Victor Hugo called the sewer “the conscience of the city”, where everything “converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form”. So what can we learn if we gaze into the muck and the mire of modern Britain?

If the stool of the patient is a sure indication of his health, John Bull is not a well man. Sewage is spilling into British rivers and oceans, spewed out by our privatised water companies. The Victorians built a system of storm sewage overflows, which ensured that in periods of heavy rain sewage wouldn’t back up into private homes. That’s how all the waste has been getting out. But, eagle-eyed readers may already have noted, there hasn’t exactly been a lot of rain lately. Nope, British water companies have been relying on storm sewage overflow to get around annoying little things like spending money upgrading our ageing water infrastructure and preventing small matters like pumping raw sewage onto your local beach or riverbank.

It’s a grim story, but hardly a new one. In fact it’s a perfect template for every story of national decline, decay and failure. Public infrastructure, carefully planned, built, expanded and maintained over a century is handed to a private entity. But it’s not really private. Cheerful door to door water salesmen don’t offer to sell you a bathtub full of heated spring water at a competitive rate, vendors don’t offer you a choice between the reservoirs of the Highlands, Pennines and Malverns.

As before, you get what you’re given, but in a typical pathetic fudge the British state has outsourced the responsibility. The companies don’t have to answer to anyone but their shareholders, and consumers have no ability to vote with their feet. So responsibility lands right back where it began, on the desk of some minister, who will promise to furiously chastise those naughty water companies — as if clean running water were somebody else’s problem rather than the sort of things nation states exist to provide.

Oh yes all the familiar elements are there, the bathetic British anti-success story, toilet humour served up with irony and maybe a David Mitchellesque rant about the Tories. Lurking beneath it another familiar but overlooked element — Victorian era infrastructure, still doing its job, built with care and foresight, undergirding our crumbling modern country. If you dig through all the dirt, you hit something solid, quite unlike everything that rests upon it.

It’s hard not to look back on the Victorians and feel that we’re a bit crap by comparison. There are always explanations for our current failures, always causes and reasons. And you can explain away the Victorians in the same breath — they after all were newly industrialising, beginning with a blank canvas. Today we’re victims of their success, whilst bombed out Europe had brand new factories and railways. It’s an argument, just not a very convincing one.

The Victorians were hardly perfect, and it would be a foolish romanticisation to pretend they didn’t have their share of failure, corruption and mismanagement. But it’s equally hard to imagine the Victorians making excuses for their failures. Looking at each case of failure, each declining area of state capacity and economic life — whether it’s factories moving overseas, the housing crisis, the energy crisis, the cost of living crisis, our lack of public transport, regional inequality, our failure to field a coherent and effective military, the decline in education or any of the myriad other areas of decline, excuses are always found for why nothing or very little can be done, and why (somehow) we’re doing alright and will vaguely muddle on.

But taken together the picture is catastrophic. Any one thing can go wrong, and generally will, but for so much to go wrong at once bespeaks a more systemic failure in which state capacity has been lost and we are no longer planning for the future. You can cite global economic conditions, natural resources, policy screw-ups of every stripe, but nothing would touch on the essential differences between the era of British success and the era of British failure and decline. It’s a matter of character.

In our technocratic, egalitarian age it is popular to ascribe everything to environmental and impersonal conditions, and look to administrative and procedural reforms to fix every sort of problem from crime to inequality to economic stagnation. Structures matter, but they are only ever as good as those who use them, and those who govern them. These limiting factors, the raw human material of governors and the governed, has been utterly neglected by an arrogant materialistic age which discounts the human factor.

The stereotype of the Victorian is a thrusting, confident, but repressed being. All external ambition and internal self-control. This Spartan image bears at least some resemblance to the truth however — there are more than enough remarkable examples of resilience, stoicism and successful ambition to enflesh the bones of the idea. But in a way it’s a sort of excuse — it’s all very well those tight-arsed Victorians busily conquering the world and leading the industrial revolution but we’re like in touch with our emotions? Modern Brits understand that this sort of excess is bad for you, and probably comes with lots of racism, sexism and homophobia anyway.

