"Their conversation was altogether made up of Shakspeare,
taste, high life and the musical glasses."--_Vicar of
Wakefield_.
We will venture to assert, that in the course of these essays on the
aristocracies of London life, we have never attempted to induce any of
our readers to believe that there was any cause for him to regret,
whatever condition of life it had pleased Providence to place him in, or
to suppose, for one moment, that reputable men, though in widely
different circumstances, are not equally reputable. We have studiously
avoided portraying fashionable life according to the vulgar notions,
whether depreciatory or panegyrical. We have shown that that class is
not to be taken and treated of as an integral quantity, but to be
analyzed as a component body, wherein is much sterling ore and no little
dross. We have shown by sufficient examples, that whatever in our eyes
makes the world of fashion really respectable, is solely owing to the
real worth of its respectable members; and on the contrary, whatever
contempt we fling upon the fashionable world, is the result of the
misconduct of individuals of that order, prominently contemptible.
Of the former, the example is of infinite value to society, in refining
its tone, and giving to social life an unembarrassed ease, which, if not
true politeness, is its true substitute; and, of the latter, the
mischief done to society is enhanced by the multitude of low people
ready to imitate their vices, inanities, and follies.
Pretenders to fashion, who hang upon the outskirts of fashionable
society, and whose lives are a perpetual but unavailing struggle to jump
above their proper position, are horrid nuisances; and they abound,
unfortunately, in London.
In a republic, where practical equality is understood and acted upon,
this pretension would be intolerable; in an aristocratic state of
society, with social gradations pointedly defined and universally
recognized, it is merely ridiculous to the lookers-on; to the
pretenders, it is a source of much and deserved misery and isolation.
There are ten thousand varying shades and degrees of this pretension,
from the truly fashionable people who hanker after the _exclusives_, or
seventh heaven of high life, down to the courier out of place, who, in a
pot-house, retails Debrett by heart, and talks of lords, and dukes, and
earls, as of his particular acquaintance, and how and where he met them
when on his travels.
The _exclusives_ are a queer set, some of them not by any means people
of the best pretensions to lead the _ton_. Lady L---- and Lady B---- may
be very well as patronesses of Almack's; but what do you say to Lady
J----, a plebeian, and a licensed dealer in money, keeping her shop by
deputy in a lane somewhere behind Cornhill? Almack's, as every body
knows who has been there, or who has talked with any observing _habitué_
of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in
somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least
effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men,
and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes
they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance
of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing,
balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much better fashion
than many of the exclusives make it a matter of life and death to have
their admission secured. Admission to Almack's is to a young _débutante_
of fashion as great an object as a seat at the Privy Council Board to a
flourishing politician: your _ton_ is stamped by it, you are of the
exclusive _set_, and, by virtue of belonging to that set, every other is
open to you as a matter of course, when you choose to condescend to
visit it. The room in which Almack's balls are held we need not
describe, because it has been often described before, and because the
doorkeeper, any day you choose to go to Duke Street, St James's, will be
too happy to show it you for sixpence; but we will give you in his own
words, all the information we could contrive to get from a man of the
highest fashion, who is a subscriber.
"Why, I really don't know," said he, "that I have any thing to tell you
about Almack's, except that all that the novel-writers say about it is
ridiculous nonsense: the lights are good, the refreshments not so good,
the music excellent; the women dress well, dance a good deal, and talk
but little. There is a good deal of envy, jealousy, and criticism of
faces, figures, fortunes, and pretensions: one, or at most two, of the
balls in a season are pleasant; the others _slow_ and very dull. The
point of the thing seems to be, that people of rank choose to like it
because it stamps a set, and low people talk about it because they
cannot by any possibility know any thing about it."
Such is Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and
lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders to
fashion.
We must not omit to inform our rural readers, that no conventional rank
gives any one in London a patent of privilege in truly fashionable
society. An old baronet shall be exclusive, when a young peer shall have
no fashionable society at all: a lord is by no means necessarily a man
in what the fashionable sets call good society: we have many lords who
are not men of fashion, and many men of fashion who are not lords.
Professional peers, whether legal, naval, or military, bishops, judges,
and all that class of men who attain by talents, interest, and good
fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more
to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man
may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general
to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife
and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people,
that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is
because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or
because it is part of their system to keep up a qualified intimacy with
all whom they think proper to lift to their own level: but this intimacy
is only extended by the man of birth to the man of talent. His family do
not become people of fashion until the third or fourth generation: he
remains the man of business, the useful, working, practical,
brains-carrying man that he was; and his family, if they are wise, seek
not to become the familiars of the old aristocracy, and if they are
foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too
near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion
place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their necks
in servile mud.
It is the same with baronets, M.P.'s, and all that sort of people. These
handles to men's names go down very well in the country, where it is
imagined that a baronet or an M.P. is, _ex officio_, a man of
consequence, and that, rank being equal, consequence is also equal. In
London, on the contrary, people laugh at the idea of a man pluming
himself upon such distinctions without a difference: in town we have
baronets of all sorts--the "Heathcotes, and such large-acred men," Sir
Watkyn, and the territorial baronetage: then we have the Hanmers, and
others of undoubted fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of
their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet:
descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the
tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the banking, the pastry-cooking
baronetage.
