Victorian Attitudes to Race by Christine BoltReview by: William J. BakerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1972), pp. 149-150Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1856641 .

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Modern Europe 149

thetic, yet detached, and there are no symp- toms of hagiography.

Mrs. Isichei is at her best when she deals with the internal history of the Society. Her description of theological change is full and impressively lucid. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Quaker theology was still suffused with quietism and the inner light. The theology of withdrawal was reflected in the pe- culiarities of Quaker dress and Quaker speech. By the middle decades of the century quietism was overwhelmed by evangelicalism. With- drawal was transformed into struggle, and peculiarities were de-emphasized. After 186o marriage with a non-Friend no longer meant automatic expulsion from the Society. This evan- gelical phase was the great age of Quaker phi- lanthropy. It was also the period in which the Society was smallest and socially most cohesive. Toward the end of the century liberal modern- ism became a powerful theological current that further swept away distinctive sectarian behav- ior.

The thorough descriptions of formal schisms are well integrated into the discussion of theo- logical change, and so is the craftsmanlike ac- count of the formal organization of the denom- ination. Even more interesting is the skillfully drawn picture of the Society as a closely knit community of upper-middle-class families, a community bound together by genealogy and family traditions as much as by theological commitment. The author draws from the cen- trally kept register of deaths a few samples of occupational structure that help illustrate the social composition of the Society. She also ex- amines the social character of meetings in Nor- wich and Manchester. These local studies raise such intriguing questions that one wishes there had been room for more than two. Why did the upper-middle-class domination of the meet- ing in Norwich decline during the latter half of the nineteenth century while it did not in Manchester? Which of the two cases is the more typical of provincial Quakerism? Mrs. Isi- chei, however, is principally concerned with those great families whose importance was more on the national level. Much like Unitari- ans, Victorian Quakers considered themselves a spiritual elite, the aristocracy of dissent. Con- centrating her attention on the most aristo- cratic among them, Mrs. Isichei describes with

sensitive perception a style of spiritual and so- cial life that seems more Victorian than Quaker. It is a style that differs only in detail from that of those fathers of the Victorians, the Evangelicals of Clapham.

The role Victorian Quakers played in poli- tics, moreover, differed little from the role of Protestant dissenters generally. They produced few significant political leaders, and they sup- ported a variety of liberal causes including, usually, the Liberal party. Nor is it clear that in philanthropy Friends differed significantly from other evangelicals. Quakers were notably generous, but they may well have seemed par- ticularly philanthropic because they were par- ticularly rich. Only one of the many philan- tlhropic causes that attracted Quakers was peculiar to the denomination-the adult Sunday school movement. Why adult education should have been particularly appealing to Friends is difficult to understand. Perhaps, as Mrs. Isichei suggests, the accidents of whim and fashion are the best explanations.

While the limitations of denominational his- tory, some of which have been suggested here, should be recognized, they do not, of course, invalidate denominational history as a histori- cal form. Within those limitations Mrs. Isichei has written a very good book indeed. Victorian Quakers should add appreciably to the reputa- tion of its genre.

R. J. HELMSTADTER

University of Toronto

CHRISTINE BOLT. Victorian Attitudes to Race. (Studies in Social History.) Toronto: Univer- sity of Toronto Press. 1971. Pp. xviii, 254. $10.50.

Victorian attitudes to race were of the arm- chair variety. Few black or colored exslaves, seamen, or petitioners from the Empire made their way to the British Isles. Prejudices were formed at second hand, from accounts of plan- tation owners, travelers, military men, and mis- sionaries; and they were given a quasi-scientific basis by the ethnological and anthropological societies.

Christine Bolt analyzes these attitudes by fo- cusing on the British response to the recon- struction of the American South, the Jamaican uprising of i865, the conquest of Africa, and the vicissitudes of the Indian Empire. We are re-

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150 Reviews of Books

minded that the humanists' pity for the natives often harbored contempt, that missionary zeal was usually a thinly disguised form of racial and cultural arrogance, and that fear and anxi- ety lay at the base of Victorian racial pride. The imperialist, rightly seeing himself as an in- truder having to cope with a foreign climate and indecipherable languages, religions, and folkways, knew that he was in a numerical mi- nority. Native strength, if organized and equipped, could have unseated white power. Thus even the most racist of statements from the Empire contained "a clear undercurrent of fear, disguised by bravado."

The issue of race was closely associated with the question of power. Anglo-Saxon imperial supremacy proved, to the satisfaction of many Victorians, the innate superiority of the white man. On the other hand, Britons consistently admired the strength of the more vigorous African tribes and reluctantly praised the higher castes in India-those nonwhites displaying the qualities of independence and fortitude that were supposedly characteristic of Aryans them- selves. Power and authority were the crude rules of the game of racial distinction in the age of Darwinism. Yet color itself was important. Rationalizations of suppression and discrimina- tion were built, in the final analysis, upon the color difference. The uncritical assumption of "white over black," so embedded in traditional Western European thought, was still operative in the Victorian era.

A treatment of this subject being long over- due, Dr. Bolt's work commands our attention. She effectively uses not only the pertinent mon- ographs and newspapers but also the journals of the various scientific, plhilanthropic, and co- lonial societies. Yet in several respects this book is disappointing. One often loses the theme amid the details of the American, Jamaican, African, or Indian scenes. More important, one is not put into touch with that large body of popular racial opinion-exemplified in Charles Kingsley's Anglo-Saxonism-that had little di- rect reference to the Empire. And the title it- self is misleading. Although there is merit in avoiding a superficial survey of the entire cen- tury, our attention here is largely limited to a period of about twenty years, from i86o to i88o. We would like to know more about the rac- ism in the South African question around

9goo-for example, Cecil Rhodes's grotesque racist views. We especially need to know of the racial attitudes in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Otherwise we are at a loss to interpret the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England, or to ascertain whether the Jamaican revolt merely revived rather than increased that "vulgar tendency to see all black men as alike and inferior."

WILLIAM J. BAKER

University of Maine, Orono

F. M. LEVENTHAL. Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1971. Pp. xv, 276. $7.75.

The mid-Victorian phase of English working- class politics, a relatively quiet interlude be- tween Chartism and socialism, has been ne- glected by historians. This is a pity, not only because of the resulting gaps in our knowledge but also because it fosters a neo-Whig view of modern English history, one in which popular militancy is the chief motor of steady progress toward socialism. Having witnessed a quarter century of welfare capitalism, however, we may now be more inclined to treat mid-Victorian- ism not as an aberration but as a paradigm: after G. J. Harney comes George Howell, and after Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald. Lenin's com- ments on "trade-union consciousness," framed with an eye on Victorian England, make a good deal of sense.

Under these circumstances F. M. Leventhal's fine study of George Howell, the most impor- tant figure in English working-class politics be- tween 1865 and 1875, is especially welcome. Drawing on the rich materials assembled in the Howell collection at the Bishopsgate Institute, Leventhal has written a definitive political bi- ography, informed by a steady and dispassion- ate intelligence. We can follow in detail the career of a man who exemplified trade-union consciousness and Lib-Labism. First as secre- tary of the Reform League and then as secre- tary of the parliamentary committee of the Trades Union Congress, Howell was deeply in- volved in the agitations for extension of the franchise and reform of the labor laws. From this vantage point Leventhal guides the reader

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