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The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Stefan Collini
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Extract

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 35 , December 1985 , pp. 29 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1985

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References

1 Bosanquet, Helen, The Strength of the People: A Study in Social Economics (1902), iv, 120, 129Google Scholar. Mowat, C. L., The Charity Organisation Society: 1869–1913: Its Ideas and Work (1961), 125Google Scholar.

2 The correspondence is reprinted in the Preface to the 2nd edition of Strength of the People (1903), quotation at p. viii.

3 Marshall, Alfred, The Principles of Economics, Ninth (Variorum) Edition, with annotations by Guillebaud, C.W., 2 vols. (1961) (1st ed, 1890), I. 1Google Scholar; 11. 17; 1. 723–5, 740–4. For fuller discussion of Marshall's views on this topic, see Collini, Stefan, Winch, Donald, Burrow, John, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), 309–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For the most sophisticated discussion along these lines, see Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, part III.

5 Bliss, W. P. D. (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Social Reform (1898), 1271Google Scholar; Ball, Sidney, ‘The Socialist Ideal’, Economic Review IX (1899), 437Google Scholar. Ball's testimony is particularly relevant here because he had taken issue with the Bosanquets' 1895 volume: see esp. his ‘The moral aspects of Socialism’, International Journal of Ethics VI (1896), 291–322Google Scholar. Although Ball, founder of the Oxford Branch of the Fabian Society, was not by this date a typical Fabian, it is worth recalling that the stated ‘Object’ of The Fellowship of the New Life, out of which the Fabian Society had grown in 1883, had been ‘The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all’; see Pease, Edward R., The History of the Fabian Society (1916), 32Google Scholar.

6 Encyclopaedia of Social Reform, 895.

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11 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) (repr. 1965), 7, 9, 13. The book was based on lectures Bradley had been giving for some years previously.

12 A residue of this is very evident in the definition of ‘character’ given in the self-consciously ‘value-free’ language of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (N.Y., 1930), 335Google Scholar: ‘An enduring psychophysical disposition to inhibit instinctive tendencies in accordance with regulative principles… Some other phrase, such as “prepotent impulses” or “firmly ingrained habits” may be substituted for “instinctive tendencies”, but the implication remains that the more resistance there is to overcome in order to achieve a desirable end, the more character is to be ascribed to the successfully inhibiting individual’.

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17 Cf. the remark of an historian of nineteenth-century America, which he describes as ‘a culture of character’:

‘It is significant in this context to call attention to the other key words most often associated with the concept of character. A review of over two hundred such items reveals the words most frequently related to the notion of character: citizenship, duty, democracy, work, building, golden deeds, outdoor life, conquest, honor, reputation, morals, manners, integrity, and above all manhood. The stress was clearly moral and the interest was almost always in some sort of higher moral law. The most popular quotation—it appeared in dozens of works—was Emerson's definition of character: “Moral order through the medium of individual nature”.’

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18 The best account of Arnold's view is still Trilling, Lionel, Matthew Arnold (N.Y., 1939)Google Scholar; there is a helpful comparison with Mill in Alexander, Edward, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (1965)Google Scholar.

19 See Rees, J. C., Mill and His Early Critics (Leicester, 1956)Google Scholar.

20 See ‘Editor's Introduction’ to von Humboldt, Wilhelm, The Limits of State Action, ed. Burrow, J. W. (Cambridge, 1969), xxiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1957), 233–4Google Scholar.

22 Hilton, Boyd, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar, esp. ‘Conclusion’.

23 For some perceptive remarks on this ideal, see Rothblatt, Sheldon, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture (1976)Google Scholar, and Phillipson, Nicholas, ‘Culture and society in the eighteenth-century province: the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The University in Society, ed. Stone, L., 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1974), II. 407–48Google Scholar.

24 Century Dictionary (1889); cf. the OED: ‘the estimate formed of a person's qualities; reputation; when used without qualifying epithet, implying “favourable estimate, good repute”’. See also White, R. G., Words and their Uses (1870), 99Google Scholar: ‘Character is like an inward spiritual grace of which reputation is, or should be, the outward and visible sign’.

25 For examples, see Collini, , Winch, and Burrow, , That Noble Science of Politics, 151–9, 170–4, 185–205, 317–329Google Scholar.

26 Mill, , System of Logic, CW, VIII. 904–5Google Scholar.

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28 For my understanding of ‘the language of virtue’ I am primarily indebted to Pocock, Machiavellian Moment: for its relation, particularly relevant to my theme, to political economy, see Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. the essays by Robertson and Pocock himself.

29 For ‘the language of sociability’ see the sources cited in fn. 23 above, and Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as civic moralist’ in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue.

30 Quoted in Rothblatt, , Liberal Education, 73Google Scholar.

31 Rothblatt, , Liberal Education, 28Google Scholar.

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34 Bradley, Ian, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (1980), 154–5Google Scholar. There is much interesting material on the educated classes' views of reform in 1867 in Harvie, Christopher, The Lights of Liberalism: Academic Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860–1886 (1976)Google Scholar, but for some reservations about Harvie's interpretation of it see Collini, Stefan, ‘Political theory and the “science of society” in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), esp. 212–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Stephen, Leslie, The Life of Henry Fawcett (1885)Google Scholar. Note the terms of Stephen's endorsement of Fawcett's, views: ‘Whoever professes to raise the position of a class without elevating its character is a charlatan’, (p. 152)Google Scholar.

36 Cf. Macintyre's, Alasdair remark about Smith's, Adam moral philosophy: ‘On Smith's view Knowledge of what the rules are, whether the rules of justice or of prudence or of benevolence, is not sufficient to enable us to follow them; to do so we need another virtue of a very different kind, the Stoic virtue of self-command which enables us to control our passions when they distract us from what virtue requires’. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), 218Google Scholar.

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38 Cf. Haley's, remarks on the ‘Hebraic’ ethic of the games-cult (Healthy Body, 260–1)Google Scholar:

The imposed moral imperatives of the game are few and simple: one does not cheat, take unfair advantage, shirk, or give up. Although this represents a type of seriousness, it is nothing like Arnold's “high seriousness”. The player who lives by these lights on or off the field does not need the developing vision, the mental receptivity, or the imaginative or philosophic grasp—qualities most Victorian intellectuals considered necessary for a healthy mind. Those qualities he does need— tenacity, daring, and moral decisiveness—are not so much mental traits as traits of the mind-body, constitution, or “character”.

39 Quoted in Mangan, J. A., Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, 1981), 187Google Scholar. The cult of organised games is treated in very similar terms in Haley, Healthy Body, Chaps. 6–9.

40 Both quoted in Mangan, , Athleticism, 69 70, 56Google Scholar; see also Almond's, article on ‘Football as a Moral Agent’, in The Nineteenth Century for 1893Google Scholar, cited in Haley, Healthy Body, Chap. 8.

41 For the term ‘homo Newboltiensis’ see Howarth, Patrick, Play Up and Play the Game: The Heroes of Popular Fiction (1973), 14Google Scholar. For the understanding of the First World war in sporting terms, see Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (N.Y., 1975)Google Scholar, Chap. 1, which also cites Northcliffe's, Lord explanation of why the German soldier cannot be capable of acts of individual initiative like his British counterpart: ‘He has not played individual games. Football, which develops individuality, has only been introduced into Germany in comparatively recent limes.’ (p. 26)Google Scholar.

42 Quoted in Mowat, , Charily Organisation Society, 170Google Scholar.