THE COUNTRY TOWN
“I saw the people that were therein, and how they dwelt after the
manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure, and had no dealings with any
man.”--BOOK OF JUDGES.
Let us leave London, and visit a certain English country town--a market
town--as it was in the year 1837. We will then consider the place as it
is to-day.
In 1837 it is a quiet town with no industries except those created
by the requirements of an agricultural centre. This not only causes
a certain amount of activity and trade, but also gives rise to such
industries as saddlery, farm implements, etc. The town consists chiefly
of two or three streets running parallel, the larger and more important
being the High Street. In the middle of the High Street is a square or
place, where once a week is held a market, at which all kinds of things
are exposed for sale, from poultry to shoe laces. A corn exchange, a
branch bank, the town hall, one or two shops, and the principal inn,
fill up the square. The inn boasts a large wooden porch, whose pillars
are painted to resemble stone. A covered way leads to the stables and
stableyard. Within, there is a hall, imperfectly lighted, in which one
finds a fly-blown map of the country, a huge pike in a glass case, a
stuffed otter, doors leading to the coffee-room and commercial room,
a glass partition separating the bar-parlour, with the bar itself in
front, and a broad, low staircase leading to the upper rooms. Here,
on market day, the farmers hold their ordinary, with deep and long
potations to follow. Here the lodge of Freemasons holds its monthly
meetings in the winter, with a cheerful time of refreshment after
labour. Here the county balls are held twice a year. There is a close,
confirmed smell always lingering in the house; it suggests not so much
beer and tobacco, which belong to a humbler house of entertainment,
as hot brandy and water. The cold meats displayed under glass beside
the bar look as if they were imbibing and assimilating that smell. If
the windows were sometimes open, one feels, it would make that cold
chicken fresher, and would enliven that cold roast beef. When you order
dinner at this hostelry let it be of the simplest. Avoid their soup, of
which they have but one kind; be careful as to their fish, which has
not only travelled fifty miles by train, but has also waited longer
than is good for it; but you may trust them entirely in the matter of
roast beef and mutton, fowls and “birds.” As regards wine, you will
avoid most carefully claret; it is a thick and strong liquid, very
heavily “fortified” with brandy. No one in England, as yet, has learned
what claret means; they buy it, and they pour brandy into it. Their
sherry is a fiery compound, which you must regard with an uncomfortable
suspicion; this also has been “treated” with brandy. In the year 1837,
if you ask for champagne (which is extremely unusual) you expect a wine
sweet and cloying, pink in colour, and served in long narrow glasses
which make it look very pretty. In 1837 we all, even among those who
have travelled, belong to the age of sweet champagne. We regard the
wine, not as the exhilarator-in-chief at human banquets, but as a
feminine luxury, suitable for weddings, christenings, Christmas Day,
and such other family gatherings in which women take their parts. For
ourselves, we shall order what is expected of us, namely stout, with
our dinner,--good, thick, foaming stout,--which is without doubt the
finest drink ever invented as a companion to beefsteak or to a roast
leg of mutton. We shall perhaps, for the good of the house, have a pint
of the fiery sherry with the admirable apple pie, seasoned with cloves,
which they will presently bring us; and then, for the serious business
of the evening, we shall call the landlord and consult him. Which is
it to be? Does he recommend the 1820? Has he, perchance, a few bottles
left of 1798, though that is almost past praying for? Does he think
the 1828 sufficiently matured? Would he recommend that he should set
before us some of his Tawny? These questions--these difficulties--are
recognised as matters of the greatest importance. There are two of
us, we are moderate men; a bottle a head is our humble limit, we must
not throw away this moderation upon an inferior bottle. Finally, we
yield to him. In port, this landlord, we know from former experience,
hath a conscience; he brings us, not the most expensive wine, as a
low-class practitioner would do, but the wine which he thinks will
please us best. He carries the bottle in his own arms, as if it were a
baby; he draws the cork as an actor on the stage opens a letter--with
importance; he decants it as if it were liquid elixir, leaving off at
the precise moment when a drop from the turbid dregs of the bottle
might sully the perfect purity of the splendid purple which he calls
upon you to admire, holding the decanter before the light. We take our
two bottles; we sit down to dinner at six, so that when the bottles
are empty it is no more than nine. We ring the bell and order brandy
and water before we go to bed. We hold up the bottle to the light. It
is the light of candles, not gas; no nasty, new-fangled gas is allowed
in this old inn; and, indeed, those who have once used wax candles can
never desire any better or softer light.
