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“Monstrous Vandalism”: Capitalism and Philistinism in the Works of Samuel Laing (1780–1868)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Bernard Porter
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Extract

Is free market capitalism intrinsically inimical to culture and learning? The question probably would not have occurred to many people twenty years ago. That it can be seriously put today is a sign of the times. Two things have happened to Britain over the past decade. One is the political revival of the idea of the “market,” under the aegis of probably the most zealous capitalist ideologues ever to take power in what had generally been a fairly pragmatic political culture before then. The second is a scries of damaging cuts, or what are claimed to be damaging cuts, in the public funding of higher education and the arts. Some of the victims of the latter have perceived behind them a positive antipathy on the part of the zealots to what they are doing and what they hold dear. If this is so, then where does it derive from? The personal idiosyncrasies of the zealots? Simple economic necessity? A genuine belief in alternative and perhaps better ways of supporting learning and culture? Or is free market capitalism fundamentally philistine?

The question has come up before. In the nineteenth century people also remarked on the cultural barrenness of their time. There can be no doubt that it was pretty barren in certain areas. Compared with the European continent, and with her own past, Britain was something of a cultural desert during most of the century, and particularly between the 1840s and the 1880s, which are usually regarded as the high plateau of her free market capitalism.

Type
Capitalism and Culture in Victorian Britain
Information
Albion , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 253 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1991

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Footnotes

*

This article is a version of a paper read to history research seminars at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Melbourne University, amended in the light of the stimulating and helpful discussions that ensued there.

References

1 Wiener, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

2 Dictionary of National Biography (1921–1922 reprint), 11: 404–05Google Scholar; The Orcadian, 30 November 1967, p. 4Google ScholarPubMed. I am grateful lo Alison Fraser of the Orkney Library, Kirkwall, for this latter reference, and for her help generally.

3 “J.C.,” “Norway,” in London and Westminster Review 27 (1837): 164, 195Google ScholarPubMed.

4 Laing, Samuel, A Tour in Sweden in 1838; comprising Observations on the Moral, Political and Economical State of the Swedish Nation (1839), pp. iii–ivGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 167.

6 Edinburgh Review 82 (1845): p. 271Google ScholarPubMed.

7 Laing, Samuel, Journal of a Residence in Norway during the Years 1834, 1835, & 1836; Made with a view to enquire into the Moral and Political economy of that country, and the Condition of its Inhabitants (1836), pp. 18–20, 37–38et passimGoogle Scholar.

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10 Laing, Samuel, Journal of a Residence in Norway, p. 176Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., ch. 5.

12 Ibid., pp. 32, 64, 384, 442, 444–49.

13 lbid., pp. 40–41 et passim.

14 Laing, , A Tour in Sweden, p. 113Google Scholar.

15 Count Björnstjerna, M. F. F., On the Moral and Political Union of Sweden and Norway, in answer to Mr. S. Laing's Statement (1840)Google Scholar.

16 Laing, Samuel, “Sweden and Norway,” Monthly Chronicle 6 (1840): 394–95Google Scholar.

17 Laing, , A Tour in Sweden, p. 7Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., pp. 33–36.

19 Ibid., pp. 90–91.

20 Ibid., pp. 40–41.

21 Ibid., ch. 9; Journal of a Residence in Norway, pp. v–vi; “Sweden and Norway,” p. 385.

22 Laing, , A Tour in Sweden, p. 431Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 41, 67, 73, 243–44, 425.

24 Ibid., pp. 68, 88.

25 Ibid., p. 67.

26 Ibid., pp. 84–85.

27 Ibid., pp. 275–77, 427.

28 Ibid., p. 88.

29 Laing, Samuel, Notes of a Traveller, on the Social and Political state of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, and other parts of Europe, During the present Century (1842), pp. 12–14Google Scholar.

30 Laing, Samuel, Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849 (1850), p. 349Google Scholar.

31 Laing, , Notes of a Traveller, pp. 12–14Google Scholar.

32 Laing, Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People, ch. 6.

33 Ibid., pp. 122–23.

34 Ibid., p. 352.

35 Laing, , Notes of a Traveller, pp. 367–68Google Scholar.

36 Laing, , Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People, p. 114Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 374.

38 Ibid., pp. 345–46.

39 Laing, Samuel, Notes on the Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Schism from the Church of Rome, called the German-Catholic Church, Instituted by Johannes Ronge and I. Czerzki, in October 1844, on Occasion of the Pilgrimage to the Holy Coat at Treves (1845), pp. 178–79Google Scholar.

40 Laing, , Observations on the Social and Political Stale of the European People, pp. 343–44Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., pp. 350–55.

42 Ibid., p. 376.

43 Ibid., p. 468.

44 Ibid., p. 356.

45 Ibid., pp. 200–03.

46 Laing, Samuel, Observations on the Social and Political State of Denmark, and the Duchies of Sleswick and Holstein, in 1851 (1852), p. 32Google Scholar.

47 Laing, , Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People, p. 201Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 215.

49 Samuel Laing junior was only 15 when he entered St. John's College in 1827. Four years later he graduated as Second Wrangler and was elected to a Fellowship, before embarking on a distinguished career in industry and politics, and as a philosophical author in his own right. Dictionary of National Biography (Supplement), 22: 948–50Google Scholar.

50 Samuel Laing to William G. Watt, 5 December 1823: Orkney Archives, D1/15/6; reproduced by kind permission of the Orkney Library.

51 Laing, , Observations on the Social and Political Slate of the European People, pp. 286–87Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., p. 344.

53 Ibid., p. iv.

54 Ibid., p. 349.

55 Laing, , Notes of a Traveller, p. 485Google Scholar.

56 Review of Notes of a Traveller, in British and Foreign Review, 16 (1842): 595Google Scholar. Other substantial reviews of Notes of a Traveller appeared in the Dublin University Magazine 19 (1842): 579–87Google Scholar; and the Eclectic Review 75 (1842): pp. 384ffGoogle Scholar.

57 For “lisping amateurs” see above, p. 000; and for “Continental snobs,” Thackeray, W. M., The Book of Snobs (1847), chs. 21–23Google Scholar. On British tourists in Europe generally, see Porter, Bernard, “‘Bureau and Barrack’: Early Victorian Altitudes towards the Continent,” in Victorian Studies 27 (1984): 407–33Google Scholar.

58 The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, translated from the Icelandic of Snorro Sturleson, with a Preliminary Dissertation, by Laing, Samuel, 3 vols. (London, 1844)Google Scholar. It begins, for example, with a description of early mediaeval Russia, or “the Great Swithiod,” peopled with giants, dwarfs, “blue men” and “many kinds of strange creatures,” which reads very differently from Laing's own travel books. Laing's translation of the Heimskringla was republished in the “Everyman” series in 1930. His Preface comes at the beginning of Part II of that edition, pp. 1–2; the description of ’the Great Swithiod” is on p. 7.

59 British and Foreign Review 16 (1842): 596Google ScholarPubMed.