'A landscape of exhaustion and moral decay' – lessons from the 'lost decade' of the 1860s

You'd need to go back 150 years to find the last time wage growth was this stagnant, according to the governor of the Bank of England. But even then there were a few reasons to be cheerful

When Mark Carney insisted in a speech at Liverpool John Moores University that the conditions through which we are now living are "exactly the same" as those that British citizens endured during the "lost decade" of the 1860s, he was taking a bit of rhetorical licence. The past is never simply the present dressed up in funny clothes, and the analogy between today's painful realities and those of 150 years ago doesn't quite hold. And yet, the governor of the Bank of England had a point.

When Overend Gurney collapsed in 1866, it undid once and for all the sense that, give or take a few individual misfortunes, capitalism was a moral force that rewarded skill and hard work. Toppling under a mountain of unsecured debt, the joint stock bank dragged down 200 businesses and a broad tranche of private investors with it, from courtiers to grocers. As with the Northern Rock crisis in 2007, there were queues of panicky investors lining the streets. More profoundly, now came a dawning realisation that bad things could happen to good people. Thanks to the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, the universe increasingly seemed not only godless but, what was perhaps even worse, indifferent to the sufferings of ordinary folk.

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