What is there, what can there be, in common with these widely severed
classes, save that they equally enjoy _Sir_ at the head and _Bart_. at
the tail of their sponsorial and patronymic appellations? Do you think
the landed Bart. knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he
sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor,"
and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the
naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare
idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning,
Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not
each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, even including the
last-mentioned, look down with immeasurable disdain upon the poor Nova
Scotia baronets, who move heaven and earth to get permission to wear a
string round their necks, and a badge like the learned fraternity of
cabmen?
Then as to the magic capitals M.P., which provincial people look upon as
embodying in the wearer the concentrated essence of wisdom, eloquence,
personal distinction, and social eminence. Who, in a country town, on a
market day, has not seen tradesmen cocking their eye, apprentices
glowering through the shop front, and ladies subdolously peeping behind
the window-shutter to catch a glimpse of the "member for our town," and,
having seen him, think they are rather happier then they were before?
The greatest fun in the world is to go to a _cul-de-sac_ off a dirty
lane near Palace Yard, called Manchester Buildings, a sort of senatorial
pigeon-house, where the meaner fry of houseless M.P.'s live, each in his
one pair, two pair, three pair, as the case may be, and give a postman's
knock at every door in rapid succession. In a twinkling, the "collective
wisdom" of Manchester Buildings and the Midland Counties poke out their
heads. Cobden appears on the balcony; Muntz glares out of a second
floor, like a live bear in a barber's window; Wallace of Greenock comes
to the door in a red nightcap; and a long "tail" of the other immortals
of a session. You may enjoy the scene as much as you please; but when
you hear one or two of the young Irish patriotic "mimbers" floundering
from the attics, the wisest course you can take will be incontinently to
"mizzle." These men, however, have one redeeming quality--that they
live in Manchester Buildings, and don't care who knows it; they are out
of fashion, and don't care who are in; they are minding their business,
and not hanging at the skirts of people ever ready and willing to kick
them off.
Then there are the "dandy" M.P.'s, who ride hack-horses, associate with
fashionable actresses, and hang about the clubs. Then there is the
chance or accidental M.P., who has been elected he hardly knows how or
when, and wonders to find himself in Parliament. Then there is the
desperate, adventuring, ear-wigging M.P., whose hope of political
existence, and whose very livelihood, depend upon getting or continuing
in place. Then there is the legal M.P., with one eye fixed on the
Queen's, the other squinting at the Treasury Bench. Then there is the
lounging M.P., who is usually the scion of a noble family, and who comes
now and then into the House, to stare vacantly about, and go out again.
Then there is the military M.P., who finds the House an agreeable
lounge, and does not care to join his regiment on foreign service. Then
there is the bustling M.P. of business, the M.P. of business without
bustle, and the independent country gentleman M.P., who wants nothing
for himself or any body else, and who does not care a turnip-top for the
whole lot of them.
The aggregate distinction, as a member of Parliament, is totally sunk in
London. It is the man, and not the two letters after his name, that any
body whose regard is worth the having in the least regard. There are
M.P.s never seen beyond the exclusive set, except on a committee of the
House, and then they know and speak to nobody save one of themselves.
There are other M.P.s that you will find in no society except Tom
Spring's or Owen Swift's, at the Horse-shoe in Litchborne Street.
These observations upon baronets and M.P.s may be extended upwards to
the peerage, and downwards to the professional, commercial, and all
other the better classes. Every man hangs, like a herring, by his own
tail; and every class would be distinct and separate, but that the
pretenders to fashion, like some equivocal animals in the chain of
animated nature, connect these different classes by copying
pertinaciously the manners, and studying to adopt the tastes and habits
of the class immediately above them.
Of pretenders to fashion, perhaps the most successful in their imitative
art are the
SHEENIES.--By this term, as used by men of undoubted _ton_ with
reference to the class we are about to consider, you are to understand
runagate Jews rolling in riches, who profess to love roast pork above
all things, who always eat their turkey with sausages, and who have
_cut_ their religion for the sake of dangling at the heels of
fashionable Christians. These people are "swelling" upon the profits of
the last generation in St Mary Axe or Petticoat Lane. The founders of
their families have been loan-manufacturers, crimps, receivers of stolen
goods, wholesale nigger-dealers, clippers and sweaters, rag-merchants,
and the like, and conscientious Israelites; but their children, not
having fortitude to abide by their condition, nor right principle to
adhere to their sect, come to the west end of the town, and, by right of
their money, make unremitting assaults upon the loose fish of
fashionable society, who laugh at, and heartily despise them, while they
are as ashes in the mouths of the respectable members of the persuasion
to which they originally belonged.
