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June 18 - June 23, 2018
Writing at mid-century, Marx categorized the petty bourgeoisie as a disparate collection of subsistence farmers, traditional artisans and small independent retailers.
The poor Marine Society boys, many of them from London, were the shortest group ever recorded in Europe and North America. They were even 2–3 inches shorter than the average height of American slaves at the time. Among male Scottish prisoners, Glasgow natives were nearly an inch shorter than other prisoners. Longitudinal studies show that average height in Britain did not start to increase until the late nineteenth century.
However, in Sicily the blood feud took on a new and dangerous form in the 1860s as the landowners’ private armies, disbanded by the new Italian state, were replaced by rival clans – the Mafia – who first worked to enforce the landowners’ sanctions against their tenants, then drifted into protection rackets and other forms of criminality, and finally began to fight each other over the spoils.
Social conservatives who viewed the countryside as a haven of peace and tranquillity, morality and orderliness, were thus wide of the mark. Indeed, as Britain underwent a vast expansion of its towns and cities, the statistical record showed a steady decline in the rate of recorded acts of theft and violence
By 1900 there were more Irish-born men and women living in the USA than in Ireland itself.
Still, between 1820 and 1914 well over five million Germans went to live in the USA; between 1820 and 1860 they constituted 31 per cent of all immigrants there, the second largest contingent after the Irish, and from 1861 to 1890, with nearly 29 per cent, the largest contingent of all.
In Denmark, by contrast, where the land is flat and the summers are longer, and arable and pasture made up a majority of the land at the turn of the century – 75 per cent, as opposed to a mere 12 per cent in Sweden and 3 per cent in Norway – relatively few people decided to seek a better life overseas. Here the economy developed on the basis of the mechanization of food processing and a switch from grain to meat and dairy products. Danish butter and Danish bacon became major exports in this period.
Altogether over a quarter of the natural increase in population in western Europe between 1841 and 1915 was absorbed by emigration, with a net population loss of 35 million people. As a result, the world balance of population was beginning to change. At mid-century the population of the USA was not much larger than that of Britain, the same as that of France, and a little less than the area covered by the future German Empire. By the eve of the First World War the USA was well ahead, with a total population of more than 92 million. Yet Europe’s share of world population actually increased over
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Official statistics recorded that around two hundred people were eaten by wolves every year in Russia through most of the century; between 1870 and 1887 the total came to nearly 1,500 altogether.
The last great auk in the British Isles was captured by fishermen in July 1844, who kept the unfamiliar bird alive for three days until a storm blew up, upon which they beat it to death, believing it to have summoned up the tempest by witchcraft.
Mountain crossings had been in use for many centuries, but it was Napoleon who took the initiative in constructing paved roads across the major Alpine passes to aid the movement of troops and supplies, though, as in other mountain ranges, these were closed for long periods during the winter.
Altogether nineteenth-century Europe saw one of the greatest processes of deforestation to have taken place so far. Agronomists began to recognize that the destruction of forests led to soil erosion and even climate change.
Altogether Europe’s forests declined by 25 per cent between 1700 and 1850
Only towards the end of the century did the increasing use of coal as fuel and iron and steel for buildings and implements begin to slow down the rate of deforestation.
A more widespread terror by far was caused by the fires that frequently swept across European towns and cities in an era when most buildings were still made of wood. The greatest of all nineteenth-century fires was one that devastated Hamburg in 1842.
The Great Fire of Hamburg was far from being the only such event of its kind. In one famous conflagration the ancient Palace of Westminster in London, containing the Houses of Parliament, burned to the ground in 1834,
In 1875 an international metric convention was signed by seventeen countries. However, it was ignored by the British, who, along with the United States and much of the rest of the world, used the imperial system defined by the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, and stuck to miles, furlongs, chains, yards, feet and inches for length, and roods, perches and acres for surface area.
The adoption on most of the Continent of the metric system was one of many consequences of the fact that the second half of the nineteenth century was the age of railway-building, when railway companies needed a standard measurement of length.
