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  It must have seemed at times as if he were going to school for his father as much as for himself. “I wish I could be with you,” Mr. Bagehot wrote shortly after dropping off Walter for his first term at Bristol, “but as that cannot be, we must gladden each other’s hearts by writing as often as we can, and telling each other, not only what is passing without, but within us, and keeping up a constant interchange of thought.”23

  His father sent him the highbrow quarterlies and briefed him on current affairs. In politics, it was like father, like son: both supported free trade, opposed the Corn Laws—the high tariff on imported grain, a gift to the country gentlemen at the expense of the consumer—and stood with Lord Palmerston against the landed interests. Walter was grateful to be furnished with Anti-Corn Law arguments for debates with the protectionist college master. “What makes Mr. Booth a Corn-Law advocate?” father inquired of son by post. “I hope he has an old rich Uncle with many fine acres, all of which are to be his!”24

  Watson and Walter saw eye to eye in the matter of party politics, too: they were against it. A letter from Walter deploring the blind partisanship of the Whigs and Tories afforded his father the opening for some moral instruction. “A strong love of truth and the seeking it for its own sake, must be the ground on which all our endeavors must rest,” he wrote,

  but there are too many enemies ready to displace us, so that we must be ever on our guard, and ready to defend ourselves. A love of ease, and an unwillingness to examine into the foundation of things long settled, as far as we are concerned—a fondness for our own opinion, and a dislike of allowing that we were, or are mistaken—are some among the numerous enemies to be resisted, beside the heavy and weighty troops of pounds, shillings and pence, and patronage and power.25

  Man and boy shared another interest: Edith’s flights of madness frightened and tyrannized them both. In the absence of effective medical treatment, it fell to family and friends to help, and the job fell increasingly to Walter. His personality more closely resembled his mother’s than his father’s. Sharing her gift for nonsense, he could sometimes jolly her back down to earth.

  “Walter told us,” relates his sister-in-law and biographer, Emilie Barrington,

  of a characteristic scene which took place towards the end of her life. One morning, for some unknown reason, she got it into her head during breakfast that she could not speak to Walter, and therefore remained dumb; but this silent situation before long became dull; so she wrote on a slate something she wanted him to know, and hung the slate around her neck and appeared in his study where he was writing. She was standing mute in the doorway when he looked up suddenly, and saw her and the slate, and the two burst out laughing together.26

  It was as a peer and fellow sufferer that Mr. Bagehot wrote to Walter in 1842 to report that his mother had had one of her spells. Worse, she had had it while he was home sick, “so I have not had so much to delight me as in some of my illnesses.” He had so looked forward to a few days of peace.

  Walter strained to succeed for his parents as much as for himself; he would fall asleep over his books rather than disappoint them. He had been at school only a few months when he reported that he would soon discover whether he stood at the top of the junior division in only German and theology or in classics, too; he was number two in mathematics—“but,” he added, “I am afraid I am building castles in the air . . . I scold myself for being so anxious.”27 Two years later—just before Christmas 1841—he was writing an essay on “the comparative advantages of the Study of Ancient and Modern Languages” not because he had to, but because he wanted “the practice in composition.”28

  Walter was away at school when Edith sat her husband down and read to him the letters that Stuckey Estlin, the son from her first marriage who was killed in a coach accident, had written to her. Then she sat down with paper and pen. “My dearest Walter,” she wrote,

  I have been reading over many of my beloved Stuckey’s letters to dearest Papa this week, and he and I were much struck with the similarity of the style with yours and in affection for his own Mamma—or rather in parental affection I hope you resemble each other. Oh! I have the blessed assurance that that is a feeling which survives the grave and lives purified and anew through all eternity.29

  Not every schoolboy would be equipped to receive such a letter. Nor is it clear that Walter was.

  By the age of fifteen, he was immersed in Newton’s Principia, studying integral calculus, and reading Homer and Cicero. At sixteen, he returned to school from the Christmas holiday for his final term at Bristol to discover that he would be placed, literally, in a class of his own.

