As a form however, historical fiction is bristling with risks. Most saliently, anachronisms — to be pointed out by pedantic readers. The exemplar in such matters is Charles Dickens. A draft of his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), contained a minor character who was hanged “for passing bad one pound notes”. A correspondent who had seen the proofs wrote to inform him that it was only after 1797 that notes under five pounds were issued; Barnaby Rudge was set in the lead-up to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Dickens checked, assented, and replied to this Victorian pedant, wishing him: “Very many thanks… for your kind care.” (It’s noteworthy not just that he was grateful but that he took care to double-check first.)

Dickens is himself a minor character in Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, a work of historical fiction set in the 18th and 19th centuries, partly in the bit of northwest London which has inspired most of her non-historical fiction and partly in Jamaica, the narrative spreading over multiple characters and storylines. There is, to start with, the world of the real (but largely — and deservedly — forgotten) novelist William Harrison Ainsworth: his numerous but terrible books, his smug self-satisfaction and his complex domestic arrangements. These are sardonically observed through the eyes of his cousin and housekeeper Eliza Touchet — which Smith takes her to pronounce, with Dickensian aptness, “touché”. But Mrs Touchet’s attention is distracted, like that of countless others in England, with the (also real) cause célèbre of Arthur Orton, a butcher who implausibly claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-missing heir to a large inheritance.

But the Tichborne affair, wild from start to finish, provides Smith with her situation rather than her story. Her plotline — or the best of her several — is the one woven around the Tichborne Claimant’s star witness: a Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle who insisted, even when there was little else to support Orton’s claim, that he recognised Sir Roger, a man he had once worked for. Bogle’s own story — of his enslavement and his freedom — ends up being as or more interesting than that of the other people involved in and those breathlessly following the Tichborne Case.

Smith’s handling of Bogle involves a deft synthesis of fact and fiction. And the book comes with a short paragraph acknowledging Smiths’ principal academic sources and thanking one scholar of the period in particular for having read the book in manuscript. Being at best a part-time student of this period, I suspect that I will only embarrass myself if I go about seeking anachronisms. But in any case, this isn’t the sort of book whose interest in history starts and ends with getting the facts right. If that’s all there were to it, why bother fictionalising it at all?

Much mainstream historical fiction does engage in that lower literary pleasure Smith warns of: “cosplay”. And what man doesn’t look better dressed in Mr Darcy’s shirt, or Sir Lancelot’s armour, than in a tracksuit? But historical fiction of this kitschy kind — Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels are the recent exemplars — also gives us the chance, rare in the modern world, to look at the world through concepts few of us can use today without irony: chastity, honour, vengeance. The popular taste for this sort of fiction, and indeed for the pseudo-medieval worlds in which much fantasy is set, tells us something about our longings for a world before liberal democracy, before “health and safety”, before political correctness.

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But these aren’t Smith’s reasons for succumbing to the lures of history. She evidently intends to write the less kitschy sort of work associated with Hilary Mantel, and before her, Penelope Fitzgerald. Smith is a talented parodist, as anyone would need to be who dabbles in this genre. But a book that contained nothing but parody would be a wearying thing. That is itself a reason why the pedant’s impulse to read with an eye to anachronism misses the point of the best historical fiction. Here, for instance, in a passage describing the Jamaican witness, Bogle, accompanied by a mysterious teenager, appearing before a curious public, is Smith letting us know that she can write “period” when she wants to:

“He [the son], too, was a negro, but of lighter complexion. His extraordinary hair… had been shaped into a pair of triangular wedges, one pointing up, the other down. Surely a son: they had the same narrow, almost Oriental eyes. But where Bogle’s were a shrewd exception in a soft and inconclusive face, the boy’s flashed round the room like lightning.”

The racial terms — “negro”, “Oriental” — are not, of course, Zadie Smith’s, but those of Mrs Touchet, the Victorian character through whose eyes we’re viewing the scene. The same goes for the description of the boy’s “extraordinary” hair, and the inference she — and we — make: “Surely a son.” The clichéd simile at the end, as Smith allows Mrs Touchet herself to observe, is like something from the hackneyed prose of her cousin, William Ainsworth. Lovers of Victorian fiction will recognise Smith as one of them; she has read the same books they have, and doubtless a good many more.

What, then, of Smith’s contention that historical fiction might come at history from an “interrogative angle”? That isn’t true only of historical fiction; it is what any historian worth his salt does anyway. Not even the most vulgar kind of historical narrative can be simply a list of facts about the past. They must be held together by something, usually a question: not just “What happened?” but “How?” and “Why?” And there’s no anachronism in approaching the materials of history — documents, oral testimonies, archaeological remains — with the questions and concerns of the present. Indeed, that approach is what produces the kind of history we can learn something from, an account of the past that has something to tell us. It only produces bad history when it turns out that the past tells us exactly what the present tells us.

Zadie Smith’s own life, lived under the glare of public scrutiny from her bestselling debut, White Teeth, published in when she was in her early 20s, can encourage the view that her concerns are “presentist” in the bad sense. She was for many years, as she has self-deprecatingly described, British fiction’s “multicultural (ageing) wunderkind”. Sceptics put down her success to everything other than the quality and popularity of her books: her mixed racial heritage, her striking appearance, and her flattering the right-on political prejudices of the Anglo-American chattering classes.

These judgments really are unfair, and readers tempted to hold them should try (for evidence of her literary seriousness) her essays on E. M. Forster and George Eliot, (for evidence of her political unclassifiability) her dark and haunting short story about a West African woman effectively the slave of a Muslim family “The Embassy of Cambodia”, and (for evidence of her insight as a critic of contemporary culture) her reviews of such films as The Social Network and Tár. And similarly, the pages of The Fraud are not filled with Left-wing clichés, but ask questions that were always there to be asked about the past.

