“The Shadow of the Workhouse”: The Afterlife of a Victorian Institution

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Notes

See M. W. Taylor, Men Versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism. The association of the free market with “conservatives” in this quotation is somewhat misleading out of context; his point is precisely that in the 1880s Spencer took the inheritance of liberalism and inflected it in a conservative direction, though always refusing to describe himself as a conservative.

This is, unsurprisingly, the very terrain on which Hayek begins in The Constitution of Liberty, since he needs to contest the appropriation of liberty to mean “capacity” from the outset: “Neither of these [earlier] confusions of individual liberty with different concepts denoted by the same word is as dangerous as its confusion with a third use of the word to which we have already briefly referred: the use of ‘liberty’ to describe the physical ‘ability to do what I want,’ the power to satisfy our wishes, or the extent of the choice of alternatives open to us… . Only since this confusion was deliberately fostered as part of the socialist argument has it become dangerous” (16). In another, and apparently less combative, register, Isaiah Berlin concedes the values of “positive” liberty but ultimately subordinates it to a more “humane” ideal of “negative” freedom: “Two Concepts of Liberty.” But compare Mill: “liberty consists in doing what one desires” (152).

There is also some discomfort, triggered by this passage from Mill, in noting the connections between his political economy, his disgust at human sexuality, and his feminism as it emerges in the successive versions of the Principles of Political Economy and eventually in the Subjection of Women.

Mill's expectation of posterity was specifically contradicted by George Hewins, who persisted in thinking that it was cruel to “part husbands and wives in the workhus, mothers and kiddies” (Hewins 72).

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Simon Dentith

Simon Dentith is Professor of English at the University of Reading. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieh-century literature, most recently on the possibilities for epic poetry in the period, in Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He has also published on the writing of the 1930s, working-class writing, and contemporary Scottish writing, and has a long-standing interest in the work of William Morris.