The elite of Victorian England were one unified family who played together but knew little. By Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress.
[Modern] books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours.
Victorian Britain ruled the world like no one before or since, and their elites did it very differently:
The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.
Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.
The British elite were one big unified family, strong on team building and soft skills, and rather poor at acquiring knowledge about anything other than themselves.
Schools:
Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. …
Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. … Victorian adults had little occasion to use their classical languages, so they tended to forget them. ‘I have gladly forgotten all my Latin, and don’t ever want to remember it again’, wrote the war poet Charles Sorley, one year after leaving school; at least he did better than Winston Churchill, who remarked that ‘In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet’. …
School authorities introduced programs of organized sports, chiefly cricket in summer and various forms of ‘football’ (including what became rugby) in winter. Many schools ultimately had four, five, or even six afternoons of sports per week: a student would certainly spend ten hours a week on the sports field, and might well spend twenty.
The Victorians thought extremely highly of sports, believing that they instilled team spirit and endurance, fostered mutual loyalty, channeled energy and competitiveness, and taught men how to win and lose graciously. …
Most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge (‘Oxbridge’). Oxbridge was not necessarily a big step up academically. Virtually everyone who applied was accepted. Once you were in, you could pursue one of two tracks: either an ‘honors’ degree, which involved at least some serious study, or a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree, which involved sitting only some very easy exams in classics and religion. In the early Victorian period, most Oxbridge students were ‘pass men’; this changed gradually as the century drew on, but there were still plenty of pass men around as late as 1914. The pass degree was particularly popular among aristocratic students, who tended to prioritize rowing, feasting, and social polish over disciplined study. …
Nearly all students lived together in colleges.
Adulthood:
One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. … The day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed, rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.
At some point in the late morning, the Victorian would finally make his way to the office. … Britain’s elites were slow to suburbanize, and in 1914 most still lived in centrally located row houses and walked to work. …
Dinners were rich and elaborate. … A typical dinner began with soup and sherry, then proceeded to fish with hock (Rhineland whites), passing on through a sequence of meat courses with champagne or red wines, and finishing with various desserts and savories served with port and madeira. The Victorians loved drinking and drank a lot by modern standards. Men drank more than women, but women drank a good deal too: one conduct guide noted that ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends’. …
Balls were the flagship evening entertainment. They started late, at nine or ten, and guests would filter in gradually, with the dance floor really full from about 11pm. Around midnight a meal called ‘supper’ appeared, comprising soups, salads, cold meats, shellfish, fruit, and ice cream. After supper, dancing recommenced; a good ball peaked after 1am. Guests gradually returned home in the small hours, and the most determined might continue until dawn. …
It would be quite wrong, however, to think that balls were simply mass dating events. Courtiers, bankers, judges, and cabinet ministers would have shared the dance floor with debutantes. In fact, with some exceptions like club lunches, the social events of the Victorian elite were notable for their lack of segregation by age or sex. A Society ball discharged the functions of both a teenage house party and a business networking convention: in fact, it was both a teenage house party and a business networking convention. …
Working hardly at all, or all the time?
By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun. In the words of the historian Leonore Davidoff, these social occasions provided ‘access to a vast information network: information about jobs, investment possibilities, secret political decisions’. Many Victorians were intensely ambitious and drove themselves hard: sleep deprivation, exhaustion and burnout were familiar companions.
The distinctive feature of elite Victorian lifestyles was not laziness, but an extreme weighting toward what we might call team building and professional networking, and the near-total fusion of personal and professional life….
Why it succeeded:
It is not altogether fanciful to think of the Victorian elite as functioning like a big premodern village, though its members were geographically dispersed across the kingdom and its vast empire.
All the practices I have described in this article helped to maintain this emotional village. The ruling class were educated together from an early age, in schools and universities designed to inculcate shared values, a common identity, and ties of mutual loyalty. As adults they congregated every year in an area of central London that actually was village-sized, where they spent every night in one another’s company. Young members of the Victorian elite tended to meet their future spouses during these glittering evenings, so that the elite came to form, to some extent, a literal family. …
The advantage was unity — no rivalry among elites:
In some ways, rich Victorians were quite diverse. They came from every part of the British Isles. They included landed aristocrats and urban bourgeois, with the latter steadily superseding the former over the course of the century. Most landowners were Anglicans, but many of the new rich were Nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants), and some were Jews or Catholics. With the conspicuous exception of the Irish Catholics, all these people were successfully folded into a single British elite, rather than forming hostile counter-elites working to overthrow the social order.
This obviously had advantages for Britain. The elites of the American South had a very different identity to those of the North, and ultimately led the country into civil war. Spain, Italy and France suffered from incessant conflicts between urban bourgeois and rural nobility. Germany was riven with strife along geographical, religious, and class lines. Some of these tensions existed in Britain, but except in Ireland, the elite finessed them peacefully. …
What if we were more like that today?
Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious.
But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
