Turning Point

J.M.W. Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5). Oil on canvas, 36 ¼” x 48 ½”. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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On October 16th, 1834, the Palace of Westminster – sections of which dated to the 11th century and had been since 1295 the home of Parliament – burned in the largest fire in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz of 1940-1. The fire was an accident: workers were disposing of old willow-wood “tally sticks” formerly used by the Exchequer as an accounting device in the large basement furnaces of the Palace. The task took all day, and workers threw the last of the tally sticks in the furnaces around 4:30 pm, shut the iron doors, and left for a local pub. The furnaces had been designed to burn coal, and not wood; the heaped tally sticks melted the copper flues and ignited a chimney fire which burned unnoticed before bursting through the centuries-old walls and floors of the Palace. Through the great efforts of the London fire brigades and nearby troops called to assist, Westminster Hall and other parts of the building were saved. Still, much of the structure was destroyed, including St. Stephen’s Chapel (where the Commons sat), the Lord’s Chamber, and the magnificent “Painted Chamber,” one of England’s great medieval treasures.

Crowds gathered from all over the city. The Prime Minister, the cabinet, and others assembled in Parliament Square to watch the blaze. Westminster Bridge and the far, eastern bank of the Thames were mobbed with thousands, largely from the working classes, their faces illuminated by the great fire. Many took to boats in the river to gain better vantage points. Turner’s painting, one of several he made from pencil and watercolor sketches produced as he witnessed the fire from different positions on the riverbank, the bridge, and a hastily rented boat, is an image of what Edmund Burke had christened the “sublime”: awe mixed with terror. Turner was fascinated by the emotive power of color, and his clear rejection of Neoclassical and Romantic conventions – the indistinctness of objects, the uncertainty of composition, the elevation of color and light over line and form as the primary instruments of painting – were wholly new and unexpected. Among major artists, only William Blake, and perhaps Goya, had experimented with painting in this way. His style, anticipating in the 1830s the later emergence of expressionism, prioritized the eyewitness’s reaction to the world around him, in this case a visceral and immediate interpretation of a potentially politically explosive event. Looking at Turner’s painting today, the viewer experiences what it was like to be there, as it is happening: the heat of fire, the smoke, the noise, the smell, the acrid taste in the air, the timefulness and timelessness of being fully present. It is not a precise, objective journalistic recording of a moment in time but a psycho-emotional imprint, a dream-memory of what occurred.

Around 6:30 pm, a flashover created a huge fireball and a large blast that led many to conclude that a second Gunpowder Plot had succeeded in destroying the building (in fact, the roof of the Lord’s Chamber had collapsed). The royal family, alerted to the disaster, their eyes turned towards the city, witnessed the tremendous mushrooming cloud of fire and felt the concussion from far-away Windsor Castle. Many present, including Turner himself and the great Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, reported that the crowd cheered as the fire spread, and that a great roar went up from the banks of the Thames when the flashover occurred. Carlyle recorded the shouts of those around him deriding the government, and later wrote, “a man sorry I did not anywhere see . . .” Others disputed this, remembering onlookers as largely quiet and subdued, but Carlyle’s account rings true: 1830s London was a fractious city.

The fire occurred at an important moment in British history, a time of great social change and unrest wrought by the Industrial Revolution, rapid urbanization, and mounting pressure for political reforms from many corners of society. Virtually every major British established institution – the monarchy, Commons and Lords, the Anglican Church, medieval town councils, the entrenched bureaucracy perceived as corrupt and moribund, anything associated with privilege and position – faced calls for reform. The Whig government had recently passed, with great difficulty and resistance from the conservative Lords, a series of reforms including the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which expanded the franchise to many middle class Britons. The Test Act had been repealed, granting full civil rights to Catholics and Dissenters. The working classes, however, were dissatisfied and increasingly militant. They felt cheated by the Great Reform Bill, and support for Chartism continued to grow and the Anti-Corn Law League became a powerful political force. The Combination Acts remained largely unchanged, tying the hands of the trade union movement by strictly limiting organizing, collective bargaining, and striking. The “Captain Swing” riots – Luddite-like uprisings of rural workers in southern England resisting mechanization – had been suppressed. Revolutions erupted in northern Europe, most notably in France in 1830, when the reactionary King Charles X was swiftly overthrown by a broad, popular coalition. Such events were watched anxiously by the ruling classes in Britain. Most significantly – and likely most on the minds of the working classes watching the Palace burn – was the deeply unpopular Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This New Poor Law, as it was called, ended the old system of providing poor relief in local parishes, supported by local taxes, with the widespread adoption of the hated Victorian workhouse system that separated families and effectively reduced many to debt peonage.

