A question of class

This is another selection from Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, my social history of science in the year 1859. Find out more here. We are looking at Britain as it was in 1859.

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In London, May, June and July were once the months when Parliament met, and this determined ‘the season’ which ended on 12 August, the first day of grouse shooting. The well off, even those not involved in politics, came to London in the season for races at Ascot, operas, balls, parties, viewings of the Royal Academy and other social events.

Every member of society had obligations, but the obligations of some were less onerous than the demands society made of others. In an age before labour-saving devices though, the rich had a duty to hire labour.

In 1859, Isabella Mary Beeton, known today as “Mrs Beeton”, even listed how many servants a household should have, based on income. She had, that year, begun a series of 48-page monthly supplements to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, her husband’s journal, and in 1861, these were released as a single volume, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. We will visit this in chapter 7.

Army officers, having purchased their commissions, were obliged to lead, and sailors and soldiers were obliged to submit to flogging. Still, the writing was on the wall for the lash as a naval punishment after an incident at Plymouth in July, on board HMS Caesar (then in dock) when a sailor was flogged in front of civilian workers. The outraged watchers protested and argued with some of the officers. Flogging was not abolished in the British army and navy until 1881, but it effectively ended in 1859, thanks largely to a crusading doctor.

When Mary Ann Evans published Adam Bede in 1859, she wrote as George Eliot, and was unprepared for the attention it would bring her. Well known and admired in her own circle of intellectuals, she now found herself publicly identified with George Eliot, the clever ‘male’ novelist. By the time Middlemarch came out in 1871–72, she was well respected, and admired, in both names, for her social conscience.

In chapter 16 of Middlemarch, her fictional characters debate Wakley’s view that coroners need medical training, so as not to be bamboozled or misled by inadequate medical men. Unlike the characters in Eliot’s  book, Thomas Wakley was a real person. As a young doctor he cared about the reform of the medical profession, and political reformer William Cobbett suggested that he establish a medical journal, which he did in 1832, calling it The Lancet.

In 1835, Wakley was elected to Parliament, and his maiden speech attacked the conviction of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of unionists transported to New South Wales in 1834 on trumped-up charges for daring to organise to defend themselves. He was an all-round decent human being of liberal outlook who opposed slavery, the Corn Laws, the 1834 Poor Law and the Newspaper Stamp Act.

Wakley deserves most of the credit for the creation of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843 and also the General Council of Medical Education and Registration in 1858, but his public fame rests mainly on his work as a coroner. He not only held the beliefs mentioned in Middlemarch, he put them into action.

No observer of coronial inquests today can hear a coroner’s blunt demolition of an evasive witness without recalling what happened when Wakley confronted a workhouse master. The man complained that an exhumed pauper’s body, while it had undoubtedly been scalded to death, had not been properly identified as Thomas Austin, the subject of the inquest. Said the worthy coroner: ‘If this is not the body of the man who was killed in your vat, pray, Sir, how many paupers have you boiled?’

To get his reform campaign moving, Wakley needed to be elected as a coroner. He narrowly lost his first attempt in East Middlesex in 1830, but won in West Middlesex in 1839. From time to time, Wakley reported details of notable coronial hearings in The Lancet, and that brings us to his inquest into the death of Fred White, a young soldier of the Queen’s Own Hussars who died in 1846.

The true cause of death, a flogging of 150 lashes, was covered up, but with a jury’s support, Wakley ordered the body exhumed so the original post mortem could be assessed. The evidence of military cruelty was there for all to see, and an end to flogging in the army came a step closer. The practice finally ceased after a man called Davies was flogged almost to death at Woolwich in September 1859; Wakley’s pursuit of the White case had laid the foundations.

Wakley and Dickens met in 1841, and Dickens once served on a jury under him. The two undoubtedly influenced each other, but Wakley’s essential humanity is seen best in an instance where he may have cut the odd coronial corner.

Thomas Glover was a Civil Surgeon at Scutari during the Crimean War, and either during that time or on his return, became addicted to chloroform and opium, both then readily available to doctors. In April, 1859, he died as a result of an excessive dose of chloroform, and his colleague Thomas Wakley, acting as coroner, brought in a verdict of accidental death. It did no harm. But there was harm enough around.