For instance, one doesn’t need to overstate how many black people there were in Victorian England to be curious about the lives of the small number there indubitably were. A lovely passage in this book has Mrs Touchet take notice of “a band of Ethiopian minstrels” who “had joined forces with a chaunter, singing the broadside he was selling for a penny a sheet” — a simple image of a real London scene that doesn’t need analysis. One can see the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a real evil while acknowledging the complicity of African elites in it and indeed that its abolition, while a real achievement, was only the beginning of a process of emancipation. As Mrs Touchet puts it to a too-complacent dining companion, “No, Mr Chapman, it is not at all an end to the matter. The plantations remain in operation. You might as well say the fire is out while a man still roasts atop the coals.”

It is impossible to avoid the echo of 21st-century activist slogans when we find that there were working-class Londoners, used to being patronised by the legal system, carrying signs that read “BELIEVE BLACK BOGLE”. But Smith allows the reader to entertain the full range of possibilities — that Bogle was the schemer behind the whole affair or that he was in earnest but mistaken. The question of who took Bogle’s testimony seriously is interesting quite apart from the question of whether he was, knowingly or not, lying. The past is, in that sense, exactly like a foreign country. The Mikado has virtually nothing to do with the real Japan because its Japanese setting was never supposed to be anything other than a proxy for England — the real target of Gilbert and Sullivan’s gentle mockery. By the same token, if a novel’s historical setting is supposed to be more than merely incidental, it had better have the capacity to surprise the reader.

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Few people today are going to be much surprised by being told that there were black people in Victorian London, that conditions on British plantations in the Caribbean were often dire, that there was a human zoo at the Great Exhibition of 1851. We are told that often enough now. My favourite scene in The Fraud is the one where Mrs Touchet, in raptures at church over the singing of former slaves (“Had she ever truly heard music until this moment?”) is introduced to one of the singers and finds herself disappointed that the lady is less moved than she is by the occasion. “Why was this young lady so determined to behave as if she had done nothing more remarkable this evening than clean a kitchen or serve a meal?”

A young black man, clearly besotted with the singer, wishes to take the singer on a tour of London, to see “our ‘Big Ben’”. Poor Mrs Touchet cannot handle the ordinariness of people she wants to see as “noble sons and daughters of Africa — filled with the grace of suffering, illuminated by freedom”. She feels shamed by their evident desire to be rid of this earnest do-gooder so they can resume their flirtation. This is often the most surprising thing about history: what it constantly tells us about the banal humanity of human beings.

Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire.

Analysis of Britain’s lost Greek empire opens up new and productive pathways for interpreting the imperial past, keenly studied by a young generation of Greek historians even as it is ignored in the former colonial metropole. As the historian Evangelos Zarokostas observes, the half-century Ionian interlude took place at a formative time, “a period of transition between the collapse of old structures and the establishment of new ones”, in which “British officials were ambivalent about the place of the protectorate in the empire from its very beginning.” From the very start, Britain ruled the islands as a crown colony, but under the legal fiction they were an independent state under British protection. This ambiguous settlement would prove fatal to British rule, but it also provided a template for later British governance in Cyprus, Egypt, Mandate Palestine and Iraq. The islands were a laboratory for later imperial adventures, and would soon prove just as onerous a burden. In this sense, the bloody and still-unresolved conflicts of today’s Middle East were born on the verdant islands of the Ionian. Similarly, the failed Ionian experiment, abandoned just as Britain began to acquire hegemonic status, was to be Whitehall’s first experience of decolonisation — a first draft, in colourful mid-Victorian style, of Britain’s 20th-century decline. 

In 1815, when Britain won the Ionian Islands from a vanquished Napoleon, the world looked very different. The island chain off Greece’s western coast commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, and seemed to offer mastery of the Mediterranean. In the 20 years preceding the raising of the Union flag over Corfu’s medieval fortress, the islands had rudely entered modernity after 400 years as a sleepy colony of Venice, passing from French to Russian hands and back to France again in a wearying succession of sieges and conquests. Desperately poor, they presented London with a complex society to govern: centuries of Venetian rule had left a Greek-speaking peasantry living in feudal squalor, lorded over by an absentee class of Italian-speaking nobles. In the regional capital, Corfu Town, all classes spoke Italian of one form or another, including the many Jews, confined to their ghetto by the vigorous antisemitism of their neighbours. As European Christians for the most part, the islanders were an anomaly in Britain’s expanding empire. How, then, were they to be governed? 

The Treaty of Paris which granted them to Britain asserted that Whitehall’s rule was merely a benevolent guardianship of the first independent Greek state since the Middle Ages. The reality was rather different: fresh from negotiating Haiti’s handover to its new black rulers, the Ionian Islands’ first British Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, or “King Tom”, ruled with a rod of iron. A Scottish nobleman, described by his new Ionian charges as “dirty” and “frequently drunk”, Maitland began his decade as “conquistador” by erecting imposing monuments to himself, and ensured that, whatever the constitution said, absolute power rested with his own person. Feared by the locals as a volatile and abusive autocrat, whose secret police penetrated every level of Ionian society, Maitland’s absolute rule established the basis for later British governance. An enlightened despot, and a devotee of Adam Smith’s latest, fashionable theories, Maitland encouraged trade and imposed a sense of British order to Corfu’s teeming, overcrowded streets. Finding the locals disinclined to work, Maitland imported Maltese labourers to build his imposing regency palace of St Michael and St George, in the process reviving Corfu’s dwindling Catholic community. Correctly assessing the local nobility as easily swayed by glittering baubles, Maitland invented a chivalric order to dazzle them, still awarded today, in the absence of Greeks to bribe, to British diplomats — by themselves.

