The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite, Samuel Hughes notes, who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon:
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.
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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.
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Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.
One might assume that Victorian education was at the extreme traditionalist end of the spectrum, and modern educational progressives would indeed be horrified by the rote learning and corporal punishment of Victorian schooling. But in respect of all the controversies listed above, elite Victorian schools lean curiously toward the ‘progressive’ side of the spectrum.
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Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century. Trailing in third and fourth places were mathematics and modern languages. There was resistance to the teaching of science, not because Victorians were hostile to science in principle, but because they thought it irrelevant to the kind of moral and cultural formation that a school for gentlemen was supposed to provide.
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At Rugby School, weeks were divided into three ‘full days’, three ‘half days’, and Sunday. On a full day, students spent about five hours in the classroom, compared with maybe two hours on a half day. Other schools varied, but nearly all left many hours unfilled.
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During the Victorian period, 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. An extreme but not entirely unrepresentative example was Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
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Another distinctive feature of the public schools, relative both to modern education and to other nineteenth-century school systems, was student self-government. The Victorians thought that close supervision by schoolmasters would inculcate servile habits in boys, compromising what one headmaster called ‘the great glory of an English public school – its free development of character, its social expansiveness, in short its liberty’. As a result, a system of prefects was developed in which, in theory, the more benevolent and mature boys were given extensive pastoral and disciplinary responsibilities over the others. The prefects would receive an apprenticeship in leadership, while the student body as a whole would come to see authority as something emanating from their peers rather than imposed upon them by an alien entity.
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From school, 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.
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Nearly all students lived together in colleges. This contrasted with the situation in continental Europe, where students generally rented rooms off campus. Victorian pedagogues believed that colleges provided religious, cultural, and social formation, and that they prevented English students from acquiring the bad morals and habits of their continental peers. A typical day began with chapel; honors students and the less indolent pass men would then spend the morning reading and preparing assignments. Students normally ordered lunch to their rooms: rich students could have elaborate feasts brought up from the college kitchens, like Sebastian Flyte’s lunch in Brideshead Revisited. In the early afternoon it was customary to go out for rural walks or sports, especially rowing and cricket.
Around 4pm, students returned to college. Once or twice a week this was the time for ‘tutorials’, one-to-one or small-group discussions with tutors, often over tea or sherry. The tutorial system contrasted sharply with the more didactic and lecture-based teaching that prevailed in other university systems, and was seen as a way of inculcating independent thought. If a student had no tutorials, he would probably spend the early evening reading, socializing, or at one of the university’s various cultural, discussion, or debating societies, notably the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. The day concluded with a formal dinner in the college hall, often followed by conversation over dessert, digestifs and tobacco in college rooms.
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For about five months a year, between February and July, the elite of Victorian Britain congregated in London for what was called ‘the Season’, essentially a sequence of parties and social events. They usually owned or rented houses in Mayfair and Belgravia, two small neighborhoods that face each other across Hyde Park, meaning that the bulk of the ruling class would live literally within walking distance of one another. Parallel institutions existed in most Western countries at the time – the social seasons in Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg and New York were famous – but the London Season had a particularly dominant role in the national life because it coincided with the Parliamentary session, making it a forum for political networking as well as elite matchmaking and court rituals.
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Balls naturally had special significance for people in the marriage market. Arranged marriage in the strict sense had largely died out by the nineteenth century, but upper-class young people and their parents still hoped they would make advantageous matches, and balls furnished opportunities to do so. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For political reasons, most modern societies pay politicians and civil servants vastly less than they pay people with a similar level of responsibility in the private sector. As a result, they struggle to persuade their most talented people to enter and remain in public life. The Victorians did not have this problem. Until the 1880s, most local government roles in Britain were conducted on a completely unpaid basis by local landowners. They also administered the rudimentary welfare system, sat as magistrates in the lower courts, and staffed the boards of most schools and hospitals. A landowner who ignored these responsibilities would suffer no material consequences, but he would be diminished and resented in the eyes of his peers, and for most, that was inducement enough.
Something similar applied to Parliament.