  The former victim of his classmates’ envy and loathing had by now grown into his skin. Cousin Sawtell recalled that “he was all himself, with his standing leaps, his daring ventures on horseback, his absorbing love of children, and his conversational freshness, chiefly, as far as I was concerned, interrogatively as to what I, three years older, learnt and saw and heard in the great city, always with the result of making me feel that I had got hold of the little end of the stick.”30

  After graduation, it was to the great city—London—that Walter repaired.

  * Everybody knew he was rich, including the criminals. In 1827, William Kerslake broke into the Stuckey mansion and carried away a quantity of silver plate, a pocketful of small change (which some charity girls had turned over to Stuckey for safekeeping), and a mustard spoon. When Kerslake was caught, his pocket was still smeared with mustard. He was tried, convicted, and hanged, along with three other thieves, in front of Ilchester jail; 10,000 people watched.

  CHAPTER 2

  “IN MIRTH AND REFUTATION—IN RIDICULE AND LAUGHTER”

  There would be no Oxford or Cambridge for Walter Bagehot. Britain’s ancient universities required entering students to subscribe to the tenets of the established church; Watson Bagehot, the Unitarian, refused to hear of it. So, for Walter, it was off to London to study with the sons of Catholics, Jews, and Protestant dissenters.

  There was nothing very ancient about University College London. Founded on February 11, 1826, the school was eight days younger than the incoming first-year student from Langport. Walter arrived on the campus at Gower Street, Bloomsbury, in October 1842.

  London was new, exciting, and hideous. Stinking cesspools, rank cemeteries, fetid alleyways, and soot-filled air accosted the rural nose. The urban mud—57 parts horse dung, 30 parts abraded stone, 13 parts abraded iron, according to the City of London’s medical officer—was sticky enough “to suck off your boots.”1

  Perhaps the only slightly familiar aspect of collegiate life for the sixteen-year-old alumnus of Bristol College was the hostility of the English establishment to the liberal institution in which he was enrolled. “The radical infidel college,” some called it, there being no chapel and no religious instruction. Fastening on the inclusive social profile of the student body, others sneered at “the Cockney college.” As money was short, the grand, neo-Grecian design of the college architect, William Wilkins, had been only partially realized. The magnificent portico, critics smirked, was “the grandest entrance in London with nothing behind it.”

  The founders, a pair of Scotsmen, the poet Thomas Campbell and the lawyer and parliamentarian Henry Brougham, were undaunted. They passed the hat for seed money in much the same manner as the joint-stock companies had raised funds in the boom of 1825—a method that proved another incitement to ridicule. They secured enough money to open the doors to the first students in 1828. Campbell, writing to Brougham, envisioned “a great London university,” for “effectively and multifariously teaching, examining, exercising and rewarding with honors, in the liberal arts and sciences, the youth of our middling rich people.”

  The spirit of the times, if not the disposition of the then-sitting Tory government, smiled on the project. In 1819, across the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson had founded the University of Virginia. Seven years later in England, Brougham, championing popular education, had es
tablished the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. London, the biggest city in Europe, was the only capital without a university. Campbell and Brougham set out to fill the void.

  University College could hardly have hoped for a brighter light than Bagehot. A preliminary examination found him qualified in Latin, Greek, natural philosophy, English, and mathematics. Homesick, the devout and brainy country boy found solace in the dense pages of books such as A Second Defence of Dr. [Samuel] Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: In Answer to the Postscript Published in the Second Edition of Mr. Law’s Translation of Dr. King’s Origin of Evil.