The burning of Parliament is a symbolic turning point in British history, conveniently separating the 18th century political system from a more modern and increasingly – albeit gradually – representative and responsive one. In the latter 1830s and afterwards a series of reform measures were adopted by Parliament: the Factory Acts, adjustments to the Poor Laws, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and acts further expanding the franchise, eventually to include most adult males by 1881 and women in 1918. This is not to suggest that the fire led, post hoc ergo propter hoc, to these reforms. But the ground, already slipping, was now felt decisively to shift.  Radicals calling for a democratic republic sensed in the fire the end of the old aristocracy and the unfinished business of the Great Reform Bill. Whigs, committed to a truly modern constitutional system with power firmly based in Parliament and the rule of law, welcomed the opportunity to create a new seat of government embodying those values. Conservative Tories, many of whom were convinced the fire had been deliberately set and so augured imminent revolution, gave up their intransigence and moved in a more moderate direction (though they took their time, and led the way in insisting that the New Palace be designed in a medieval neo-Gothic style that specifically celebrated the history and ancient institutions of the country). And for the laboring poor, it was justice: justice for being cheated in 1832, for the New Poor Law, and for the entire plutocratic structure of society that enriched the many at the expense of the few. All shared the conviction that governing and politics would be different after 1834 – that in this spectacular public moment something had irrevocably changed. Turner’s painting captures this: the wildness and uncontrolled nature of the fire, its flames reaching fantastically high into the evening sky, as if the world itself had been torn open; the human mass pressed together on the near shore, powerless do anything other than bear witness; the dissolving amorphousness of Westminster Bridge on the Palace side of the Thames and its growing materiality as it crosses the river from an old world consumed in fire to the new world, where the viewer is placed. One feels, standing on the banks of the Thames, that there is no going back.

It is tempting for historians to look for such convenient turning points, for clean, obvious moments where we can say, yes, that’s where it all changed. We may be so tempted by the events of January 6th and the end of President Trump’s tenure. Such moments, however, are often only apparent in hindsight, and attempts to imbue them with such meaning and power as they are occurring – the business model of the twenty-four-hour news cycle – are fraught with hubris. Turner’s painting, made within months of the fire, is an exception. The Roman Stoic Seneca once observed, “ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt [the Fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling],” and the painting acknowledges this. The fire had been an accident, an act of God or the Fates; two workmen, rushing to finish their work and lift a pint, had carelessly destroyed the symbol of political power in Britain. Many welcomed the opportunities created by the fire as a chance to move forward, and others resisted, but most went along in the end. The attack on the Capitol has a similar aura of portent. Though it was not an act of fate, but a willful act of men, premeditated and provoked (unless, of course, we deny free will), it was witnessed by millions and well-documented with likely thousands of photographs, many of them taken by the insurrectionists themselves. Each of these impressions is only a very small flash of the kaleidoscope, atomizing history and denying us the overall picture. Tolstoy would appreciate this. Whether January 6th is a turning point or not is not yet known; all will depend on what happens next, beginning with President Trump’s impeachment and trial. A bridge has been crossed, and there will be no going back, only forward, willingly and unwillingly. Perhaps we need Turner, watching from, let’s imagine, the portico of the National Gallery, his sketchbook in hand as the mob charges the steps of the Capitol, to show us what it all means.