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For a while, in the early decades of the 19th century, British rule was accepted by Corfiot society, if not by the more rebellious inhabitants of the southward islands. As Aggelis notes, there were even “popular demands from many Ionians to be ‘modernised’ by the British”. So, with all the lost confidence of Victorian Britain, Corfu was duly gifted the Foucauldian novelties of a Panopticon prison in Benthamite style, and a high-walled lunatic asylum, still occupied today. New Macadamed roads, also still in use, linked the villages to the capital, and a sturdy aqueduct brought water to its population. The expansion of new law courts, coupled with stiff sentences for carrying knives — at the time the British arrived, the Ionians had the second-highest murder rate in Europe — transformed a previously violent society into the most pacific, if now litigious, in the region. Handsome villas, their sober Regency neoclassicism softened by pastel-coloured limewash, sprung up around the town and its prosperous new suburb of Garitsa to house the garrison’s officers and their wives in British comfort. They are still lived in today by Corfu’s upper-middle class professionals — indeed, Prince Philip was born in one, Mon Repos. Banks and stock exchanges, hotels and sewers, street lamps and bandstands transformed the medieval walled city into a Balkan simulacrum of Cheltenham.

The eccentric Lord Guilford — whose erratically-spelled name is still commemorated by Corfu’s central square — founded modern Greece’s first university on the island, after being dissuaded from situating it on a goat-haunted mountain peak on Ithaca. A network of “Lancastrian schools” provided public education, including the first ever schooling for girls; British sentries guarded the ghetto during Holy Week, ending the local custom of stoning Jews who dared venture outside. And amid all this reforming zeal, garrison life drifted along with a sleepy, romantic charm, where red-coated officers and their crinolined companions hunted scented paper in lieu of foxes, and enjoyed champagne and oyster picnics on the island’s beauty spots, surrounded by peasants toiling in the olive groves. For Mrs Gaskell, imagining the life of an officer’s wife, enjoying “music and dancing” in her “house with its trellised balcony,” the daily round was one long summer holiday. For the ordinary squaddies, happily acquiring “local connections with women” and “local habits” and serving in the only British posting where wine was the ration drink, the only hazards were drunkenly falling from the ramparts or being snatched by sharks while swimming. A soldier’s life here was distinctly less onerous than in the Empire’s more spartan outposts. 

But the holiday atmosphere would not last long. The outbreak of the Greek Revolution aroused nationalist passions which would ultimately make British rule untenable. The exiled Corfiot nobleman Ioannis Kapodistrias, Russia’s foreign minister and a fervent opponent of British rule, complaining that the islanders were treated “like indians”, became the new Greece’s first head of state, complaining that the islanders were treated “like Indians”, until he was assassinated by his volatile mainland charges. When a Turkish ship carrying Muslim refugees landed on Zakynthos, the passengers were murdered by the islanders, causing Maitland to impose martial law and disarm the Ionian population. Agrarian rebellions would rumble on in the southern islands, with British officials occasionally murdered, and reprisals exacted. The Ionians were the only British territory where the revolutionary fervour of 1848 was successful: the liberal Tory Lord High Commissioner Lord Seaton, fresh from his experience governing Upper Canada, widened democratic participation and permitted a free press, recasting the Ionians as a white dominion fit for Canadian-style responsible self-government. Indeed, under Seaton the Ionian islanders were granted greater democratic rights than the people of Britain itself. When, the following year, British troops put down a peasant uprising in Kefalonia, burning villages and hanging rebels to the applause of the local nobles, his reactionary successor Sir Henry Ward blamed Seaton’s naive idealism for the disturbances, proroguing the Ionian parliament and exiling journalists in an abrupt return to authoritarian rule.

This constant oscillation between Liberal and reactionary Tory proconsuls introduced tensions into Ionian governance that would soon make British rule untenable. The expansion of education, of the legal system and of employment in the British administration created a new Ionian bourgeoisie who rejected the pro-British sympathies of the islands’ aristocracy in favour of radical nationalism: a pattern that would be repeated in more exotic colonies. In stirring Italian prose (though the British had reintroduced Greek as the language of law and government for the first time since the 13th century, Italian remained the language of choice for the educated classes) nationalist radicals with names such as Dandolo, Padova and Lombardo demanded union with the Greek fatherland. Enraged by Ward’s repression of the Kefalonian rebellion, the moderate reformists, who had previously sought closer integration within the empire on more favourable terms of trade and access to imperial sinecures, ceded power to the radicals.

When the Crimean War broke out, and the islands became the supply base for Britain’s defence of the hated Ottoman Empire against the islanders’ Orthodox co-religionists, even the formerly-pliable clergy began to publicly pray for the Tsar’s health and success, while islanders celebrated Russian victories over their colonial overlords. The end was looming. Local government was deadlocked as the radicals frustrated British rule, but the heightened repression angered liberal sentiment in London. In the dying decade of British rule, as at the beginning, Whitehall’s sole concern with the islands became keeping them out of Russian hands. Nervously, London discussed gifting the islands to Austria, though feared the international response. A proposal was made by Ward’s successor, Sir John Young, a former MP for Cavan who consistently likened the increasingly unruly Ionians to the now equally troublesome Irish, proposed to annex Corfu while ceding the more volatile islands to Greece.

In a justificatory British correspondence, the placid Corfiots were now characterised as “half-Venetian and half-Albanian” and thus barely Greek at all. As Paschalidi notes, Young insisted that “Corfu was perfect for ‘British capital and enterprise’ and “would be ‘completely Anglicised’ in a few years.” Yet the initially convenient legal fiction of the Protectorate prevented Britain from either fully annexing Corfu or handing the problem to a friendly power. The publishing of Young’s stolen correspondence just as Gladstone arrived in Corfu to find some workable solution forced London to reassure wary European powers it had no intention of creating a Balkan Gibraltar. At a loss for how to rid itself of its now unwanted Greek dependency, the British government began to search for a way out. That way out was to be King Charles’ great-grandfather, Prince William of Denmark.