Perhaps the most dynamic motor-manufacturing industry was to be found in Italy, however, where, boosted by government sponsorship and cheap electric power sources, there were no fewer than seventy-one such companies by 1907. These were based above all in Turin, and focused on high-performance vehicles to sell to wealthy foreigners on the lookout for new thrills driving fast cars produced by firms such as Bugatti,
In 1865 an Act of Parliament, aimed at steam traction engines, had limited the speed of ‘locomotives’ on roads to 4 miles per hour and decreed that they had to be preceded by a man on foot holding a red flag. Under heavy pressure from motorists, this law was repealed in 1896, allowing motor vehicles to travel at speeds of up to 14 miles per hour. A new national speed limit was introduced in 1904, imposing a maximum of 20 miles per hour on all public highways.
Car ownership before 1914 was overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy, like the car-loving nouveau riche Mr Toad in the children’s story The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932). The motor car enabled them once more to revert from the public nature of railway travel to the privacy of an individual mode of transportation, exhibiting their prosperity and modernity to an astonished world.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had a horn specially made for his car, blaring out the leitmotif of the thunder-god Donner from Richard Wagner’s 1854 music drama Das Rheingold.
Mistranslated as ‘canals’ by over-enthusiastic American readers of his report, the discovery sparked intense speculation about the possibility of intelligent life on the red planet, even though subsequent observations failed to locate the lines and they eventually turned out to be optical illusions.
In the novel On Two Planets, published in 1897 by the German mathematics teacher Kurt Lasswitz (1848–1910), a group of Arctic explorers are abducted to Mars by aliens from the red planet; the expedition finds the planet’s surface criss-crossed by innumerable canals and the Martians a nautical race who then send a fleet of battleships to England to defeat the Royal Navy, a piece of wishful thinking that demonstrated the navalist ambitions of some Germans even before a German navy had been built.
The vast majority of people had little need to reckon time accurately to within the minute; often, indeed, clocks only possessed one hand, and the convention of marking the minutes as well as the hours only gained currency gradually. As increasing numbers of men and women migrated to the cities and worked in factories and mines for wages paid by the hour, so timekeeping became more important for employers and employees alike.
To avoid being fined for late arrival, workers needed watches. World production of pocket watches, around 400,000 a year in the early nineteenth century, rose to more than 2.5 million a year by 1875.
Early factories still set their clocks by local time, but soon the impulse to standardize time became irresistible, and it was driven above all by the spread of the railways.
By 1855, however, virtually all public clocks in the United Kingdom were set by Greenwich Mean Time, well before they were forced to do so by law twenty-five years later, largely following the initiative of railway companies that decided it was too complicated to take local times into account.
In Germany it was not the railway companies or other economic pressure groups that proved the most powerful advocates of standard time, but the Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. He had already used railways to good effect in the wars of German unification to move troops rapidly across the land, and saw the continuing chaos of variable time zones as a major obstacle to military efficiency in the future.
The need to standardize time had already become urgent with the spread of telegraphing systems across not only Europe but also the world. The first submarine cables were laid across the English Channel in the early 1850s, and already in 1852, Edward Highton (1817–59), a pioneer of the electromagnetic telegraph, commented: ‘Time and space are all but annihilated.
It was not until 1865 that the Great Eastern, then the largest ship in the world, succeeded in laying a cable across the Atlantic Ocean. A frenzy of cable-laying followed, and by 1871 punters in Calcutta could learn the result of the Derby no more than five minutes after the famous horse race was over. The scale of the British Empire and the dominance of British industry ensured that in 1890 nearly two-thirds of the telegraph lines in the world were owned by British companies, which controlled 97,000 miles of cables. But the influence of the system extended far beyond the British Empire.
Not coincidentally, this concept provided the underpinning for that most universal of nineteenth-century ideas, the idea of progress. The concept of a uniform time proceeding everywhere in a linear fashion enhanced people’s ability to imagine a distant past beyond their own experience, in which things had been different. The French Revolution had already created a sense of the pre-revolutionary past as different, renumbering the years from its outbreak as Year I, Year II, Year III and so on. This practice itself did not survive. But the idea of the past as different became widespread in
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The relatively mild symptoms, the generally slow progress of the disease, the lack of any link to immoral conduct, all made consumption seem almost ennobling. It was widely regarded as intensifying the sufferer’s experience of life.
The decline in tuberculosis mortality accounted for around half the overall decline in mortality between 1850 and 1900, though in 1894 it was still claimed that each year it caused as many deaths in Europe as had been caused by the whole of the Crimean War. The most important factor in the decline is likely to have been improved diet. Direct medical intervention, by contrast, had little effect.