Victorians believed in things

Except that it’s comforting nonsense. Annoyingly, like the popular kid at your school who is good at their classes as well as being sporty and handsome, the Victorians have us beat there too. It was an age that brought us wild romanticism, fanatical religious movements, decadent literature and the rise of socialism. What’s the magic difference? Victorians believed in things, and they thought that freedom meant freedom from being enslaved to your own desires and appetites. They valued the great treasuries of wisdom of the Christian and Classical worlds.

Even a modest household in the Victorian age would typically have had a copy of the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Above and beyond all the still-popular works of Victorian poetry and literature, it was these that constituted and underwrote all the rest. We still enjoy Dickens and George Eliott, but we don’t read the Bible (let alone Bunyan). In much the same way that we still use physical Victorian infrastructure, but have abandoned the values and spirit that created it.

Victorians were not superhumans, they were not gods or giants who have left their matchless works to their mortal descendants. They were not magically more driven, capable and ambitious, possessed of some Nietzchean will to power we simply lack. All that divides them from us is contained in that humble bookshelf — scripture and allegory. The Victorians were still members of a Christian civilisation, and their greatness consisted not in their blind service to technology and technocracy — that’s our approach. Rather their triumph was to have struggled to overcome and master technology.

And it was a struggle. The Victorians were in many ways the first moderns too — and if Christianity was dominant, it was in fierce conversation with growing ranks of materialists, atheists, utilitarians and secular socialists who wanted to “rationalise” society. All our bad ideas congealed in that era too, such as the social darwinism of Spencer, Malthus and Huxley, or the utilitarian liberalism of Bentham and Mill. But these forces were powerfully resisted, moderated and qualified by a vibrant and forceful Christian civilisation.

The Victorians were participants in a great renaissance in British life — the return of the mediaeval. Just as the original renaissance renewed the tired scholasticism of mediaeval civilisation with the recovered glories of the classical world, so the Victorians relieved the grim neoclassical capitalism of the 18th century with the furious colours of mediaeval civilisation. This was the time of neo-gothic architecture, of bold railway stations and bridges that still set a shining standard of industrial design, of the revival of mediaeval piety in the Oxford Movement, and of great efforts to redeem the corruption and inequity of modernity and urban life.

Pugin’s Contrasts, a famous work of this time, made the case through architecture against a utilitarian and capitalist trend that prefigured our own. Bland brick blocks comprising identical workhouses, prisons and factories accompanied the cruelty of the clearances and the poor laws, unfavourably contrasting with the palatial gothic alms houses of mediaeval England.

These romantic ideals were not left as flights of fancy however. Pugin put his ideas into practice, not least in designing our present Palace of Westminster. The link between principles and practice is a defining feature of British culture that has been lost. Ruskin and Morris, fired by similar ideas, were deeply interested in the lives of working people, the principles of design, and works that met the practical need of ordinary people for both the useful and the beautiful.

This was the age of “gas and water socialism” such as that of Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham who nationalised the city’s utility companies, as well as clearing slums and providing modern housing. But he was no raging communist, but rather a man who made mis fortune and proved his ability in private enterprise.

This combination of municipal socialism with socially conscious private enterprise was a quintessentially British model, one that was abandoned for the national welfare state and its even more hapless successor, our present crony capitalist system of pseudo-private outsourcing, corporate welfare and hidden subsidy. Municipal socialism still works in some of Britain’s best run cities — whilst London and Edinburgh have racked up multibillion pound bills trying to build infrastructure, Nottingham has quietly run and expanded an efficient and affordable tram and bus network.

As we gaze into the bowels of Britain, we see the origins of our problems as well as the ideas that could renew our culture. Joseph Chamberlain was a great civic leader, but already he was at odds with Gladstone in his drift away from formally religious language, and his unitarianism and finally atheism. This more secular tendency was to become especially pronounced in the wake of WWI, and it was the loss of our shared spiritual sensibilities more than anything else that saw the move from philanthropy, civil society and municipal socialism to a more rationalist world of national economic planning, central state control, and purely pragmatic markets.

So as we look at our leaky pipes, crumbling infrastructure and sewage strewn beaches, we should consider what Hugo said of philosophy “From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora or the jug”.

We must draw out the poisons of Grandgrindish utilitarianism (and the passivity and despair that it leads to), and draw again on the deep wells of classical virtue ethics and the Christian religion which inspired the Victorians. Only if we can drink of those pure waters can we hope to escape the endless national meta-crisis we find ourselves caught in.