Last Christmas brought a record number of attendees at the local churches. Dymock and Redmarley were packed and Gloucester Cathedral was standing room only. I expect that, like me, many sat in the pew of your local church waiting for the message of hope, encouragement and confidence from the pulpit, unlike a distant sermon during which I recall the speaker painted a picture of a Dickensian world of dismal, dirty smoky chimneys, grey swirling smog and capitalists intent on making profit, from the sickly and downtrodden Victorian masses.
The speaker did however get my interest, first of all because I do not see making a profit (surplus) as bad, and secondly because my early years were spent in the cobbled streets of a Nottinghamshire mining village, and so I am familiar with damp swirling fog and men returning from work in their helmets and with pit-muck stuck to their faces and clothes. They walked the two miles from the Pit, back to their homes in cold driving rain; back to homes with coal fires and galvanised tin baths hung on thick nails driven into the brickwork of a terraced wall.
Like the Victorians, these men worked so that their children would have choice as to what they did. They worked! They did not seek the pity or the patronising charity of the better educated. They worked and took the opportunities presented by the vibrant market economy which, despite shortcomings, offered better opportunities for personal creative expression than the centrally planned economies of many other nations.
The men I knew from that colliery village did not consider themselves superior to the Victorians, and so when I left home and first came across those in academia who placed themselves above the bustle of trade and commerce, I questioned why they would want to distance themselves from the cradle of modern science, industry and society. “Why,” I asked, “Should clever men today feel themselves morally superior to those who had gone before?”
The Christmas sermon continued, but my mind drifted off as I remembered that many of my academic friends appeared to get pleasure from wallowing in the miseries suffered by the poor of the industrious Victorian era. It seemed that, because they themselves were born into privilege without poverty and deprivation, they needed to work out vicariously the miseries of those who had.
There is however, a truth to be found in the Dickensian pictures of grinding poverty in the streets of nineteenth century London, but I wonder if those who dwell on those images today, do justice to the vigour, foresight and intellectual and technical genius that flowered during Victoria’s long reign? After all, this was the time when Britain established standards of scientific, technical, educational, social and artistic endeavour for the whole world.
We still benefit today from the surpluses left to us by the Victorians. Railways, Roads, Public Buildings, Institutions, Sewers and Underground Systems remain. In addition and not much noticed, was the surplus money (profits) created by the Victorians which, in recent years, has been disbursed to policy holders by the de-mutualising building societies and insurance companies. Not to speak of the money frittered away by profligate bankers and politicians.
The sermon continued, and just as I was beginning to think that it would be nice to hear about individual hopes and not social miseries, the discourse took another turn as the preacher remembered that Christmas is not a time to dwell on the down-side of the human lot, and so reminded us that we can be confident that tomorrow is another day.
I am hoping that this year’s sermon will be about hope and joy for the individual not the doom and gloom of society. After all, to paraphrase the poet Betjeman, if the Christmas story is true and God really was born in Bethlehem: Then we have every reason to sing, “Yea Lord we greet thee, born this happy morning.”
View from the Pew 