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