  There were no dormitories at University College; the students settled in nearby lodgings. Bagehot took a room at 39 Camden Street, the home of Dr. John Hoppus, the college’s first chair of logic and philosophy of mind.2 A fellow student also living under the Hoppus roof happened to be conducting an affair when he ought to have been in class, and a second student seemed ready to do the same. Apprised of these facts, Bagehot resolved to step in: “This certainly must be stopped, and I possess no other means of doing so, but informing Dr. Hoppus immediately.” Hoppus showed the offending students the door and the tattletale became a pariah. “It is my first taste of the troubles of life,” Bagehot wrote to his father. “Henceforth, I shall perhaps never be wholly free from them.”

  The prig soon lived down his infamy. If some of his classmates shunned Bagehot, others stood in awe of his mind or were charmed by his conversation. He made friends: William Caldwell Roscoe, grandson of William Roscoe of Liverpool, the historian of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Leo X; Timothy Osler, a distant relative whose family had befriended him in Bristol; and Richard Holt Hutton.

  Hutton, the son of a Unitarian minister and future critic and journalist whose life and career would intertwine with Bagehot’s, chafed at his friend’s “superciliousness” and “arrogance.” But he recognized, too, the basis of Bagehot’s youthful conceit; he really was smarter than the others.3 In later years, Hutton wrote critical essays on the arts and religion and turned the Spectator into a profitable and respected weekly journal. “Both wore beards and glasses,” Alastair Buchan, a twentieth-century Bagehot biographer, observed of the two collegiate friends, “but Hutton’s beard did not curl nor his eyeglasses flash as Bagehot’s did. One of Hutton’s best characteristics was that he was fully aware of this, from the day when he was struck ‘by the questions put by a lad with large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan.’”

  Augustus De Morgan, like Bagehot, had entered university at the age of sixteen—in De Morgan’s case, Trinity College, Cambridge. And, like Bagehot, De Morgan wound up at University College because he bridled at a religious test. Arriving at Gower Street to take up the chair of mathematics at the age of twenty-one, the prodigy was the youngest of the original University College faculty and, by some accounts, the most brilliant. The chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, a few years behind Bagehot’s class at University College, judged De Morgan to be “one of the profoundest and subtlest thinkers of the nineteenth century.”

  The deviser of eponymous laws in the fields of Boolean algebra and propositional logic, and the author of a volume entitled Trigonometry and Double Algebra, De Morgan sometimes looked out into a class of blank faces. “We have,” reported Bagehot, “been discussing the properties of infinite series, which are very perplexing—one is harassed by getting a glimpse of theorems and then to find that they are to be taken with so many limitations, that one has still greater difficulty in seeing them at all.”4

  The mathematician brought whimsy as well as rigor to his lectures, for he was a collector of riddles and puzzles. Paradoxes, he called these intellectual curios, and paradoxers, he called their authors: “the squarers of circles . . . constructors of perpetual motion, subverters of gravitation, stagnators of the earth, builders of the universe.”5 Bagehot, though his head sometimes reeled, followed De Morgan through the labyrinths of pure and applied mathematics.*

  Classical languages were an essential part of the Victorian curriculum, even at University College, which prided itself on the new teaching of science.† George Long, the professor of Latin, was a Cambridge man and, like De Morgan, a favorite of Bagehot’s. For many years the editor of the Penny Cyclopedia, the classicist was deeply imbued with the ideals of the founders of University College. Elected professor of ancient languages at the new University of Virginia in 1824, he had returned to England in 1828 to assume the chair of Greek at University College. He gloried in the promise of a university “offering,” as he put it, “the advantages of higher education to all classes, but particularly to those who had before been excluded from it.” Learned, versatile, and witty enough to bring tears to Bagehot’s eyes, Long was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, a contributor of articles on Roman law to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the author of the five-volume Decline of the Roman Republic, and the editor of the Bibliotheca Classica series, the first substantial edition of classical texts with English commentaries.