[Illustration: PRINCE ALBERT, AGE 4]
In the bedroom the furniture is simple. There is a vast four-poster,
with its heavy furniture and valance and curtains. The bed is provided
with feather mattresses, deep and soft and sinking, and pillows as
deep. There is a washhand-stand, there are two chairs, there is a
dressing-table with a looking-glass, there is a chest of drawers. There
is nothing else--not a writing-table, not an easy chair; a bedroom is a
place, if you please, to sleep in, not to sit in or to work in. If a
guest wants to work, let him have a private room and pay for it, unless
he can write in the public room.
[Illustration:
LORD BROUGHAM
SIR ROWLAND HILL
LORD PALMERSTON
LORD BEACONSFIELD
RICHARD COBDEN
W. E. GLADSTONE
LORD SALISBURY
REPRESENTATIVE STATESMEN OF THE REIGN]
If a bottle of port was considered a sufficient allowance of drink for
a moderate man, what was it for a toper? The amount of drinking in
these country inns was, in fact, incredible. Men who were considered
quite temperate, as a rule, would sit drinking at a public dinner
half the night through. They drank, not weak potations of whisky and
Apollinaris, but strong fiery port, which they liked, as Tennyson is
reported to have liked it, strong and black and sweet. Not for such
drinkers as these did mine host produce his best and rarest; a more
common and a ranker liquid did for them. The public dinner was rare.
There was generally in the bar-parlour, however, the town toper. He was
a man whose father had amassed money in trade and left his son a small
fortune, enough to keep him in idleness. The small fortune proved, as
usual, a danger and a pitfall; idleness led to temptation, temptation
led him to the bar-parlour. We may see him sitting in the wooden
armchair, where he spends all his evenings. He is close upon fifty--the
toper’s limit. A tumbler of rum and water is on the table beside him.
He is silent, for very good reasons. He smiles upon the company to
show how sober he is. He has been drinking all day long, and is now
quite full and quite drunk; yet at ten o’clock he will get up and walk
home by himself without so much as a reel or a lurch. He presents to
the world when he goes out into it a nose of a kind that you cannot
find now, a red, even a purple nose, largely swollen, covered with red
blotches; it is a nose enlarged and painted by rum.
[Illustration: PRINCE CONSORT IN ROYAL ROBES]
The tradesmen of the town have their club, which meets every night, but
not in the tavern; they frequent a place of lesser repute, where they
are alone. They are shy of admitting strangers. It is not known how
much they drink; but one hears of families where there are daughters
who, on the arrival of the familiar footstep, hurry out of the way.
The town is eight miles from any other town. A stage-coach passes
through every day, but there is very little done to encourage it. The
oldest inhabitant has lived here, man and boy, for eighty years, but
he has never seen any other town. The coach drives merrily down the
High Street, with the horn blowing: the coachman pulls up at the inn,
the passengers all get down and have a drink, the horses are changed,
the coachman mounts, the guard blows his horn, and the excitement of
the day is over. The interests of the town are wholly self-centred:
it is not conscious of any other place. There were wars twenty years
ago. There is a fellow, somewhere, who fought at Waterloo; but nobody
asks him questions. A weekly paper, published at the nearest town,
comes over on Sunday mornings and gives them news of the outer world;
but, indeed, the news of the outer world drops on their ears like the
murmurs of the ocean in the shell, it means nothing.
