The Victorian middle class was respected both by the workers whose lives they exploited - and opened up - and by the aristocrats, whose increasingly international outlook was progressively integrated with trade. Russia and China had political systems without an economically powerful, shareholding middle class, which could start or follow fashions, and support romantic, visionary ventures. Today, the British will still support a Channel Tunnel venture or a Beagle-2 Mars lander, because such things are romantic and possibly heroic, even though they are unlikely to be very profitable. A lengthy historical record shows very clearly that the first attempt at any major tunnel usually collapses financially - though after the tunnel is successfully built - often after a long series of attempts to shore up a failing enterprise. Then the ruins are bought for a song, occasionally nationalised or considerably financed by government or some other major capital source, and the resulting business can stand on the shoulders of the first. Only some rather strained economics has so far kept the original companies involved in the Channel Tunnel in business, at least on the British side of the Channel where everything was done by private enterprise.
Some projects are so romantic, so attractive in concept but so very difficult in execution, that three or four attempts are needed for them to acquire momentum. It is recursive structure of the complicit kind that keeps them afloat[59]. Telford's bridges are famous, as are so many of his other engineering works; his ability to capitalise on his successes was the result, and the cause, of his fame, which was achieved by what would now be called `networking' among aristocrats, government ministers, and pickle manufacturers. He was, as they said, famous for being famous. In America similar enterprises were measured more by the anticipated financial return, the `bottom line'. So John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and their ilk were worth supporting because your investment was guaranteed to multiply, rather than because the enterprise was exciting `for Queen and Country'. Early twentieth-century America had gigantic, monolithic Ford ... while England had a variety of small engineering concerns like Morris Garages (MG).
The other major reason why societies like Victorian England can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fly is one we've discussed earlier. They lift themselves out of the old constraints, and into a new set of rules. In The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld II we explained why the space bolas, a kind of enormous Ferris wheel in orbit, is capable of carrying people into space far cheaper than rockets - in fact, requiring less energy than anyone would calculate using Newton's laws of motion and gravity. We took one further step, and invoked the space elevator, a very strong cable hung from geostationary orbit, which would be harder to build but would require even less energy. The trick is that people and goods coming down can help to lift other people and goods up. The energetics satisfy all the standard mathematical rules, but the context supplies an unexpected source of energy.
These gadgets work better than rockets, but not because these use relativity or other clever new physics like quantum. Or because they don't obey Newton's laws, because they do, to the extent that these are still relevant. Instead, the bolas and the elevator have new invention immortalised into them, so that a spaceman who gets into the cabin of a bolas in thin upper atmosphere from a jet aircraft can shortly afterwards get out of the cabin 400 miles up. Going at the right speed, it so happens, to catch the passing cabin of a 400-mile space bolas, which can deposit him, days later, in the right orbit to catch the 15,000-mile bolas, which deposits him in geostationary orbit, 22,000 miles up, after a couple of weeks. Such machines can be powered by using them to drop valuable asteroid material down to Earth, or (in the case of the bolas) by `pumping' them like a garden swing, using motors in the middle powered by sunlight and reeling in or letting out the cabin tethers as the bolas rotates.
Once we've made the huge initial investment required to build such machinery, rocket technology becomes largely obsolete, just as animal traction was dispossessed by the internal combustion engine. Sure, you can't attach 500 horses to the front of a big canal-barge, because there wouldn't be room on the towpath - but a 500horsepower marine engine is another matter entirely. Sure, a rocket would use far too much fuel to be a practical method for hoisting goods and people into orbit en masse - but that's not the only way to get them there. Yes, Newton's laws still have to be obeyed, and you have to `pay' to set everything up, and it still costs just the same energy to get people into orbit. But nobody pays once the machinery is there. If you don't believe this, go up in an elevator in a skyscraper, noting how the counterbalance weights go down, and return to solid ground. Then, to ram the message home, walk up the stairs.
The wordprocessor we're using to type this book is a metaphorical space elevator compared to a manual typewriter (remember those? Maybe not). A modem automobile is a space elevator compared to a Ford model T or an Austin-7, which were themselves bolases, while 1880s steam cars were rockets. Think of the investment that went into the Victorian railway system, the canals - then realise how this immense investment changed the rules, so that later generations could do all kinds of things that were impossible to their forebears.
Victoriana, then, was not a situation, it was a process. A recursive process, which built itself new rules and new abilities, as previous hard work and innovation led to new capital, new money, and new investment. The new poor, downtrodden though they may have been, were much better off than the rural poor had been. Which is why people poured into the cities where their lives, even though Dickensian, were easier and more interesting than they had been in the countryside. The urban newcomers provided a new workforce to build new industries. They provided a useful consumer base too. Those workmen's cottages, still found in the suburbs of many towns, were not only housing for an exploited labour force; they were also a source of new wealth for that young aristocrat back from the Gold Coast who'd opened a pickle factory in Manchester. He had seen the sauces made in Madagascar or Goa, liked the taste, and thought that he could sell them to workmen to put on their sausages and bacon. Think of him for a moment, perhaps a chinless wonder who employed thirty men to mix the tropical-fruit ingredients and boil them in great cast-iron vats. The vats had been made in Sheffield and carried by narrow-boat along canals, giving coin to perhaps fifty workmen who supplied the original vats and buildings[60]: His pickle company supported a whole small industry for generations: supplying coke for heating, imported and locally grown fruit and spices to be processed into sauces, special water, glass bottles, printed labels ...
There would have been half a dozen middle-aged matrons busy at different tasks in his factory, too, even bossing some of the men. This was new - outside the home, anyway. Women also got jobs with him as cleaners, perhaps as secretaries to some of the senior staff, and women earning their own money was a massive wedge driven into a male-dominated society. In that society, it was rare even for courtesans to have control of their own funds, to that extent Mimi in La Boheme is more realistic than Flora in La Traviata. The laws and customs then were very different from what we accept as 'normal' now: young women and older ones were exploited sexually, large numbers of workmen died from industrial accidents and pollution[61]. Only through their suffering - and their triumphs - could the next generation be built.
59
In their 1980 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela confused this kind of recursion with a life force, and called it 'autopoiesis'. Many selfconsciously modem management experts cite this concept, without having the foggiest idea what it is.
60
When Jack started at Birmingham University in the 1950s, the factory behind the university made cooking pots for missionaries, just like the ones that were popular in the cartoons in Punch - with the missionaries as ingredients, not cooks, you appreciate. No doubt the same factory had once made the original sauce vats used in Madagascar and Goa.
61
Details can be found in many personal diaries, such as those kept by the foremen of the spinning and weaving mills in Lancashire as exercises in writing for their evening classes. We learn that sexual engagement with women employees was sometimes necessary for these men, in order to retain the respect of their colleagues, to maintain obedience by the workforce, even when they found it horrible themselves. In the armed forces, of course, and in prisons, the social 'rules', the peer pressure to sin grossly, were too powerful to resist, too awful for us to contemplate now.