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In 1862, Greek revolutionaries overthrew their unpopular Bavarian king Otto, and the country voted for a successor. When the votes were tallied, the winner, with more than 95% of votes cast (still the greatest democratic mandate in Greek history) was Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son. Both Alfred and Victoria immediately declined the offer — the throne of an impoverished Balkan country in the throes of revolution was hardly a prize — but the Greeks refused to listen: Alfred-mania had entirely swept the country. The Greeks believed that choosing Alfred would guarantee British protection for their weak and unstable new state, with the still-unliberated Ottoman possessions of northern Greece thrown into the bargain. Struggling to convince them that the Alfred option was impossible, British officials feared the disappointed Greeks would choose a Russian king in a fit of pique, swinging the country into the orbit of London’s greatest rival. After much haggling, British officials settled on a safely pliable king for Greece, Prince William of Denmark — King Charles’ great-grandfather. But to seal the deal, London needed a handsome gift to woo the Greeks: and what better option than Corfu and the Ionians, no longer strategically valuable and now impossible to govern?

And so, on June 2, 1864, the last British troops marched out of Corfu’s Old Fortress and the Union flag was lowered for the last time. The final Lord High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks, gave a tearful speech in Italian while island notables gathered round him, “embracing him and conferring upon him not infrequently those salutations which Englishmen generally reserve for the other sex”. The frosty atmosphere of Britain’s last decade of rule had evaporated with their looming departure, as soldiers marched along streets “strewn with flowers”, “fêted in the taverns with free beer”. Now it was over, Corfiots had already begun to feel a certain nostalgia for their brief episode of Britishness. “Sono bono genti [they are good people],” a British correspondent quoted an old man waving his straw hat at the departing ships, wiping tears from his eyes: “’Adesso siamo liberi!’ [Now we are free!], said a young man, as he lit a cigarette by way of inaugurating the new order of things.” The young man was not quite correct: in relinquishing Corfu, Britain won a far greater prize, a quasi-colonial dominance over Greece itself, which would remain an effective British protectorate until London was supplanted by Washington following World War Two. For this exact reason, once Britain finally agreed to cede the Ionians, Ionian radicals who had long demanded union futilely began to campaign against it, as the historian Eleni Calligas shows: after experiencing “the corruption, intrigue, and clientelism permeating Greek politics” they soon retired from public life altogether, entirely disillusioned.

British rule in the Ionians is often seen, in Britain, as a curious backwater in the long imperial record, but the romantic but ultimately failed Ionian experiment set the scene for later imperial trends. Oscillating between Liberal and Tory proconsuls, tensions in British internal politics introduced a wild incoherence to Ionian governance: Tory repression inflamed local passions; Liberal idealism created a native nationalist bourgeoisie who would make the islands ungovernable. But young British administrators who cut their teeth in the failed Ionian project would later move on to the equally ambiguous annexation of Egypt, which established a precedent for British mandate Iraq: British governance in the Ionian would shape later failures in the Middle East. Similarly oscillating between liberal idealism — tempered by the nationalist enthusiasms of a bourgeoisie British rule had created — and harsh oppression, Britain repeated the same cycle in the Middle East as it did in the Ionian, ending in bloodier and less romantic failure. In the end, British patronage of independent Greece ended as that of its rule in the Middle East did, a rule supplanted by America, now being supplanted in turn..

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Cycling through an incoherent policy mix of authoritarian repression and liberal idealism, benevolent modernisation and indirect rule through feudal elites, British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation, even as Britain stood on the brink of world hegemony. But far from the black-and-white moral certainties of today’s demagogic historiography, the Ionian islanders themselves always felt ambivalent about their status as semi-Britons, as often pleading for greater incorporation into the imperial fold and the right to send an MP to the Commons as demanding independence. 

London, too, always felt more ambivalence than cupidity for its Greek possessions, searching for the least painful way to relinquish them and finally doing so according to the unsentimental demands of realpolitik. Far from the Ionians’ union with Greece being the inevitable result of nationalist fervour, London chose the moment of decolonisation, just one of many potential outcomes, and did so with relief. “I wish them joy of the association,” Storks wrote bitterly, “Ionia will be the Ireland of Greece.” When the British left, they were mourned only by Corfu’s nobility, its Jews (whose “situation would be very pitiable, if the English did not take them under their protection”), and its women, who, Storks observed, were “universally opposed to the cessation of British protection”. But in the end, aside from the residual Anglophilia of Corfiot elites, the only living result of this brief and romantic Anglo-Hellenic synthesis is our own philhellene King, and a lingering Corfiot taste for cricket and ginger beer, the last ghostly echoes of Britain’s lost Greek empire.

But Fry was undoubtedly a devout Christian of the Quaker variety, as were the other two of the big three British chocolatiers, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, all of whom were directed towards manufacturing through being barred from most professions. They were drawn to chocolate in particular because they regarded it as a more moral treat, and that was how it was widely perceived: an innocent indulgence, supplied by men whose Quaker conscience dictated that they combine its manufacture with good works. In a wider sense, we might see that Fry’s egg as symbolising a strain of particularly moral — indeed, overtly Christian — capitalism, operating paternalistically both in its own workplaces and the surrounding community. The story of these eggs, and the companies that made them, therefore forms a simulacrum for the narrative of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from local, civic-minded commerce toward globalised, faceless big business.   

I grew up in Seventies York, upon which the Rowntrees had been showering gifts for nearly a century. The primary benefactor had been Joseph Rowntree II, heir to the first Joseph Rowntree, who’d established the business in 1822. In 1893, JR II established Rowntree’s garden factory in York, whose 4,000 employees benefited from a female welfare worker, a doctor’s surgery, sick and provident funds, savings and pensions schemes. Nearby was — and is — New Earwsick, a model village for employees with pretty Arts and Crafts houses, each with a fruit tree in the front garden, and no two successive trees bore the same fruit, to promote crop-swapping and neighbourliness. There was a toytown air about the signs indicating “Butcher”, “Greengrocer”, ”Chemist”. No sign indicated “pub” of course.

