These days I spend a lot of my time reading in the Manchester Central Library which has a wonderful collection of Victorian books, pamphlets, newspapers & archives. Manchester was a pioneer of C19th public libraries & the current building, which was erected in the 1930s, is a magnificent 6 storey circular structure based on the Round Reading room of the old British Library. Unlike the British Library, which was hidden away in the midst of the British Museum, this one is free standing, near to the Victorian Gothic Town Hall, but in another nod to the BM has an impressive south-facing colonnaded entrance
The Library is also home to, on its basement floor, a theatre. In common with many other theatres the Christmas season is occupied with shows suitable for children & attracts many school parties to its daytime performances. Readers & theatregoers share the entrance to the building
An experience of two years ago still resonates with me; I came down the stairs from the 1st floor reading room to meet a party of excited & noisy 6/7 year olds making their way out from a performance of that years Christmas show; chaotic in their excitement, it took time for them to pass through the security gate. After standing watching them with a fond grandmotherly eye for several minutes, then thinking that it could take a long time for a whole theatre-full to pass, I joined the melee & made my way out of the building
A couple of days later I again came down the stairs as the theatre was emptying. Another crowd leaving the show, slightly older this time, 8 year olds perhaps. But these children, though clearly happy & excited, were quiet & organised; they passed quickly, two by two, often holding hands
Reflecting on the differences several things became clear; age, obviously, plus the fact that the first was a mixed group & the second was just girls - no noisy boys. But the chaotic group also obviously came from one of the poorer areas of the city, the organised ones were from a much more prosperous background. Uniform in more than one sense, the second group were all dressed in navy & red & I particularly remember the coat worn by one little girl - fully tailored, made of an expensive woollen cloth - how much do you have to pay for such a coat which she will grow out of within the year?
The noisy group had many more adult supervisors who themselves looked harassed & pale, even ill. The second group seemed to be accompanied by no more than a couple of teachers, well-dressed, even soignée, women
C20th historians pondered the question of 'social control' in the Victorian era - meaning middle class attempts to control the noisy, dirty, chaotic & immoral working class, or slum, populations of the cities. Some of these historical essays suggest that social control was an imposition which demeaned the liveliness of working class culture & was distasteful in its sense of superiority (they also beg the question of how many of the middle class cared & how many preferred to ignore these social problems). My C21st example raises the question of how the middle classes achieve such control over their own children; of whether it is a good thing; & if so, what are the benefits?
Organisation & control have clear benefits - in this example, access for me & for all other library users was subject to minimum disruption. Cleanliness & order have clear medical & health benefits too. But total order is the same thing as entropy; growth & evolution depend on difference; does organisation bring atrophy, can change emerge only from chaos? Or can important differences only emerge more clearly when the noise of chaos is removed from the system?
And how is such order achieved? Could the mechanism be genetic? This seems unlikely in itself - if two babies are swapped at birth would the one assigned to the middle class upbringing necessarily revert to lower class behaviour & vice versa? It seems much more plausible that the advantages of a comfortable environment would encourage conformity of external behaviour while allowing maximum scope for thinking about ways of developing & expanding human experience. For example it would allow or encourage thinking about new types of technology whether this be railways, telephone or internet
But this in turn begs the question of how some people (regardless of which class they are born to) are able to act, throughout their lives, in a way that gives them access to & control over, the resources needed to provide such comfort; which in themselves need a certain skill in relating to others - to organising - the plumbers, builders, cleaners, architects, solicitors etc etc - necessary for such a comfortable life. Such talent for organisation is not limited to the middle classes, which brings us back round the circle to the question: does order come from chaos, or do new forms of order come only from order?
