5 - High Victorianism

Summary

One day late in November of 1859, Matthew Arnold decided to stay home for dinner. Doing so, he thought, would keep his ‘cook’s hand in’, but Arnold had another reason for taking an early meal: that evening he was planning to participate in the drill exercises of his amateur rifle corps, the Queen’s Volunteers, which met three times a week in Westminster Hall. Like a number of his fellow writers – Thomas Hughes, William Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Arnold was taking part in the volunteer movement, one of the most revealing oddities of high-Victorian culture. Although members of this force were sometimes mocked for their military incompetence and their vanity – the chance to wear fanciful uniforms was one of its many attractions – most contemporaries viewed the volunteers as a serious response to the threat to British security posed by the ambitions of Napoleon III and the eagerness of the French military to build a steam-powered, iron-clad fleet. Reacting to fears of a French invasion, Parliament moved quickly in May of 1859 to authorize the formation of units of volunteer riflemen who would be trained to defend the southern coast of England. By 1861, forty-eight members of Parliament had joined up, a figure that almost tripled between 1868 and 1880. The movement, however, was less remarkable for the noteworthy individuals whose efforts it engaged than for the numbers of otherwise ordinary men who chose to enlist. Enrolling approximately 100,000 men in its first year, this Victorian auxiliary army rose in strength to 200,000 by the 1870s. It therefore virtually equaled in size and arguably exceeded in visibility the regular army, half of whose units were at any given time stationed overseas.