love for a country life so strongly developed as in England, and no man who could not linger out a summer day by the river bank or on the hill side is capable of appreciating Wordsworth’s poetry. The familiarity with sylvan scenes, and an habitual calm delight under the influence of nature, are indispensable requisites before the tendency of the song canbe understood which works by catching a divine inspiration even from the dewy fragrance of the heatherbell and the murmur of the passing brook. It was not in Wordsworth’s genius to people the air with phantoms, but to bring the human mind in harmony with the operations of nature, of which he stood forth the poet and the interpreter. We write with the full recollection of many lovely human impersonations of the departed poet present to our minds; but his great aim appears to have been that which we have endeavoured to shadow out as distinctly as our limited space would permit.

Before concluding we would advert to a point which is perhaps more in keeping with the usual subjects of our columns than the humble tribute of admiration we have endeavoured to offer to the illustrious man who has just been called away. Let us hope that the office of Poet Laureate, which was dignified by its two last possessors, may never be conferred upon a person unworthy to succeed them. The title is no longer an honour, but a mere badge of ridicule, which can bring no credit to its wearer. It required the reputation of a Southey or a Wordsworth to carry them through an office so entirely removed from the ideas and habits of our time without injury to their fame. Let whatever emoluments go with the name be commuted into a pension, and let the pension be bestowed upon a deserving literary man without the ridiculous accompaniment of the bays. We know well enough that birthday odes have long since been exploded; but why retain a nickname, not a title, which must be felt as a degradation rather than an honour by its wearer? Having said thus much, we will leave the subject to the better judgment of those whose decision is operative in such matters. Assuredly, William Wordsworth needed no such Court distinctions or decorations. His name will live in English literature, and his funeral song be uttered, amidst the spots which he has so often celebrated, and by the rivers and hills which inspired his verse.

Wordsworth died at midday on 23 April 1850. Readers of this obituary may well have been inclined to agree with the poet himself who in 1801 had remarked to a friend that ‘in truth my life has been unusually barren of events’. A version of his great autobiographical poem, The Prelude: Growth of a Poet’s Mind was not to appear until shortly after his death and full revelations about his time in France during the early stages of the Revolution were only made in the 1920s. In November 1791 Wordsworth had crossed the Channel to France and, on 6 December, had moved from Paris to Orléans where he met Annette Vallon. He and Annette moved to Blois in February 1792. He was alone in Paris when Annette gave birth to his daughter Anne-Caroline on 15 December and he was back in England, without Annette and his daughter, by the end of the month. The Prelude memorably describes both the elation and the later disillusion occasioned by the political upheaval in France but it does not mention the liaison with Annette. Wordsworth’s eventless and ‘blameless’ life was therefore more open to question than his Times obituarist knew. Despite the claim that ‘he might not have a single star or riband to hang up against the wall of his rustic cottage’, some of his admirers, including Browning in his poem The Lost Leader, regarded the sometime-radical Wordsworth’s acceptance of government appointments as a sell-out. He was succeeded as Poet Laureate by Tennyson.

SIR ROBERT PEEL

Politician: ‘One of the most sagacious statesmen that England ever produced.’

2 JULY 1850

A GREAT AGE has lost a great man. Sir Robert Peel, whom all parties and all nations associate more than any other statesman with the policy and glory of this empire, is now a name of the past. He has been taken, as it were, from his very seat in the Senate, with nothing to prepare us for his departure, and everything now to remind us of it, with his powers unabated, and his part unfulfilled. Although gradually removed during the last four years from the sphere of party, he had still political friends to be reconciled, a social position to be repaired, motives to be appreciated, and acts to be justified by the tardy and conflicting testimony of results. A devoted band of admirers hoped to see him set right with all the world, while life and strength still remained; and that day of peaceful triumph seemed not very distant. There were others who still saw in Sir Robert Peel the man who had more than once saved his country at the cost of his party, and might again be called to a task which demanded such marvellous powers and so singular a position. The page that recorded his last great effort was scarcely spread before the eyes of the nation when the object of all these hopes and calculations was suddenly withdrawn, and they who speculate or dream over the great game of politics have to readjust their thoughts to the loss of the principal actor.