  The year of Bagehot’s matriculation to University College, 1842, was a year of economic depression—hunger, political upheaval, and sharp-drawn ideological controversy. In February, some five hundred struggling manufacturers from the northern shires descended on London. Arm in arm, they marched down the Strand and Parliament Street roaring, “Down with monopoly” and “Give bread and labor.” The prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, driving to the House of Commons, saw the respectable men before he heard their angry chants, at first mistaking the roars for cheers.6 In fact the voices raged against him—and against the Corn Laws, the tariffs on imported grain that raised the price of bread in the service of protecting British farming (“corn,” a generic term, encompassed the grains that, like wheat and barley, can be ground into flour). Opponents contended that British agriculture needed no protection and that the laws, besides constituting an offense against the principle of free trade, were promoters of state-sponsored hunger.

  The barons and the squires replied that what the Corn Laws protected was the stability of British institutions. The owners of acres ruled by right and tradition, and slightly elevated grain prices were a small price to pay for political continuity and good government. The Reform Act of 1832, which had enlarged the franchise and proportionally reduced the authority of the landed interest, was a necessary concession to the tumultuous times, but it was enough—more than enough. Factory hands would have to learn to adapt to higher-priced bread, and manufacturers to deal with higher wages and lower profits. It did not sweeten the terms of debate when the Duke of Norfolk, presiding at an agricultural dinner in Steyning, Sussex, in December 1842, suggested that starving workers might allay their hunger with a pinch of curry in hot water.7

  The Anti-Corn Law League was prepared to accept none of these arguments. The sons of Adam Smith spurned compromise with a system that advantaged the well-fed over the hungry. There could be no concession to an injustice so monstrous. Among the most persuasive spokesmen for the principles of free trade was a thirty-seven-year-old Scotch hat manufacturer named James Wilson. He happened to be Bagehot’s future father-in-law.

  NOBODY HAD TAUGHT WILSON political economy; he imbibed it from the pages of Smith, David Ricardo, and Edmund Burke. Wilson was the fourth of fifteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood; his mother died in childbirth. Wilson’s father, a Quaker, was a well-to-do wool manufacturer in Hawick, in the east southern uplands of Scotland. Young Wilson played the flute and had an eye for pictures, and, like the young Bagehot, excelled at his books but not at games. His schooling complete, and after an unhappy false start as a teacher, he pointed for the law. This, too, came to naught—Quaker doctrine was against the legal profession—and the thwarted lawyer turned to business. His father set him up in the hat-making trade with another one of his sons.

  Wilson did well enough in business to amass £25,000. This small fortune he proceeded to lose on a speculation on indigo in the pa
nic year of 1837. By then, the hat maker, who had married the beautiful Elizabeth Preston of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and left the Society of Friends for the Church of England, was the father of five girls under the age of eight. He lived with his family in the leafy London suburb of Dulwich in a big house with large grounds. He owned another residence in London.

  Righting himself from this financial debacle, Wilson paid off his private debts. His commercial creditors, accepting cash for half of what he owed them, took the balance in an assigned interest on a foreign property. Wilson was under no obligation to make his creditors whole when that earmarked asset failed to realize its expected value. He rather did so as a point of fair-dealing.

  It was in the throes of his crisis that Wilson began to devote himself to the repeal of the Corn Laws. In 1839, he wrote and published his first essay in persuasion, a pamphlet entitled “Influences of the Corn Laws as Affecting All Classes of the Community, and Particularly the Landed Interests.” Wilson’s position was that everybody lost with high tariffs; not even the landowners gained. English farmers could compete with Continental agriculture perfectly well, he demonstrated with a characteristically daunting array of data and argument. He raised another objection: artificially high prices for grain contributed to Britain’s violent economic cycles, the busts hitting the landowners just as they did the manufacturers and the working people.

  Some of the Anti-Corn Law brethren cast their arguments in terms of a perceived clash between the commercial interests and the landed aristocracy, but Wilson would accept no part of that class-struggle dialectic: “nothing can possibly be favorable to the whole that is detrimental to a part, and . . . nothing can be detrimental to one portion that is favorable to another portion.”8