Several members of my extended family worked for Rowntree’s, and they were entitled to heavily discounted chocolate, some of which came my way, and my mother always included a Kit-Kat in my packed lunch, a token of love from her, and (it seemed) the Rowntrees themselves. One could still almost believe that their primary concern was philanthropy and the creation of charitable trusts, while they left the chocolate making to secular subordinates.

I benefited in many ways from Rowntree largesse, playing tennis and swimming in Rowntree Park, acting in plays at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre and swotting for exams in York Library, which they’d funded. I never went inside the factory but did once visit its equivalent in the Midlands: Cadbury’s Bournville complex. This too is a garden factory, with a similarly relaxed spaciousness between the buildings, like pieces on a chess board towards the end of a game. I recall seeing, among many other tokens of paternalism, the factory dentist’s surgery, indicated by a sign in Cadbury’s purple. At the time (early 2000s) Cadbury’s seemed to have retained the “purity” (a word much employed in their advertising) we appeared to have lost in York.

Rowntree’s was acquired by Nestlé in 1988, and I remember being shocked at seeing the Swiss flag flying from the factory roof. Nestlé have since invested heavily in the York factory, but they admit that they don’t continue the Rowntree tradition of York benefactions, and the extent of their wider philanthropy is mysterious to me. A spokesperson for the firm said: “We don’t necessarily PR our charitable work.”

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In 2010, Cadbury’s, which does still support the charitable Cadbury Foundation, was sold to the America-based multinational, Kraft, and is now owned by Mondelez, a company hived off from Kraft in 2012. In York, we knew all about Kraft. It had acquired the other York chocolatier, Terry’s, who were not Quakers, but whose factory — closed by Kraft in 1993 — nonetheless had a fishpond, bowling green and sports fields, and whose female hockey team played in the colours of one of their best-known brands: All Gold.

But even before British Big Chocolate entered a world you’d need a degree in business studies to comprehend, the companies had not been averse to capitalistic chess playing. In 1919, Cadbury’s had (gently and politely) acquired Fry’s, and in 1969, Cadbury’s merged with Schweppes, despite Schweppes mixers being used in alcoholic drinks. In his history of 20th-century confectionery, Sweet Talk, Nicholas Whittaker refutes the sentimental version of the Rowntree’s takeover, whereby Nestlé was seen as a bully spoiling for a fight: “Who should it be? Cadbury’s looked a bit too muscular, and that Mars was a Yankee smartarse. How about that Rowntree’s wimp in the corner, happily counting his Smarties? He’d do.” On the contrary, as Whittaker writes, it was “all about percentages, shareholdings and wheeler-dealing”.

The Quakers had also been worldly enough to embrace advertising even though, as Deborah Cadbury writes in her 2010 book, Chocolate Wars: “Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself; abhorrent to a man of God.” The heyday of chocolate advertising was in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of it was particularly un-Quaker like (the way those fashion models ate a Cadbury’s Flake, for instance). And whereas Cadbury and Rowntree’s benignity on the home front was unquestionable, they took their eye off the ball when it came to the cocoa-producing regions.

In 2021, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Barrow Cadbury Trust — created in 1920, and now an independent charitable trust “inspired by Quaker beliefs” — apologised for the fact that their endowment was “not free from labour exploitation”. In the early 19th Century, Cadbury’s had acquired cocoa from plantations where slave labour had been used. The company eventually organised a boycott of those plantations by British cocoa manufacturers, but they had benefited from slave labour for eight years. Also in 2021, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust — established in 1904, and now “an independent Quaker charitable trust” — apologised for the “Rowntree company having purchased cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved people”.

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Cocoa production is still bedevilled by labour exploitation, which is one reason why the Fairtrade label (imprimatur of the Fairtrade movement) was established in 1997. It is applied to goods produced ethically, for which a fair price had been paid. Neither Mondelez nor Nestlé are currently signed up to Fairtrade, although both have their own schemes of certification: Cocoa Life and Rainforest Alliance respectively. Cocoa Life operates in partnership with Fairtrade but neither it nor Rainforest Alliance guarantees a minimum price to cocoa farmers, which Fairtrade does. In 2009, Nestle’s Kit-Kat did become Fairtrade-registered, a momentous event, given the scale of Kit-Kat sales, but in 2020, Nestlé moved Kit-Kat into its Rainforest Alliance scheme. (Nestlé insisted this was about unifying all their products under one umbrella and not a moneysaving measure. But Joanna Pollard, a co-ordinator of Fairtrade Yorkshire contended that cocoa farmers would lose out heavily, and she presented a petition of protest with 300,000 signatures at their York factory.)

It tends to be only the smaller players who can now claim the moral high ground, a reversal of the previous situation. Tony’s Chocolonely (“crazy about chocolate, serious about people”) was founded in 2005 by a Dutch TV producer, Tuen van de Keuken, whose chocolate bars have irregular divisions, like crazy paving, to reflect the inequalities of the chocolate industry. The “lonely” tag is because van de Keuken felt as if he alone were addressing exploitation in chocolate farming, but the company’s moral claims go only so far. Chocolonely has never claimed there is no child labour in its supply chain, which is just as well, since, in 2022, the company reported that 1,701 instances of it had been found in the previous year — a situation it has undertaken to correct.

