The De-moralization of Society from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.

GERTRUDE Himmelfarb has given us an excellent, detailed, and insightful account of the creation, maintenance, and (in our time) decline of the Victorian virtues of work, thrift, self-reliance, self-respect, neighborliness, and patriotism. These virtues defined the character and ethos of the Victorian age in Britain and, with certain variants, in America and were upheld or at least aspired to by members of all social classes. Indeed, one of Professor Himmelfarb's key points is that these virtues were indigenous not only to the middle classes but also to large sections of those at the very bottom of the social order, who realized that the mundane virtues of respectability -- such as sobriety, prudence, and frugality -- did not require status or lineage or wealth or wisdom but were available to all. Even the humblest could come to see themselves, and come to be seen by others, as free moral agents capable of self-control.Professor Himmelfarb rightly acknowledges the religious origins and underpinnings of Victorian virtue. Where I am inclined to disagree is over her argument that Victorian morality survived a period of secularization in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as earnest agnostics strove even harder to be moral after the age of faith had departed. This may well have been true of dutiful Victorian intellectuals such as Darwin, Stephen, and George Eliot, whose lives and works Professor Himmelfarb has studied in great detail, but was it really true of the ordinary people of provincial England, Scotland with its competing Calvinisms, or widely revivalist Wales? My criticism is not of the logic of Professor Himmelfarb's argument, but merely about the timing; secularization set in rather later in Britain than her model suggests.One of the most important sections of Professor Himmelfarb's book is her rehabilitation of the image of the Victorian family and particularly the Victorian working-class family. It is clear from a variety of sources, including oral history, that the women who ran, and the children who grew up in, such families did not feel that their lives had been overdisciplined or that they had been overworked or treated with repressive cruelty. Indeed in later life most of them remembered their homes and families as having provided a natural, right, and in general happy way of life. Marriage was a lifelong working partnership with clearly defined roles for husband and wife and clear standards as to what a good husband and a good wife were like. We have here a demolition of the feminist myth of an oppressive patriarchal past; ironically, but reassuringly, Professor Himmelfarb has garnered much of the evidence disproving the feminist view from empirical material gathered by scholars of a feminist persuasion. It is good to see that some feminists have the integrity to put regard for the truth ahead of political correctness.What is also very striking is the great stability of the working-class family at a time of very rapid social and economic change -- in marked contrast to the chaotic living arrangements of today's squalid underclass. Indeed, in the East End of London, a poor area with an unstable labor market and endemic unemployment and poverty, the illegitimacy rate was only 4.5 per cent in the middle of the nineteenth century and 3 per cent by the end of the century; both figures were below the national average, which had peaked at 7 per cent in 1845 and fallen to 4 per cent by 1900. Today, by contrast, about a third of all British births are illegitimate.We can see here part of a phenomenon I have called the U-curve of deviance, that strange fall and then rise in crime (both violent and nonviolent), illegitimacy, and drug and alcohol abuse that have taken place over the last century and a half. Victorian reform reduced all of these types of deviant activity to very low levels. These low levels were then enjoyed by the British and Americans for the first half of the twentieth century, until a massive rise in all of them during the last forty years. Professor Himmelfarb suggests in her book that the name of my model should be changed to the J-curve, since the rise in deviance and crime has taken Britain and America to a point of moral disorder far in excess of anything to be found in the nineteenth century. She may well be right; it looked more like a U-curve when I dubbed it that at the end of the 1970s than it does today after another 15 years of moral degeneration.Gertrude Himmelfarb's latest study of the Victorians is, like all her work in this field, a delight to read - - clear, erudite, sensible, logical, and creative. In addition to providing a convincing picture of a successful and virtuous society, her work throws new and interesting light on particular issues, such as the distinctive character of and divisions within Victorian feminism and the position of Jews, whose virtues led to their being regarded as suspect by the early socialist ideologists and organizers. There are also marvelous insights into the foibles, and more than foibles, of many early, mid, and late Victorians, including John Stuart Mill, H. G. Wells, and the rascally ``Dr.'' Edward Aveling, who abused Karl Marx's daughter in true Marxist fashion. Professor Himmelfarb's is also a moral text, for it not only dissects and praises the morality of Victorian Britain, but also shows in great statistical detail how far present-day Britain and America fall short of the Victorian ideal. It points the way to a possible renewal of society to cure our current demoralization.