HEAVY SWELLS are another very important class of pretenders to fashion,
and are divided into civil and military. Professional men, we say it to
their honour, seldom affect the heavy swell, because the feeblest
glimmerings of that rationality of thinking which results from among the
lowest education, preserves them from the folly of the attempt, and, in
preserving from folly, saves them from the self-reproaching misery that
attends it. Men of education or of common sense, look upon pretension to
birth, rank, or any thing else to which they have no legitimate claim,
as little more than moral forgery; it is with them an uttering base
coin upon false pretences. It is generally the wives and families of
professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which
we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of
gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the
son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a
marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains,
deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and
bringing-up, of respecting himself by a modest contented demeanour. He
is never so unhappy as when he appears the thing he is--never so
completely in his element as when acting the thing he is not, nor can
ever be. He spends his life in jumping, like a cat, at shadows on the
wall. He has day and night dreams of people, who have not the least idea
that such a man is in existence, and he comes in time, by mere dint of
thinking of nobody else, to think that he is one of them. He acquaints
himself with the titles of lords, as other men do those of books, and
then boasts largely of the extent of his acquaintance.
Let us suppose that he is an officer of a hard-fighting,
foreign-service, neglected infantry regiment. This, which to a soldier
would be an honest pride, is the shame of the Heavy Military Swell. His
chief business in life, next to knowing the names and faces of lords, is
concealing from you the corps to which he has the dishonour, he thinks,
to belong. He talks mightily of the service, of hussars and light
dragoons; but when he knows that you know better, when you poke him hard
about the young or old buffs, or the dirty half-hundred, he whispers in
your ear that "my fellows," as he calls them, are very "fast," and that
they are "all known in town, very well known indeed"--a piece of
information you will construe in the case of the heavy swell to mean,
better known than trusted.
When he is on full pay, the heavy swell is known to the three old women
and five desperate daughters who compose good society in country
quarters. He affects a patronizing air at small tea-parties, and is
wonderfully run after by wretched un-idea'd girls, that is, by ten girls
in twelve; he is eternally striving to get upon the "staff," or anyhow
to shirk his regimental duty; he is a whelp towards the men under his
command, and has a grand idea of spurs, steel scabbards, and flogging;
to his superiors he is a spaniel, to his brother officers an intolerable
ass; he makes the mess-room a perfect hell with his vanity, puppyism,
and senseless bibble-babble.
On leave, or half-pay, he "mounts mustaches," to help the hussar and
light-dragoon idea, or to delude the ignorant into a belief that he may
possibly belong to the household cavalry. He hangs about doors of
military clubs, with a whip in his hand; talks very loud at the "Tiger"
or the "Rag and famish," and never has done shouting to the waiter to
bring him a "Peerage;" carries the "Red Book" and "Book of Heraldry" in
his pocket; sees whence people come, and where they go, and makes them
out somehow; in short, he is regarded with a thrill of horror by people
of fashion, fast or slow, civil or military.
The Civil Heavy Swell affects fashionable curricles, and enjoys all the
consideration a pair of good horses can give. He rides a blood bay in
Rotten Row, but rides badly, and is detected by galloping, or some other
solecism; his dress and liveries are always overdone, the money shows on
every thing about him. He has familiar abbreviations for the names of
all the fast men about town; calls this Lord "Jimmy," 'tother Chess, a
third Dolly, and thinks he knows them; keeps an expensive mistress,
because "Jimmy" and Chess are supposed to do the same, and when he is
out of the way, his mistress has some of the fast fellows to supper, at
the heavy swell's expense. He settles the point whether claret is to be
drank from a jug or black bottle, and retails the merits of a _plateau_
or _epergne_ he saw, when last he dined with a "fellow" in Belgrave
Square.
The _Foreigneering_ Heavy Swell has much more spirit, talent, and
manner, than the home-grown article; but he is poor in a like ratio, and
is therefore obliged to feather his nest by denuding the pigeon tribe of
their metallic plumage. He is familiarly known to all the fast fellows,
who _cut_ him, however, as soon as they marry, but is not accounted good
_ton_ by heads of families. He is liked at the Hells and Clubs, where he
has a knack of distinguishing himself without presumption or
affectation. He is a dresser by right divine, and dresses ridiculously.
The fashionable fellows affect loudly to applaud his taste, and laugh to
see the vulgar imitate the foreigneering swell. He is the idol of
equivocal women, and condescends to patronize unpresentable
gentility-mongers. He is not unhappy at heart, like the indigenous heavy
swell, but enjoys his intimacy with the fast fellows, and uses it.
There is an infallible test we should advise you to apply, whenever you
are bored to desperation by any of these heavy swells. When he talks of
"my friend, the Duke of Bayswater," ask him, in a quiet tone, where he
last met the _Duchess_. If he says Hyde-Park (meaning the Earl of) is
an honest good fellow, enquire whether he prefers Lady Mary or Lady
Seraphina Serpentine. This drops him like a shot--he can't get over it.
It is a rule in good society that you know the set only when you know
the women of that set; however you may work your way among the men,
whatever you may do at the Hells and Clubs, goes for nothing--the
_women_ stamp you counterfeit or current, and--
"Not to know _them_, argues yourself unknown."
* * * * *