So there remains a moral dimension to the chocolate industry, albeit now a globalised one, and there is a new moral fraughtness, concerning our view of both its past and its social effects today. To the question of modern slavery, we might add the British obesity crisis that has come along to embarrass the chocolatiers. And in the modern age, there is even an anxiety about the nomenclature of their seasonal eggs. In one sense the creation of the chocolate egg pushed Easter in the child-oriented, secularised direction that Christmas had already begun to take in the Victorian period. (Decorated hard-boiled eggs had previously been given to the local poor rather than one’s own offspring.) While the Easter chocolate can be viewed as a Christian symbol, it is increasingly not so perceived.

In 2010, David Marshall crowdfunded the launch of the Meaningful Chocolate Company, having been given an Easter egg whose packaging proclaimed, “Easter is the festival of chocolate and loveliness.” Surveying the 80 million eggs on sale, he concluded that not a single manufacturer mentioned the religious aspect of the festival, hence his “Real Easter Egg”, which comes with a copy of the Easter story, is Fairtrade certified, and from the profits of which a donation is made to charity. By Easter 2023, 1.8 million of these eggs will have been sold, and without the aid of the supermarkets, who won’t stock an explicitly religious egg. Having spoken to Mr Marshall, I visited my local Sainsbury’s. About half the chocolate eggs on display were described as “Easter eggs”, but the E-word tended to be on the back of the package in small print rather than blazoned the front.

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The Quaker capitalism behind Fry’s Easter egg has become shareholder capitalism. In a globalised world, the chocolate industry grew too big for a connection to any one place or system of belief, unless it be the belief in profit. In decades past, guided tours of the Rowntree factory were regularly offered to the general public. But, a few years ago, when I applied to Nestlé for a tour, they turned me down on the grounds that if they let me in, they’d be overwhelmed with other applicants.

And Quakerism itself is a faith in decline. As Deborah Cadbury writes “there was a time when one in 10 people in Britain were Quakers”, but when she visited Quaker HQ, the Society of Friends on Euston Road, she discovered that membership was down to 15,000. As Quakerism and Christianity has faded from the world of British chocolate, a very familiar modern landscape has replaced it: a transition from the solidity and faith of the past towards a liquid, rootless, profit-maximising present.

Nothing in this respect has changed since the Victorian era, when the middle classes were equally panicked by stirrings from below. Nobody objects to the right to withdraw one’s labour; it’s just strikes that some people can’t stomach. The last thing one should do with this particular right is actually exercise it. If you do, you can be sure that the state will shackle you with even more repressive legislation. Strikes are a nuisance for the general public. Choosing between freezing and starving is also a nuisance for the general public, though not, presumably, for Newman and Wark.

There is talk again of hand-outs, which the Victorians doled out graciously to the deserving poor. Perhaps we should dispense with a new prime minister and ask Bill Gates to take over running the country. Some things, however, have changed since Victoria’s day. Back then, the poor were largely invisible. (I apologise for the quaintly archaic term “poor”; I mean of course those with limited disposable incomes). A lot of them lived in slums, where few of their social superiors dared to tread. They were a ghettoised species to be researched into or moralised about, an alien underworld visited largely by philanthropists and sociologists.

Middle-class people ventured into their midst from time to time to note their physiognomic peculiarities or beg them to be washed in the blood of the Lamb. They were also largely illiterate, which shut them out of the public sphere even more decisively. Nowadays, the poor may live next door, or even closer than that, while a good many of the ghettos are for the rich. The low-paid have also acquired a voice of their own, rather than having conscience-stricken novelists speak out on their behalf. It’s a long way from Charles Dickens to Mick Lynch. The deprived used to be a problem — a distinctive group like the disabled, in need of special measures. But what if the problem is society itself?

Some Victorians saw poverty as a transient state. A poor person was someone en route to becoming a rich person, rather as an ape was en route to becoming a human being. For the state to intervene in the laws of the marketplace would only derail this desirable evolution. Some of these apologists for progress and civilisation would have been aghast at the idea that there would still be widespread hunger almost 200 years on. Much the same view was taken of Empire. Colonial peoples were stuck at an evolutionary point which we ourselves had left behind some centuries ago, and the more enlightened of our forebears felt the need to bring these savages up to date by invading their territories, hi-jacking their labour-power and plundering their resources. They did not pause to reflect that a major reason why the colonies were in a dire state was because they themselves existed, rather as a major reason for the existence of the poor is the activity of the rich.

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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian

By Terry Eagleton

Others in Victorian Britain saw poverty as a natural condition, and thus as unchangeable. This, however, doesn’t follow: not all natural conditions are unchangeable, as the planet knows to its cost. It’s a lot easier to move a mountain than to demolish patriarchy. There are, however, certain natural phenomena which never vary, like the need for nourishment or the nastiness of the US Republican party, and destitution could easily be added to the list. Besides, an authority as unimpeachable as the Son of God had declared that the poor are always with us. If Jesus was a Tory, who were we to say otherwise?

After a while, however, poverty became a scandal. It showed no signs of disappearing, but ideologically speaking it grew less acceptable. This was partly because of the growth of humanitarianism, and partly because too stark a division between rich and poor was politically destabilising. The case that having an empty stomach is as natural as having typhoid thus crumbled away. Fewer people believed that capitalism, too, is just human nature, though this view still has a number of subscribers. It was growing harder to maintain that Neolithic Man could find his fulfilment only by running a corner shop, or that tribal peoples like the Nuer and the Dinka are secretly hankering to be stockbrokers. Aristotle thought that trade simply for the sake of accumulating wealth was unnatural. For some feudal ideologues, capitalism flouted traditional values and would never catch on. Shakespeare was well aware of the New Men, as the Elizabethans called them, and feared the devastation they were wreaking.

So hardship had to be accounted for in non-natural terms, and it was thus that the evolutionary theory became the trickle-down theory. In the end, the wealthy would come to the rescue of the needy. It is remarkable how resistant to reality this pious faith has proved. Karl Marx was derided for claiming that the rift between the well-off and the hard-up would widen as capitalism developed, but he has proved prophetic. It is the rich who are getting richer, not the poor. If it is true that capitalism can lift some people out of deprivation, it is also true that it can plunge others into it, sometimes at the same time.

