Afterword: the Last Victorian?
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Afterword: The Last Victorian? Many of the themes set out in this book and outlined in the Foreword are still topical, discussed more indeed during the first years of the new millennium than they were in the mid-twentieth century. They even hit the headlines, as Michael himself sometimes does. I have described him throughout the book as Noel Annan did – very much a man of his own time, identifying and influencing the processes of change, planned and unplanned. As he contemplates his own life, however, Michael feels now that he would like to escape from his own time, not only into the future but into the past; and, somewhat surprisingly to me as a committed critical historian of Victorian Britain, he has come to regard himself less a man of his own time than the last Victorian. Born only fourteen years after Queen Victoria’s death, Michael was not drawn into the revolt against the Victorians associated, above all, with Lytton Strachey. Nor did he emerge from a background where it mattered much whether you shared in that revolt or sympathised with it. Dartington was scarcely a Victorian institution, however, less so, indeed, than Bethnal Green with its alleys and its fogs was a residually Victorian place. Michael can provide a variety of reasons for his self-judgement. First, he has a conscience, and so did the Victorians. Second, he dislikes ‘materialism’, and so did some of the most influential Victorians. Third, he is suspicious of the state, and so were most Victorians. Self- help and mutual aid went together. Cooperation was one Victorian response to industrialisation. Fourth, there were many Victorian social entrepreneurs who were driven as much by enterprise as industrial entrepreneurs were, the kind of social entrepreneurs in demand to shape the twenty-first century. Fifth, and perhaps most important, Michael himself, as Martin Bulmer put it (see above, p. 23), has been an explorer of society who has written from outside a university context. As a sociologist, he was in the tradition of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. He did not depend on a salary and he did not expect a pension. He was concerned, as they were, with research through survey, and like Rowntree, in particular, he wanted research to lead to the formation of public policy. 329 330 Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur Michael’s statement, quoted in the Foreword, that ‘everything derives from research’ ended with the words, not quoted there, ‘so it is all very empirical’. Whatever else may be acceptable in his self- judgements, this last phrase is not. Research is not all empirical, and since Michael is highly intuitive, the ideas that he translates into organisations, are translated in complex, not simple, ways, even when the research seems empirical. His ideas have infuriated as well as inspired. There has been no one like him, although he has often had co-authors in writing his books and co-workers in pushing his projects, and his relationships with them have not been uniformly good. He may be completely Victorian in that – and in his capacity to dream as well as to think. As a historian of Victorian Britain I have always questioned the ten- dency of commentators, including some fellow historians, to generalise about Victorian character and Victorian values. I have not only distin- guished between early, middle and late periods in what was an excep- tionally long reign, but between different people in each period, wishing that for some periods I had had oral evidence, some of it based on interviews. For me there was no one Victorian prototype. None the less, if we were to try to identify ‘representative’ Victorians and draw comparisons between them and us, Michael, in some respects, had more mid-Victorian than late Victorian qualities. It would be late Victorian characters, however, like Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells, whom we would have to bring into the picture. Michael is like Wells in that they are both time travellers, critical of their own times. But was Michael ever as critical of his own times as Wells was when four years before Michael was born he described ‘the Victorian epoch’ as ‘a hasty trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind’? Victorian people were ‘restricted and undisciplined, overtaken by power, by possessions and great new freedoms and unable to make any civilized use of them whatever’. Wells was gloomy about the twentieth century when he reached old age, although there were many signs of ‘social progress’ that he had foreseen, as Michael, as interested in the future as Wells was, did also in twentieth-century rather than Victorian fashion. It is not possible to summarise his achievements as a projector of ideas and organisations more finally than was attempted in the last chapter. Perhaps the most telling way of ending this Afterword, there- fore, is to go back in time, but not as far as the Victorians, and quote from a handwritten letter written by Dorothy Elmhirst to Michael from Dartington on Sunday, 28 April 1957. Close as they were they Afterword: The Last Victorian? 