Victorian Britain 693to include the most prosperous segments of the working class. Most
British workers seemed to accept the belief that hard work and savings
would inevitably be rewarded. Most Victorians of all social classes increas
ingly felt themselves part of a nation with which they could identify.
British workers, including many union members, joined “friendly soci
eties,” or as they were increasingly called, “self-help associations.” Mem
bership in such groups rose from less than a million in 1815 to 3 million in
1849 and 4 million in 1872, four times that of unions. They provided
members with minimal assistance in times of unemployment or illness and
a decent burial. Preaching individual self-help and respectability, such
organizations did not offer the socialist vision common among workers in
France, Belgium, or the Rhineland. They helped inculcate a sense of what
the British called “respectability,” which discouraged militancy.
Like the friendly societies, Britain’s “new model unions” also embodied
the concept of self-help. Members of these unions first and foremost saw
their organizations as representing craftsmen and skilled workers of specific
crafts, such as carpenters and printers from the “aristocracy of labor” who
could afford dues. They constituted about 15 percent of the working class,
standing apart from the mass of unskilled laborers. Some of them taught in
Sunday schools, working men’s colleges, reading rooms, and improvement
societies. Even when local unions within a single trade joined to form
national organizations, there was no talk of revolution or even of eventually
restructuring British economic, social, and political life. Strikers in the
1860s were increasingly willing to accept arbitration boards and to compro
mise to achieve limited goals.
Benefiting from the 1832 enfranchisement of more middle-class men, the
Whigs governed Britain for most of the 1850s and 1860s. Henry John Tem
ple (1784-1865), the Viscount Palmerston, who began his political career as
a Conservative, led the Whigs. The notorious philandering of the shrewd
and feisty “Lord Cupid,” as he was known to his detractors, stood out in an
age of public prudishness. Palmerston outraged Queen Victoria by trying to
seduce one of her ladies-in-waiting in Windsor Castle.
Palmerston held together a coalition of Whigs who were determined to
uphold laissez-faire economic policies. Dissenters, Catholics, and liberal
Anglicans wanted the Anglican Church to lose its status as the Established
Church of England. Gradually these Whigs began to be referred to as the
Liberal Party.
Palmerston’s bellicose saber-rattling won him personal popularity. Crowds
cheered when he ordered the blockade of the Greek port of Piraeus in 1850
to enforce claims against the Greek government by Don Pacifico, a British
born Portuguese Jew whose house an Athens mob had destroyed. Palmer
ston boastfully compared the might of classical Rome and Victorian
Britain, which had remained one of the “protecting powers” of Greece since
its independence in 1832. Following the overthrow of King Otto in 1854,
Britain, France, Bavaria, and Russia selected a Danish prince to rule Greece