The highest possible estimate of Sir Robert Peel’s services is that which we are invited to take from the mouth of his opponents. If we are to trust them, we are to believe that but for Sir Robert Peel this country would long since have repudiated the exact performance of its pecuniary obligations; that half our fellow subjects would still be excluded by their creed from office and power; and that the means of existence would still be obstructed and enhanced in their way to a teeming and industrious population. Nor can it be denied that this estimate has a very general consent in its favour. If it be asked who bound England to the faithful discharge of the largest debt ever contracted or imagined by man, and who thereby raised her credit and advanced her prosperity to an unexampled standard, one name, and one only, will present itself to the mind of either Englishman or foreigner, and that name is Peel. If, again, it be asked who admitted eight or nine million British subjects to the rights of British citizenship, the answer still is Peel. If, lastly, it be asked who opened the gates of trade, and bade the food of man flow hither from every shore in an uninterrupted stream, it is still Peel who did it. On these three monuments of wisdom and beneficence other names may be written, but the name of Peel is first and foremost. Yet they were no ordinary achievements. It is within the memory of the living generation that every one of these three things was generally thought impossible, and was wholly despaired of even by those who were most clearly convinced of their moral and political obligation. These things, too, were not done on any mean stage, but in the greatest empire of the world, and where the difficulties were in proportion to the work. But how far does the name of Peel justly occupy this honourable position? Was he the author of these three great acts? Others, indeed, originated and proposed, for they were freer to originate, and it is always easy to gain the start of a statesman more or less implicated in existing legislation and encumbered by his supporters. But to confine ourselves to Sir Robert’s last and crowning achievement, it must be said that while others advised the repeal of the Corn Laws when it was their interest to do so, he was the first to propose it when everything was to be lost by it – when, in fact, he did lose everything by it. His was the risk, so his must be the renown. His right is now proved, not by what he did, but by what he suffered, and he is the confessed author of free trade, because he has been a martyr to it. We cannot question the conscientious convictions of those who drove Sir Robert from power, but in so doing they testify that but for him the Corn Laws would not have been repealed.

But these acts, great as they were, and insulated as they seem, were only parts of a series, and by no means the most laborious parts. The amelioration of our criminal code, the reform of our police, the introduction of simpler forms and more responsible management into every part of our administrative system, took up large parts of Sir Robert’s career, while there was not a subject that could possibly come within his reach that he did not grasp resolutely and well. We have had to differ from him; we do differ from him; but we must admit that no man ever undertook public affairs with a more thorough determination to leave the institutions of his country in an orderly, honest, and efficient state.

But are we wholly to pass over the ambiguities of this honourable career? Must it be left to the future historian to relate that when England lost her greatest living statesman, there were points of his character too tender to be touched, and that all parties agreed to slur over what they could not all praise? Surely not. Truth is as sacred as the grave, and the grief confessed by all may, perhaps, infuse new gravity and candour into a painful discussion. Sir Robert, so it is said, besides many smaller violences to the conscience of his followers, twice signally betrayed them. Twice he broke them up, and we now behold the result in a smitten and divided party. They give us the most undeniable proofs that their indignation is sincere. Suicide is so frequent a form of indignant adjuration that we cannot help respecting such an evidence of wrong. But with the knell of departed greatness sounding in our ear, it is time to view these acts by the light of the future. Posterity will ask, – Were they right or were they wrong? Our own answer shall be without hesitation or reserve. They were among the most needful and salutary acts that ever were given man to do. Grant that Sir Robert compassed them unfairly, and it must at least be admitted that he had a fine taste for glory and prized the gifts of Heaven when he saw them. But is it possible that a man should do such deeds, and a whole life full of them, and yet do them basely? To confess that were indeed a keen satire on man, if not a presumptuous imputation on his Maker. But perhaps there is some semblance of truth in it. Take, then, the long list of earth’s worthies from the beginning of story to the present hour, and let us be candid with them. It will not be easy to find many of that canonized throng whose patriotism has not been alloyed with some baseness, who have not won triumphs with subtlety, deceived nations to their good, countermined against fraudful antagonists, or otherwise sinned against their own greatness. But when we have employed towards other men the candour imposed upon us in the case of Sir Robert Peel, we find these imperfections rather a condition of humanity than a fault of the individual. Nearly all great things, even the greatest of them, have been done in this earthly fashion. In the language of purists all government is bad, Courts are corrupt, and policy a word of opprobrium. An abstract philosopher, indeed, can easily be abstractedly good, but when once we have to deal with the human material there is no choice but to condescend.

