In a 2004 article in Victorian Studies , Bernard Porter challenges today’s “cultural imperialist” assumption that the British empire pervaded Victorian life. Not so, he argues, for several reasons.

One was that there was no single Britain: “this idea that there was only one culture in Britain, or one hegemonic one, which is fairly represented by writers like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and the rest of the literary ‘canon,’ is unproven, to put it at its best. Anyone who has ever delved into the other cultures that made up Victorian society, in fact, will know that it is wrong, even risible. Some of the canonical writers themselves knew that: Dickens, for example; Elizabeth Gaskell; Austen (she must have known-in her books the workers aren’t even real people); and Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil: or the Two Nations (1845) -a significant and perceptive title. That is what Britain was in the nineteenth century: two-or even more-distinct nations, entirely separated from one another. There were various separators. Nationality (English, Scots, Welsh, or Irish), region, urban-rural, religion, and gender are a few of them. But the main one was class. This was crucial because it was not only a separator, but also-confusingly-what bound British society together.”

Porter also notes that the British empire was outside the horizon of most English people because it took only a small elite to run it:

“the British Empire, before the very end of the nineteenth century, did not need the involvement in any way of the working classes, even to cheer it on. This was because the running and even conquest and defence of it could be done perfectly easily by a very small and exclusive minority of Britons, at minimal expense to the taxpayer.”

And, on the other hand, Britain did not need the empire either: “”fo course it needed it in some material ways: for its markets, for example, and as somewhere to grow the Brits’ favourite sugar and tea; though it is arguable that the colonial status of these markets was not central to these trades, and it is a myth, in any case, to think that the bulk of the Victorians’ tea and sugar came from the colonies. It is also a big assumption to think that tea-drinkers knew where their tea came from. What British society certainly did not need, however, was the Empire as an object of pride. Even among the middle classes pride in the Empire was ambivalent before the 1880s (and even, again, afterwards) . . . The main reason for this lay in the structure of British society, which was built in such a way that it would not work if the working classes became imperially proud, or even aware.”

Historians and critics operating on the “cultural imperialism” model point to textbooks that stuff imperial patriotism down young throats, but Porter notes that these textbooks were not typical, and even if they had been they would not have been read by working class children. Education for the working class was limited to “reading, writing . . . , arithmetic, sewing, and woodwork, plus a bit of religion . . . History and geography - the most potentially empire-friendly subjects - almost never entered the syllabus . . . . The lower classes, in their schools, were taught to work hard and obey. Only subjects directly relevant to this (like political economy) were in the syllabus.”