331 communicated in entirely non-Victorian terms at a time when a revival was in full swing. Dorothy had just been reading Family and Kinship in the East End: I’ve had such a good time reading your book that I can’t believe that it could ever be hard work to make sociological studies, still less to read them. Yours is a study of living people, who come and go all through – rather like a novel and at times like scenes from a play. I feel I know the individuals – they seem to … greet me. ‘Michael,’ she went on, ‘this is an important book – and it achieves something that Chekhov [no Victorian] used to talk about – the art of saying serious and profound things in a light vein. This is a great achievement. … You know what it means to me.’ The words were written more than forty years ago. They still carry across all the divides of time. At this time no other words are necessary. Notes 1 In Lieu of an Autobiography 1. George Orwell was one. Yet ‘ironically’, as one student of Orwell has observed, ‘a writer who asked in his will for no biography has gotten several’ (J. Rodden, ‘Personal Behavior, Biographical History and Literary Reputation: The Case of George Orwell’ in Biography, An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, Vol. 12, Summer 1989). 2. M. Young and M. Rigge, Revolution from Within: Cooperatives and Cooperation in British Industry (1983). 3. The sub-title of the book is ‘The Arrival of the Ageless Society’. 4. NLSC Interview by Paul Thompson, 12 May 1990. 5. V. Brome, ‘Practising What You Preach’ in G. Dench, T. Flower and K. Gavron (eds.), Young at Eighty (1995), p. 94. 6. Tessa (Baroness) Blackstone, ‘The Birkbeck Presidency’ in Young at Eighty, pp. 52–3. ‘Putting Michael together with Roger Scruton,’ she writes, ‘would have been interesting, but a trifle risky.’ This was one of the many ‘might have beens’ of Michael’s life which has often involved risks. 7. See below, p. 150. 8. A. Bullock and O. Stallybrass (eds.), Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977), p. 400. 9. It still did not figure in the third edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1973). Nor did the words ‘meritocrat’ or ‘meritocratic’. Five years later, however, the word ‘meritocracy’ was given an entry twice as long as ‘meritorious’ in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 10. See below, p. 161. For China viewed as a gerontocracy turning into a meri- tocracy, see below, p. 274. 11. Young and Willmott, The Symmetrical Family (1973), p. 9, p. 1. P. Hall, Cities in Civilization (1998). For Michael’s connection with Peter Hall, see below, pp. 240–1. 12. See below, Chapter 8. 13. The Rise of the Meritocracy, Ch. 1, which is called ‘The Clash of Social Forces’. 14. The sector and the range of organisations within it is clearly identified at the Hauser Center at Harvard University. For the practical side of the paral- lel, well known to Michael, see F. Setterberg and K. Schulman, The Complete Guide to Managing the Non-Profit Organization (1985). See also Michael’s draft, School for Social Entrepreneurs, Application from the Institute of Community Studies (1996). 15. D. Bell, Social Scientist as Innovator (1983). 16. Inaugural Speech, 5 January 1998. 17. P. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1989), p. vii. See also his book The Leader of the Future (1997). The Peter E. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management held its first conference in 1991: the seventh in 332 Notes 333 1997 was devoted to ‘Mastering the Tools of Change’. Two papers were delivered on ‘The Social Enterprise of the Future’. 18. For changes in values, attitudes towards value systems and the political (and professional) use of the term ‘Victorian values’, see out of a huge liter- ature – in chronological order of appearance – J. A. Banks, Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families (1982); J. Walvin, Victorian Values (1986); G. Marsden (ed.), Victorian Values (1990); and E. Sigsworth, Victorian Values (1991). In a television interview of 1983 Thatcher described Victorian values as the values ‘when our country became great’. 19. The Times, 9 October 1997. Queen Elizabeth was addressing the Pakistani Senate and National Assembly in Islamabad. 20. See below, p. 84. 21. NS, 23 May 1963. 22. GP Interview by Jane Gabriel, 22 March 1994. See also M. Young and M. Rigge, Mutual Aid in a Selfish Society (Mutual Aid Papers, No. 2, n.d.) and below, Chapter 8.