But a charge so oft repeated, and so fixed upon the man, demands a closer scrutiny. That charge is double-dealing. It is not that Sir Robert was ‘a doubleminded man,’ and, therefore, ‘unstable in his ways,’ but that he assembled his followers on one understanding and used them for another; or, to take a milder supposition, that he gave way to a different set of impulses when on one side of the House from those which swayed him on the other. Some sort of doubleness is alleged, and some sort must be conceded, though it may not be easily described. Sir Robert was one man by parentage, education, friends, and almost every circumstance of his very early entrance into public life, and another man by the workings of his great intellect, the expansion of his sympathies, and his vast and varied experience. He was early taught to worship George III, and to adore the very shadow of Pitt, for his father published a pamphlet to prove that the National Debt was a positive source of prosperity. From this ultra-Tory household he passed to Harrow, where, as the world knows, he was the contemporary of Byron, of Aberdeen, and other great men, but it was at Oxford that he chiefly acquired confidence and fame. He was the most distinguished son of that University, and its most cherished representative. Thirty years ago Peel was to do everything for the Universities, the Church of England, the aristocracy, and every man and every thing that reposes under those institutions. The only question was, whether he would stand by them – whether he was stanch; for in those days it was the office of a statesman to do what he was bid. It is enough for our present purpose to remind our readers that he first took office under Perceval, continued under Lord Liverpool, Eldon all the time being Lord Chancellor; that as Irish Secretary he was early pressed into the service of the Orange party; and that meanwhile old Sir Robert Peel, himself in Parliament, showed a most amiable vigilance for the integrity of his son’s opinions. In fact, never was a rising young statesman blessed with so many fathers and mothers, and godfathers and godmothers. Tories and Orangemen, Oxford and the Church, Perceval and Lord Liverpool, Eldon, and we believe we must add Wellington, with old Sir Robert to hold all together, constituted a political nursery in which it was scarcely possible to go wrong. Unfortunately for his numerous patrons and advisers, Peel had something else in him than a capacity for receiving nursery impressions. He was a great man, and broke through his trammels, but his life was spent in that long and painful struggle. His affections, his friendships, his pledges, and his speeches kept in record against him, held him back, while his far-seeing and active solicitude for his country drew him on. His life was one long contest, for warm pledges are not easily broken, nor, on the other hand, are deep convictions easily belied. But is it impossible for a really honest man to suffer such a struggle? All history and every man’s own experience will tell him that it is not impossible. The larger a man’s capacity, and the kindlier his nature, the wider also will be his sympathies; and the more likely also will he be to embrace and feel many conflicting considerations. His heart may draw him one way, and his reason another. The influence of a sudden event, the force of some new argument, the excitement of some discussion, the persuasion of some example may ever and anon take possession of the imagination and senses, while the mind within pursues its even tenour, finds out truth at last, and then holds it fast. But the age wherein we live is interested in vindicating the character of its own statesman. Be he double or single, Sir Robert Peel was the type and representative of his generation. We have lived in a period of transition, and Sir Robert has conducted us safely through it. England has changed as well as he.

Sir Robert has died ‘in harness.’ He never sought repose, and his almost morbid restlessness rendered him incapable of enjoying it. His was a life of effort. The maxim that if anything is worth doing, it is worth doing well, seemed ever present to his mind, so that everything he did or said was somewhat over-laboured. His official powers, as some one said the other day, were Atlantean, and his Ministerial expositions on the same gigantic scale. There was an equal appearance of effort, however, in his most casual remarks, at least when in public, for he would never throw away a chance; and he still trusted to his industry rather than to his powers. But a man whose life is passed in the service of the public, and whose habits are Parliamentary or official, is not to be judged by ordinary rules, for he can scarcely fail to be cold, guarded, and ostentatious. What is a senate but a species of theatre, where a part must be acted, feelings must be expressed, and applause must be won? Undoubtedly the habit of political exhibition told on Sir Robert’s manner and style, and even on his mind. His egotism was proverbial, but besides the excessive use of the first person, it occasionally betrayed him into performances at variance both with prudence and taste. His love of applause was closely allied to a still more dangerous appetite for national prosperity, without sufficient regard to its sources and permanence. It was this that seduced him into encouraging, instead of controlling the railway mania. Had the opportunity been allowed, we are inclined to think he would have falsified the common opinion as to his excessive discretion, and astonished mankind with some splendid, if successful, novelties. His style of speaking was admirably adapted for its purpose, for it was luminous and methodical, while his powerful voice and emphatic delivery gave almost too much assistance to his language, for it was apt to be redundant and common-place. He had not that strong simplicity of expression which is almost a tradition of the old Whig school, and is no slight element of its power. We had almost omitted Sir Robert’s private character. This is not the place to trumpet private virtues, which never shine better than when they are really private. Suffice it to say that Sir Robert was honoured and beloved in every relation of private life.

Such is the man, the statesman, and the patriot, with his great virtues, and perhaps his little failings, that has fallen at his post. Under Providence he has been our chief guide from the confusions and darkness that hung round the beginning of this century to the comparatively quiet haven in which we are now embayed. Under the lamentable circumstances of his departure, we again revert with renewed satisfaction to the speech which, little as he thought it, was his farewell to the nation. Not the least prominent or least pleasing portion of that speech was its calm, retrospective, and conciliatory character, and, in particular, the manner in which he unconsciously took leave of the man whose policy he stood up to review, and who had entered public life with him, under the same master, forty-one years ago. Having in his introductory sentences declared his cordial concurrence with many parts of the Ministerial policy during their whole period of office, when he came at last to speak of the course recently taken by our diplomacy, he observed, – ‘I have so little disposition – and I say it with truth, for the feelings which have actuated me for the last four years remain unabated (hear, hear) – I have so little disposition, I say, for entering into any angry or hostile controversy, that I shall make no