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Even so, the myth persists that granting tax breaks to billionaires is the quickest route to all-round affluence. How many times must this theory fail in practice before it is finally discredited? Imagine someone who believes that the killing of African Americans by police officers is simply a series of tragic accidents. It says nothing significant about the structure of American society. The more African Americans are murdered, the more stubbornly this individual sticks to his view.

If he isn’t entirely dim-witted, one can only account for this by appealing to ideology. There must be some reason why this man can’t afford to acknowledge the existence of systematic racism. To do so might seriously jeopardise his own interests. He might be forced to look at the world in a way that makes it hard to carry on living as he does. The same goes for the Kentucky ex-coalminer standing up to his waist in flood water who, when asked whether climate change may have played a part in destroying his home, hesitated for several seconds before grudgingly replying: “It’s possible.”

It isn’t in the interests of the current economic system to acknowledge that it breeds inequality in the same way that sugar is sweet. This is why some look forward to the time when the low-paid will catch up with Elon Musk, or at least with Gary Lineker. This will certainly come about, but only in the kingdom of heaven, and people surviving on sandwiches because they daren’t turn on the cooker are reluctant to wait that long.

The beauty of the American Dream is that it accepts the reality of poverty, but in an upbeat kind of way. The badly off won’t get to live in Martha’s Vineyard, but individuals here and there will bootstrap themselves to success. There is a ladder leading to the top, but like all ladders it is wide enough to hold only one at a time. Society is one enormous lottery, and what keeps you from chaining yourself to the nearest police officer is the prospect that your number might always come up. Meanwhile, as you visit your local food bank, it is consoling to think that others are paying a fortune for tickets to the moon. The hearts of the unemployed swell with patriotic pride at the thought of the urchin from the Bronx or Detroit who grew up to be a millionaire and throw them out of their jobs.

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Was Jesus a revolutionary?

By Terry Eagleton

Every civilisation has its blind spots — the unsayable or inconceivable, the invisible framework which marks the limits of permissible thought. In Britain today, this is the property system. This situation, too, hasn’t changed since Victorian times. In the 1840s, a famine broke out at the heart of the British Empire, the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe. One million Irish people died, while millions of others emigrated. One reason they did so was because the British government wouldn’t permit any tampering with the laws of the capitalist economy. Few people today believe that this set-up is divinely ordained, but a lot of them behave as though it is. Watch Kirsty Wark’s blank, uncomprehending visage when someone on the show is rash enough to mention socialism.

Before we squabble about restoring a tax cut here or help for the most vulnerable there, we should step back and contemplate for a moment the sheer surreal lunacy of the situation. In a world in which computers are so advanced that they may be feeling lonesome, and for all we know are secretly dating each another, people are going to die because they are deprived of goods to which they have an absolute right. Perhaps it will soothe the grief and fury of their families to point out that there is no alternative — that, in the midst of the greatest affluence and technological wizardry history has ever witnessed, the wit of humanity is unable to conceive of a different way of doing things. I wouldn’t like to be the politician who tries to tell them.

It’s commonplace today to talk disparagingly of ‘Victorian morality’ as uptight and needlessly repressive, and of our modern culture as an improvement. But less well-recognised than Victorian uptightness is the fact that it was a backlash against preceding excess.

In the period leading up to Victoria’s coronation in 1838, the monarchy was associated with sexual licence, showy extravagance and George III’s mental illness. With republicanism sweeping Europe and America, Victoria and her consort Prince Albert sought to avoid the fate of less adaptable royals by reimagining Britain’s monarchy as moral rather than political leaders.

A progressive by the standards of his day, Albert was a natural for the job. He supported contemporary campaigns for education reform and the elimination of slavery, and was a compulsive institution-builder and attender of committees: “a civil servant in a coronet”, as A.N. Wilson put it. He was also key to the 1851 Great Exhibition, which showcased everything the society of the day wished to celebrate — from the stolen treasures of colonialism to Britain’s first public loos.

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A number of schemes were proposed to commemorate Albert after he died, including a meeting and concert venue. But the funds were swallowed up by the Albert Memorial. Not to be deterred, the civil servant and inventor Henry Cole, Albert’s chief collaborator in the Great Exhibition, crowdfunded it.

Cole did the rounds among the great and the good. He built up enough momentum to win approval from the Prince of Wales, steamrollered competing architectural designs and pooh-poohed arguments that the hall was, as Lord Derby said,”inconveniently large for the meetings of really scientific societies”. He managed to drive the project through a banking crisis, budget constraints and his own unpopularity to deliver the iconic Kensington venue that’s now about to go bankrupt.

Traces of the patriotic culture of public service, contribution and assembly survived, until last summer, in the Albert Hall itself, via the orgy of flag-waving that is the BBC Proms. But today, a Rule Britannia-singing devotion to British national identity is coded as low-status and backward. After the Brexit referendum, this shift found its way even into the Hall, via the very middle-class turf war over whether the Last Night of the Proms would be a sea of Union Jacks or EU blue-and-gold.

In terms of wealth, the modern equivalent of the Victorian great and good who funded the Albert Hall are hedge fund billionaires and tycoons of industry. Many of these individuals donate to philanthropic projects, and the £12m it cost in today’s money to build the Albert Hall is loose change to the modern mega-rich. But the prospect of such individuals chipping in for an improving public institution with patriotic overtones is slender.

Today’s public-spirited billionaires are more likely to be trying to vaccinate the whole world, while the less altruistic host private seminars on maintaining authority over their mercenaries once money is worthless, or build luxury bunkers in New Zealand.