The yearly holiday has not yet reached this place. The vicar, the
lawyer, the doctor, want no holiday, and take none. The schoolmaster
takes his in his garden. Year after year, month after month, day after
day, they do the same things in the same way, they have the same talk.
As for books they have none, only a dozen or so in a row. Boys who are
fond of books are regarded askance; they are dragging down upon their
heads a terrible future; no money is to be made by reading books. Boys
who are fond of making music, who take to a piano as other boys do to
a cricket bat, are considered as in a dangerous way. It is remarkable,
and is to me inexplicable, how this country, where formerly every
gentleman played some instrument, came to regard music with suspicion.
The fact, however, is undoubted. In the same way, a boy who could draw
and paint was looked upon with mingled pity and contempt. There was a
great deal of caste in the profession chosen by the boys. The vicar’s
son went to Oxford or Cambridge and took orders; the lawyer’s eldest
son was articled to his father; the doctor’s eldest son was articled
to his father; in the principal shops the eldest son was brought up
to carry on the shop. The professional people, who called themselves
gentlemen, would not associate with the shopkeepers; the county people
would not associate with the professional people; thus society was
hedged about and kept in gradations. As regards other professions, the
banks took some of the young men; one or two turned out to be clever,
got scholarships, and went to the universities, there to settle down
for life on a College Fellowship; necessity compelled a few into
teaching, then considered the last refuge of the destitute; the boy who
could draw was articled to an architect in the nearest big town; some
went up to London and became clerks; here and there one or two, greatly
daring, disappeared altogether beyond the seas.
[Illustration: DRAWING-ROOM AT ST. JAMES’S PALACE, 1861--THE LAST
ATTENDED BY THE PRINCE CONSORT]
As for the girls, they stayed at home. Their place was at home, they
knew nothing solid in the way of book learning; but, like the London
girls, they were accomplished. They could play a little and sing a
little, they could do all kinds of fine work, they made all the family
pies and cakes, they could distil, they could pickle and preserve,
they could make and mend. They stayed at home; out of three or four,
one remained unmarried. For her stretched along the road on the west
of the town a row of tiny villas, each with its pretty little garden
in front full of flowers--dahlias, peonies, geraniums--and the garden
behind with its vegetables and its fruit trees. The unmarried one lived
here, alone but not lonely. She it was who made most of the society of
the place. Sometimes, when there was not enough money, she remained
living with the eldest brother--a responsibility which he was never
known to refuse. Religion played a great part in their lives. Most of
the girls were “serious”: they attended a Thursday evening sermon,
which proved it; they read books about election and the elect, which
they applied serenely to other people. They were taught that all the
people--outside, in the street--in the world were destined to endless
torments: all but a very few, including themselves. They believed it,
or said they did; and the words never caused them a shudder, a gleam of
pity, a thought of remonstrance. That is what they called believing the
doctrine.
[Illustration:
_Photo by H. N. King_
LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT]
The Church in 1837 is venerable, but tottering. Within there are high
pews, long pews, square pews, pews with a fireplace, pews in the
chancel; the organ is in the west gallery where the choir sits. In the
middle there is a “three-decker” _i.e._ a pulpit, a reading-desk, and
a clerk’s desk, one above the other. The original east window has been
destroyed and is replaced by a modern thing. The charity children sit
round the altar rails. The once open roof is squared down and plastered
over, half the windows are bricked up, one aisle has been pulled down
and rebuilt in brick.
