As the mob gathered outside his gates, John Thornton, mill owner and love interest in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, felt something more than fear. He felt hard done by. He’d followed every rule and regulation, stayed well within the law, yet here the crowd came. “As if he hadn’t a right to get labour where he could!” his sister protested, as the windows began to shake. So focused on the unfairness was he that he barely noticed Margaret Hale step outside. She confronts the mob, takes a wooden clog to the head for her trouble, and the machinery of Victorian romance begins to turn.
Thornton might have felt sore, but as Gaskell and the other industrial novelists understood, those were the rules of Victorian capitalism. It did not matter who you were or how big your business was. It was not just about staying within the law, but on the right side of public opinion too: the “moral economy of the English crowd,” as E.P. Thompson once put it. A reputational whip, more often than a bureaucratic one, kept the show on the road.
Donald Trump is unlikely to be a great admirer of the industrial novels of the 19th century. Yet this week, by denouncing Jaguar’s “total disaster” rebrand and praising American Eagle’s ad featuring Sydney Sweeney (“the HOTTEST ad out there”), he found himself playing a very Victorian role: dispensing public reputational justice with moral fervour. Jaguar’s campaign, launched last year, enlisted pastel-clad models in surreal landscapes. It was a Hail Mary bid to resurrect what wistful motorheads still call “the British Porsche”.
It was meant to make a splash, though not, I suspect, in this particular fountain. In truth, though, this is about much more than a single ad, company, or president. Trump’s attack, and Jaguar’s brief brush with the pillory, speaks to the triumphant return of Victorian moral capitalism — a mood that can turn any firm, no matter how big, or how well-regarded, into a public spectacle.
There’s an enjoyable history of US Presidents going after British companies. In 1971, Rolls-Royce management drew the ire of Richard Nixon after succeeding in running the company into receivership, having just agreed to supply engines to Lockheed’s new flagship, the L-1011 TriStar. In 2010, Barack Obama kicked off a search to find “whose ass to kick” after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The ass in question was BP’s.
Rolls-Royce and BP are, frankly, in a different league from Jaguar and American Eagle. Rolls-Royce, during the 1971 crisis, held the fate of one of America’s important companies in its hands. BP, shortly before its time under the Presidential gaze, was the third largest company in the FTSE, and comfortably one of the twenty largest companies in the world. Contrast this with today’s targets: a soon-to-be-relaunched marque of a luxury car company, and a clothing brand that specialises in jeans. These are not industrial giants or systemic threats to global markets, but lifestyle brands punished, or rewarded, simply for being on the right or wrong team.
This matters more than it seems. When we talk about the shift from Victorian moral capitalism to the system we are more familiar with today, it is easy to focus on the obvious changes: the end of the satanic mill, the closure of the workhouse, the disappearance of the emaciated chimney-sweep who still haunts the 19th-century imagination. But just as important was what happened in the 20th century. As the moral economy receded and the regulatory state took its place, public and political outrage became the preserve of the giants: the BPs, the Lockheeds, the Rolls-Royces of the world.
For everyone else, it was the age of the corporate civilian. Stay compliant, stay quiet, and you were generally left alone. In this world, the rules of the game were relatively clear. If you played in certain industries, and at a certain level, it was no longer just about your product and your customer, but about how you looked to the world at large. A touch of the Victorian spirit still applied, as Tim Cook so perfectly exemplified yesterday, arriving in the Oval Office to bestow a gift of gold upon the President. In 1878, Disraeli received the same from the City of London.
Any meaningful divide between corporate civilian and corporate combatant is gone. In truth, it has been for some time. The trends that brought us here are not going away: the unforgiving flatness of the internet (as Astronomer, a little-known data firm rocked by the Coldplay kiss-cam, now acutely understands); the retrenchment of globalisation; and the rise of policymakers who increasingly see themselves not as economic stewards, but as cultural commentators. The forces that ended the era are much larger than any single president.
“Any meaningful divide between corporate civilian and corporate combatant is gone.”
Perhaps now it is even more difficult than it was for Mr Thornton himself. Then, it was clear what would bring public and political ire. Refuse to pay wages. Punch up your coffee with chicory and dirt. Forge an exchequer bill or a letter of credit. Inveigle, as Trollope’s villains so often do, a few hundred pounds from your wife, her father, or her lover. Open your shop on a Sunday. Do any of that, and only then would you draw scandal, satire, and Parliamentary scrutiny. Or, in Thompson’s memorable phrase, face “marauding bands” to “set the price at the popular level.”
Today, the offences are harder to predict, even compared to the simpler, clearer-cut culture war boundaries of just a few years ago. Hence why car brands, jeans companies, fitness firms, and light beer manufacturers alike find themselves at the centre of conversations they never meant to start. What happens when every company, not just the biggest or most geopolitically exposed, has to develop its own cultural imagination? They get Victorian.
Last week the US cryptocurrency company Coinbase launched a two-minute musical takedown of contemporary Britain, its newest advertising campaign. The video isn’t really selling a product. It’s making one thing clear: which team Coinbase is on. Inevitably, the inspiration for the advert, an all-singing, all-dancing tour of an England of calcified dirt, soot-stained street-sweepers, and endemic poverty, was the most iconic of the literary tentpoles of Victorian moral capitalism: Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
Even American Eagle, with their impish campaign in which the actress fixes up a Ford Mustang before driving off to the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” might have thought they could be no more contemporary. They might be surprised to learn that Pears Soap got there first. In 1882, they paid actress, socialite, and royal mistress Lillie Langtry to become the face of their product. It worked then. It works now. By 1889, Pears was spending £100,000 a year on advertising (around £15 million today), easily justifiable given its annual profits of £70,000 just three years later.
The return of moral capitalism matters not just for companies, but for countries too. For a long time we have lived in a world where certain firms operate not only as commercial giants, but as national emblems. In the UK, we have a long tradition of co-opting companies into the machinery of the state. They collect employee taxes, act as pass-throughs for government support schemes, and sit at the heart of our national security regime. But what happens when we have to treat them as cultural actors too? The President’s attack on Jaguar will likely bounce off. But what if the next one doesn’t? What if, instead of calling for the resignation of a US CEO, as he did yesterday, he called for the resignation of a British one?
Historically, our companies have been good at this cultural game: closer heirs to the Victorian imagination than we might care to admit. As Alfred Marshall wrote of Britain in 1890, “the same causes which have enabled England… to set the tone of modern politics, have made them also set the tone of modern business.” Could we not do the same again? While the Swiss president rushed to Washington to plead against 38% tariffs, it is telling how the UK-US trade deal announcement devolved into a debate about the symbolic power of British brands.
“I won’t do that deal on cars unless someone shows me there’s another kind of car that’s comparable to a Rolls-Royce,” the President declared, leading, of course, to the greatest irony of the Jaguar post: that it, alongside the other British luxury carmakers, stands to benefit most from the deal signed by its loudest critic just two months ago. This, I suppose, is what a cultural imagination can do in practice: make the very politician denouncing you the one to whom you now owe the most.
It’s easy to treat this with the indignance of Margaret Hale moments before the shoe hits her temple: “you come to oust the innocent stranger” she calls to the baying mob. Savvier, perhaps, to do as Lillie Langtry did: step into the role and steal the scene. As another Victorian wit (and, coincidentally, devotee of Langtry) put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