Further down the elite food chain, the attenuation of national allegiance among transnational elites is typified by the recent appointment of the Remain campaign director and Lib Dem spin doctor Ryan Coetzee, in a £5m contract to whitewash China’s new puppet regime in Hong Kong.

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Albert’s own great-great-great-great-grandsons, the Princes William and Harry, encapsulate something of this change. William clings to Albert’s vision for the monarchy, combining personal reserve and apparently picture-perfect family life with a commitment to national duty. His brother is fond of sharing his emotional state with the world, and seems keener to pursue a moral mission at the planetary rather than national scale, via his yet-to-be-launched ‘Archewell’ foundation. His recent pronouncements on the subject of the Commonwealth have mostly been confined to criticising its historic racism.

It’s hard to say whether elite disdain for the fading relics of the British imperial past is a cause or a consequence of Britain’s decline. It may just be a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship: after all, American elites were happy to salute the Stars and Stripes until that flag started to look threadbare. In contrast, China, today’s up-and-coming hegemon, has no qualms about self-aggrandising nationalism.

In any case, Britain in Albert’s day was an imperial behemoth commanding some 20% of global GDP. Today that’s a minnowish 2.2%. The mood of the day is more in tune with defacing monuments than building new ones.

It’s also possible that Britain’s High Victorian self-confidence was just a flash in the pan of British national pessimism. A thousand years ago, the inhabitants of these islands were already muttering gloomily about the passing of empires. In the 10^th-century Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, the poem’s narrator muses about the fleeting nature of all human achievement, as he passes among ‘eald ente geweorc’ – the ancient work of giants.

The Anglo-Saxons built mostly in timber, and with the exception of a few churches none of their structures remains today. The ‘geweorc’ in the peom refers to the ruins left behind by the Romans when they left in 400AD. (One such ‘geweorc’, Hadrian’s Wall, is still standing a thousand years on from The Wanderer.) To the Anglo-Saxons, Roman mosaics, underfloor heating and multi-storey stone buildings must indeed have seemed the work of mysterious giants.

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The public culture of 21^st-century Britain is as incapable of producing a new Albert Hall as the builders of 10th-century Britain would be of constructing a hypocaust. This was demonstrated by the last serious effort to deliver something of its scale, ambition and identity-defining nature: the Millennium Dome.

Funded by the National Lottery, over budget by £204m (nearly twenty times the total construction cost of the Albert Hall), its exhibition was panned at the time and attracted barely the same visitor numbers as the Great Exhibition despite running for twice as long. Today the Dome lives on as what Lord Derby feared the Albert Hall would become: “a mere place of public amusements, of which monster concerts would be the least objectionable”.

This should surprise no one: by the late 1990s, British culture had already balkanised to the point where the idea of encapsulating our shared values in a unifying exhibition was quite simply unachievable. The leadership team tried to synthesise a common cultural vision, for an individualistic society feeding on the progressive destruction of just that vision. Of course they failed. We couldn’t agree on what we have in common, so what we got – a mixture of corporate-sponsored junk exhibits and vending opportunities in a big tent – was poetically apt.

This doesn’t mean we should pine for the British Empire. The High Victorian era produced as many horrors as it did impressive buildings and scientific advances. But we can surely admire the moral seriousness and mass civic-mindedness that was the best of Albert’s legacy, without shrugging our shoulders at (for example) the starvation of 5.5 million Indian people in the Great Famine of 1876-8. It ought to be possible to convene something like the shared cultural life that animated Victorian Britain, without being obliged to bundle that with sexual prudishness, child labour, or a burning desire to invade other continents, enslave their inhabitants and steal their mineral wealth.

Unfortunately, that’s not where we are. Britain is left with neither the imperial might of Albert’s era, nor its shared cultural life. Instead, we have the buildings the Victorians left behind, squatted by a ruling class that’s happy to trade Victorian treasures while remaining largely indifferent to or actively critical of Albert’s vision of public service and civic participation. An aristocracy more like Harry than William, concerned with only the individual and the largest canvas of all – the planet – but none of the scales in between, whether town, city or nation.

Another great Victorian work, Frankenstein, was inspired by Galvani’s 18^th century experiments passing electricity through the legs of a dead frog, making them twitch even though the animal was lifeless. In the last few days, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced £1.57bn of funding for heritage and the arts, aimed at getting struggling institutions through the lockdown. We can expect the Albert Hall to receive some of that largesse, but this will no more revive mass-participation civil society than an electrical current can reanimate a dead frog.

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For lockdown has accelerated a trend that was already well under way: the death by indifference of anything in civil society that isn’t either for private consumption or amenable to commercial exploitation. And our political leaders are now driving this trend to its conclusion: the more profitless (in a commercial sense) an activity, the more grudging the unlocking. Pubs, shops and building sites all have the green light; children’s playgrounds remain closed.

The only exception has been mass political protest. And this style of cultural and political activism is as polarised between the individual and the crowd, and just as incapable of building intermediate institutions, as the post-democratic elite whose voices are loudest in its support.

The remnants of the worldview, self-confidence and cultural tastes characteristic of Victorian-era bourgeois civil society have been on life support for a long time. Coronavirus was the coup de grace. But rather than using taxpayer money to try and reanimate the corpse, maybe we should learn from the Anglo-Saxons and take the long view. Instead of seeking to imitate the mysterious ‘eald ente’ of 400AD, they let the ruins be, and took a grim comfort in the fleeting nature of all things:

Alas for the bright cup|
Alas for the mailed warrior
Alas for the splendour of the prince
How that time has passed away
Dark under the cover of night
As if it had never been

Living as I do in what feels like the death throes of a civilisation, there’s comfort in knowing that the people who lived after Roman Britain had their own culture and history. Even as the traces of the Roman imperial past through which the Anglo-Saxons wandered crumble into today’s landscape, it’s worth recalling that the Anglo-Saxons themselves, in the end, also had a future.