[Illustration:
_Photo by H. N. King_
STATUE OF QUEEN AND PRINCE CONSORT AT WINDSOR]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Valentine_
THE ALBERT MEMORIAL, LONDON]
These ladies read little; they went nowhere. London was unknown to
them, save for one short visit. They were full of prejudice. They would
not visit their right-hand neighbour, because her money--not much of
it--came from the drapery trade; nor their left-hand neighbour, because
one must draw the line above the farmer’s daughter. They were full of
little pretensions. Their papa was formerly the vicar--a gentleman
and a scholar; or he was a solicitor, who, though himself sprung from
a shop, was a gentleman by right of his profession; therefore his
daughters refused to visit their cousins. It was truly wonderful to
watch the social hedges raised everywhere.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Mayall_
A FAMILY GROUP
(Standing)
PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES
DUKE AND DUCHESS OF HESSE
(Seated)
PRINCESS CHRISTIAN
THE QUEEN
PRINCESS BEATRICE
DUKE OF CONNAUGHT
PRINCESS ROYAL
]
Somehow or other these hedges troubled the younger folk little. The
young man came along in due course. He came to tea, he brought his
flute, he stayed to supper--bread and cheese and beer, with a glass of
hot brandy and water afterwards. He gazed upon one of the girls; one
Sunday evening he presented her with a rose in the church porch. The
vicar that evening demonstrated the impossibility of hoping to escape,
but the girl with the rose in her hand sat tremulous, flushed, happy.
After the sermon the young man walked home with her, the sister giving
up her place and walking with the brother. The young man stayed to
supper--cold lamb and a lettuce, with beer and a glass of hot brandy
and water. They talked of the sermon of despair, and the text, with
no escape possible. While they talked, the spring of love was welling
up in the girl’s young heart--thus is the soundest theology mocked by
Nature. In two or three months there followed the wedding, with the
breakfast and the pink champagne.
Not every country town has experienced this decline; some few have
escaped, but all have suffered more or less which depend entirely
on the agricultural interest. Of one class I speak with great
sympathy--the Nonconformist ministers. They were none too well paid
in the most palmy days. The chapel contained perhaps a hundred and
twenty members; these members paid two shillings a quarter each for his
seat, or eight shillings a year. There was no endowment; the minister
therefore received forty pounds a year. This was increased by voluntary
gifts from the richer members of the congregation, so that the minister
probably reckoned on a hundred or a hundred and twenty pounds a year
for his stipend. Now, alas! there are no richer members, there are no
voluntary offerings; the poor man has to keep himself and his family on
forty pounds a year.
[Illustration:
_Photo By Gunn & Stuart_
H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Gunn & Stuart_
H.R.H. THE PRINCESS OF WALES]
What is this country town like after all these years? There are a few
changes in the buildings, but not many. The market-place, the corn
exchange, the cross, the old inn, are all there. The church has been
restored; the pillars have been deprived of their plaster and are once
more of polished stone, the high pews are replaced by low benches, the
roof is opened up, the east window is restored, other windows are in
course of restoration; it is now a noble and very beautiful old church.
The organ and choir have been sent to the chancel; the “three-decker”
has made way for a small and richly-carved pulpit; there is light,
colour, brightness in the church and its decorations, a light and
colour which appear also in the service.
The other changes in the town are not so apparent. You will find,
however, that the farmers’ ordinary is no longer held--the times are
now too bad. Nor do gentlemen drink port all the evening; the old
port is all gone. The inn is a house of call for bicyclists, who
drink beer or tea; there are not so many finely appointed dog-carts
driving in and out--landlords, like their tenants, are badly hit. The
market is not so well attended--there are fewer rustics. The saddler
especially is a melancholy man, because the agricultural depression
has struck him hard--a man can go on using an old saddle for years.
All the shopkeepers, however, are gloomy, their shops hardly yield
them a living. The lawyer’s income has suffered grievously, so has the
doctor’s; their daughters have left the town and are getting their own
living by working at something or other. All the young men have gone.
Everybody leaves the town who can, for it is a place of decay.
Yet is the town really brighter and better than before; far and wide
its arms stretch out to its sons who have gone away. Some are ranching
in Canada, some are fruit farming in California, some are practising
medicine on Ocean Liners or in colonial towns, some are teaching in
schools and colleges at home and in the colonies, some are labourers
on farms in Manitoba or British Columbia, soon to be themselves owners
of farms. The town is poorer, there are fewer people; yet, apart from
money, it is a far richer place than it was, with broader minds, with
fewer prejudices, and greater knowledge.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]