The practice of preventing the disease by scratching the skin with an infected needle, developed early on in China, was introduced to Europe via the Ottoman Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Its treatment was revolutionized at the end of the century, in 1798, by an English country doctor, Edward Jenner (1749–1823), who noticed that milkmaids never caught smallpox, and concluded that the reason for their immunity was because they had already caught a related disease, cowpox, which did not pose any threat to humans. Jenner’s new preventive treatment, which he called vaccination, after the
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Alongside the decline of typhus and smallpox and the virtual disappearance of the bubonic plague, nineteenth-century Europeans also had to contend with an entirely new threat to their life and health: Asiatic cholera. The disease spread to Europe as a result of the opening up of new trade routes through Afghanistan and Persia following the British conquest of northern India, escaping from its reservoir in Bengal in 1817 and making its way westwards initially with troop movements and then with trade. Cholera spread to Europe because Europe’s strategic power was spreading across Asia. Soon
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Death was becoming an unusual occurrence, especially among adults in the prime of life, and the middle and upper classes at least were losing the ability to cope with it. Such attitudes were wholly alien to the great mass of Europeans who lived in the countryside, where death rates remained high right up to the turn of the century and beyond.
The only completely safe contraceptive method was abstinence, and since it was women who bore the risk of pregnancy and all the consequent burdens, it was women who began to repress their sexual feelings. The idea that women were incapable of sexual activity, an idea that would have seemed strange in the eighteenth century, became more common, above all among the bourgeoisie.
Its most celebrated exemplar was Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), editor of The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. The omissions were indeed striking. Derogatory references to clergymen were expunged, parts of the body were not referred to, the word ‘body’ itself was generally replaced with the word ‘person’, and immoral characters such as the prostitute Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Part II disappeared entirely.
Given the pressures to reduce expenditure on children with the spread of education and the concomitant reduction in children’s earning power, it was not surprising that the decline in the birth rate affected them first.
Not surprisingly, the illegitimate birth rate also began to fall across Europe, beginning in the 1840s, and continued to decline until the end of the century; women in other words were having less sex outside marriage as well as within it. Giving birth out of wedlock, with its consequence of social stigmatization, was frequently cited as a major reason for women being forced to engage in prostitution, which underwent a considerable expansion in the nineteenth century.
It was male lust that was the object of the reformers. An even worse manifestation of male lust than homosexuality in the eyes of some was masturbation, against which there was a veritable moral panic at this time.
Even small operations, such as tooth-pulling, which had become a frequent necessity after the arrival of large amounts of sugar in the European diet during the eighteenth century, could cause almost unbearable pain.
However, objections were raised to the use of anaesthetics even during amputations; they scorned nature, some argued.
Many patients refused to undergo a general anaesthetic for fear they would not wake up afterwards. One clergyman told Simpson that chloroform was ‘a decoy of Satan’ that would ‘harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble for help’. Suffering was good for the soul; mere mortals should not try to avoid it.
Yet its reputation declined sharply after 1850, as the arbitrariness and medical absurdity of its central tenets became steadily more apparent, until it was formally rejected by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831. Phrenology never had much influence elsewhere, especially not in France, where it was associated with left-wing, secularist and materialist currents of thought.
Men who behaved in a dull, passive, weak manner, avoided society, and failed to live up to the new bourgeois cultural ideal of active manhood, were hospitalized, allegedly suffering from ‘masturbatory insanity’.
It seems astonishing that an event like this should take place as late as 1858, but such public rituals, attended by vast crowds sometimes estimated at 20,000 people or more, and accompanied by ancient folk superstitions, the selling of food and drink, and the singing of ribald songs and ballads, were common in many parts of Europe well into the second half the nineteenth century.
For much of the eighteenth century the British transported convicts to America, but when this became impossible after 1776 they turned to Australia, where by the 1820s some 3,000 were being transported every year. By the 1840s the number of private settlers had grown, and they began objecting to the continual arrival of convict shipments. Transportation began declining under the weight of public criticism at home and in Australia in the 1850s and came to an end in 1867.
The task of the historian, he thought, was to penetrate empathetically to its inner essence, to discover ‘how it essentially was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen), not to dismiss it as backward or barbarous, as the historians of the eighteenth century had done.
