The question how far Barkley subscribes to the Victorian work ethic is an important item that helps us understand his comments on the labour habits of the natives in Turkey. The civil engineer presented the ethnic groups and nations employed on the railway line as he had seen them but he judged their abilities and performance according to his own ideas.
The Englishman himself was partly a gentleman and partly a businessman. But what did the word "gentleman" imply in the nineteenth century? Gentlemen had their code; -- as Trollope writes -- they often accepted the theory of progress but they were always suspicious of the religion of gold. And they followed the rules of truthfulness and honesty (Trollope, 411.). Similarly, Barkley rarely speaks about money and indulges in idle sports such as riding and hunting. His mind seems to have been anchored in the twofold faith in goodness and progress that the middle class exhibited from the early Victorian period onwards.
There are three main issues that characterise his attitude to labour: his belief in God' s benevolence, his pride in all that was English, and his utilitarian worldview. The first of these finds its most obvious expression in the particular attention which Barkley pays to the death of an unimportant sub-contractor who had broken two ribs in a riding accident. Although it seemed that the man would survive, he did not.
I had been scolding him for the disgraceful manner he was carrying out his contract for rail-laying; and on my saying that I knew it was a good paying contract, he should not scamp it, he replied, ' Look here, sir, I have not made a penny by it. If I have, may the Lord strike me dead.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 173.)
God' s prompt punishment was for Barkley clear proof of the rightness of his cause in Bulgaria. Material evidence was found immediately after the funeral when it was discovered that the sub-contractor had 800 liras buried under his hearthstone, ' all of which I knew he had made out of his contract, as he borrowed a few pounds of me to buy food, etc., when he first began it.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 173.)
Out of the thirteen death cases during his stay in Bulgaria, Barkley reports this one because he sees in it a confirmation that his deeds and the construction of the two lines were God' s will and that the whole enterprise was bringing prosperity to all sides involved: the company, the workers and the Turkish government. The more successful his enterprise was, the more faith he showed in God' s favour and the goodness of his mission. The importance that the railway assumed in Barkley' s eyes is to be felt in the almost biblical imagery he uses to describe his project. He enthusiastically speaks of the line construction where ' workmen of all sorts, all nations, and all trades swarmed all over the line' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 99.). There is an allusion to the Babylon tower in the exaggerated use of four all-s.
Another characteristic of his was his faith and pride in all that was English. Barkley built an organisation of an English type for constructing the railway lines Kustenjeh-Chernavoda and Varna-Rustchuck. It consisted of a pyramid of contractors and sub-contractors who were responsible for parts of the line or some specialised work. Each (sub-) contractor was responsible for his men and their payment, which he got from the one above him in the hierarchy. The system worked. Yet, the enterprise itself turned out to be a courageous project.
Railway-making must be anxious busy work in any country, but few can realise how anxious and busy a man must be in a country like Turkey, where no one has the faintest knowledge of the work and every small detail must be personally looked to and the entire native staff trained to its duties. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 23.)
Unqualified and uneducated labourers and radically different working habits put difficulties in Barkley' s way. His project was realised mostly with the help of English navvies and English products and machines. The engineer was immensely proud of his work and all that was British. ' We soon put our mark on the country.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 23.) -- he exclaims, totally satisfied with the speed with which the railroad was emerging. With exaltation he tells the story of discharging locomotives from steamers. The whole difficult mission was saved, Barkley insists, by the right organisation, the splendid behaviour of the workers and — the English chain that did not break under a burden many times heavier than permitted because ' this was a new chain just out from England, where it has been tested up to four times the weight it was required to lift' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 107.).
The ease with which the line construction was going on was to a great extent due to the excellent plans for the railway. They were made in Barkley' s homeland by an engineer who knew his job well.
I think, taking all things into consideration, it [the line] was most skilfully laid out, and during the years I was on it I never had a reason to wish that any part of it had been differently planned. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 183-84.)
In Barkley' s texts his native country stands for the quality of the goods and ideas imported to Bulgaria.
The third characteristic feature of Barkley' s is his utilitarian worldview. His material viewpoint is clearly demonstrated in his attitude towards nature. When describing the Bulgarian landscape Barkley uses pragmatic rhetorics that partake neither of the aestheticism nor of the tolerance of the Romantics. In direct contrast to them, his eyes neglect the aesthetic qualities of nature and search for signs of a human presence. In his two books unexploited nature tends to be seen as ugly. This negative aesthetic, created by analytical, often statistical descriptions, presents such a landscape as a failure of human enterprise.
Although such extensive forests exist in the Balkans […], […] the timber through neglect is of little value. The habit of the peasants is to cut the boughs off the trees for charcoal-burning, fencing house-building, firing, &c., and consequently there are few timber-trees reduced to the condition of ' pollards' , the trunks of which are hollow and rotten. (Barkley, Bulgaria, vii.)
Often the "failure" to exploit the natural resources was corrected in Barkley' s imagination and added a fictitious element to the factual landscape description. ' In summer, where not covered with woods, they [the hills of the Balkan] afford excellent pasturage for numerous herds of cattle, sheep, and goats' (Barkley, Bulgaria, vi.) -- writes Barkley, and the possible usage of the fields and their real function merge. Such cases, when the pastoral is replaced by a corrective vision in the capitalist vanguard' s writing, are another instances of Pratt' s "industrial reverie".
The romantic view of nature and romantic ideas themselves were widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century. Barkley seems not to have been touched by them although there was somebody in his immediate surroundings who shared them -- his wife. The civil engineer includes without corrections one of her letters to her friends in England:
The scenery was most glorious -- infinitely superior to anything I had ever seen -- grand hills on either side, covered with forests that are gorgeous with every shade of brown, red, and yellow; and lovely valleys in between, dotted with the quaintest little white cottages only one story high. Part of the way the Danube runs through a narrow defile, as if the hills had been parted asunder to make pathway for it, and at the entrance there are ruins of an extraordinary old fortress build up the side of the rock in a most un-get-able place.(Barkley, Bulgaria, 233.)
Barkley' s wife offers us a "glorious" prospect. The scenery is also extremely rich in emotional context. This density of feeling is transmitted to the reader through epithets and images belonging to the artistic vocabulary of the romantics -- "glorious", "grand", "infinitely superior", "quaintest little white cottages", "gorgeous", "ruins", "extraordinary old fortress", etc. The sight is seen as a painting and the description is ordered in terms of large and small, back and front, symmetries between the forests flecked with autumn colours and white-flecked valleys, and so forth. The human inhabitants are absent. The only "person" mentioned in this solitude is the hypothetical and invisible traveller himself.
As a contrast we have Barkley' s non-emotive language and technical, classificatory vocabulary. His rhetoric is explicable from the ideology behind the observation of the landscape: the Englishman saw his work as a mission of bringing civilisation to Bulgaria, which in his view started with subduing nature:
By building the railways in Turkey he fought for spreading progress. With this Barkley subscribed to the ideas of nineteenth-century social thinkers and educationalists, who emphasised the notion of work as a part of the struggle against barbarism. (McLaurin, 40.)Our labourers did well, and we had already made a mark on the face of nature that would take a lot of rubbing out, even if we were now to abandon the undertaking. (Barkley, Danube, 109.)
Barkley, Henry C., Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years
in Bulgaria
(London: Murray, 1877).
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants. London: Murray, 1877.
McLaurin, Allen, "Reworking 'work' in some Victorian writing and visual art", in: Sigsworth, Eric M. (ed.), In Search of Victorian Values. Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.
Pratt, Mary L., Imperial Eyes. Travel, Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Trollope, Anthony. Autobiography (1883).
Last modified 2001