SOCIAL
LIFE IN ENGLAND
1750-1850
BY
F. J. FOAKES-JACKSON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
ACADEMIAE HARVARDIANAE
ET PRAESERTIM
A. LAURENTIO LOWELL
PRAESIDI
PROFESSORSIBUSQUE EIS
QUI FRATERNO AMORE
HOSPITEM ACCEPERUNT
CANTABRIGIENSIS CANTABRIGIENSIBUS
HOC OPUSCULUM
D.D.
PREFACE
This volume contains a course of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in
March, 1916; and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks to the
Lowell Institute for affording me the privilege of delivering them.
I must also thank a most indulgent audience for their sympathetic
attention.
I desire particularly to thank several friends in England for
assistance in the preparation of these lectures. In my investigations
into the story of Margaret Catchpole, Mr. John Cobbold of Holywells,
Ipswich, Mr. Edward Brooke of Ufford Hall, Suffolk, Mrs. Sylvester of
Tonbridge, and the Curator of the Ipswich Museum, allowed me to see
original documents of great interest; Mr. Barker of the _East Anglian
Daily Times_ and Mr. Goodwin of Ipswich helped by searching the files
of old newspapers for information. The Downing Professor of the Laws
of England at Cambridge assisted with his advice on the subject of
Dickens’ legal knowledge; and Mr. Stoakley of the Cambridge chemical
laboratory contributed to the success of the lectures by his admirable
reproductions of illustrative maps and pictures.
Above all, I must express my gratitude to two ladies in America, who
not only contributed to the pleasure of my visit by their unstinted
hospitality, but did all in their power to save me from those pitfalls
which beset every one who lectures in a strange country. Mrs. Barrett
Wendell of Boston found time in the midst of her many useful avocations
to hear several lectures before they were delivered, and to advise how
they could be made more intelligible and acceptable to an American
audience; and Mrs. Kirsopp Lake proved herself indefatigable not only
in revising the lectures before they were delivered, but also in
reading the proofs of this book.
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,
NEW YORK,
August, 1916.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LECTURE PAGE
I. LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER
OF JOHN WESLEY 1
II. GEORGE CRABBE 42
III. MARGARET CATCHPOLE 81
IV. GUNNING’S “REMINISCENCES OF CAMBRIDGE” 126
V. CREEVEY PAPERS--THE REGENCY 168
VI. SOCIAL ABUSES AS EXPOSED BY CHARLES DICKENS 213
VII. MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY 261
VIII. SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND 302
SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
LECTURE I
LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ILLUSTRATED BY THE CAREER OF JOHN WESLEY
In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I
am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though
you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth
century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with
figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their
scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is
not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well
ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the
life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or
Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great
character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less
known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher
like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the
following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell:
“How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole,
to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush
with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with
the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to
discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay
of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of
Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face
in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity
the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”
But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person
to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he
may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the
most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an
unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of
the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in
the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley
possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied.
“Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear
and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot
be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism
of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that
love you for political service, love you less than their dinner;
and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a
criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the
one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the
attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side--Jacob staring at
him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,--for he was
an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,--“History, poetry and
philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at
other times,”--are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often
as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read
with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But
how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the
sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a
mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel
Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness
and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face
continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday,
February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A
sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is
that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not
sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And
this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable
one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as
queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the
world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote
with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have
read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.”
Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the
work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and
in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of
evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little
remarkable.
I am not at all sure that sinners are not the right people to write
about saints. Saints may be; because sanctity implies something
attractive which is almost unthinkable without the sympathy which
nearly always reveals itself in a certain playfulness. But good,
deserving people are assuredly not qualified to be the biographers of
saints; for, in their desire to exalt their hero, they generally strip
him of all the qualities for which men loved him (and no one was ever
loved for his perfections alone) and present him as their own ideal of
what a saint should be. John Wesley is an example of this and he would
appear in a far more amiable light in pages written by a kindly man of
the world than in a book by a devoted admirer and would-be imitator
of his virtues. It was, after all, Boswell’s many failings which
contributed to give us so delightful a portrait as that of his great
and good friend, Samuel Johnson.
Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England,
and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask
his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using
him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before,
however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?
It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from
father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the
Wesleys. Here are six generations:
1. Bartholomew studied physic at the University and, when ejected for
Puritanism in 1662 from the living of Allington in Dorsetshire, he
practised as a doctor.
2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, imprisoned on no less than four
occasions. He died at an early age and was distinguished when at New
Inn Hall at Oxford for his proficiency in Oriental studies.
3. Samuel, Rector of Epworth, a scholar of some repute and father of
the famous Wesleys.
4. Charles, the poet of Methodism.
5. Samuel, the musician, one of the pioneers of modern organ playing.
6. Samuel Sebastian, the celebrated composer, organist in Gloucester
Cathedral, who died in 1875.
Talent, not without eccentricity, seemed the natural gift of this
remarkable family, to which was added beauty in the females and
distinction of appearance in the male members. Samuel, the third on
our list, was, naturally, a puritan by upbringing; but he became a
Churchman by conviction. He obtained the Rectory of Epworth in the Isle
of Axholm in Lincolnshire, and the chaplaincy of a regiment. This,
however, he lost; and his dissenting enemies stopped his getting any
further preferment save the living of Wroote, near to Epworth. He
married the daughter of an ejected minister, Susannah Annesley, who
was herself connected with the noble family of that name. She had no
less than nineteen children, but few of these survived, among them the
three famous brothers Samuel, John, and Charles. The girls, had they
had their brother’s advantages and education, might have been almost
equally distinguished. As it was, however, Samuel had enough to do to
give his sons an education worthy of their abilities. The eldest son
Samuel was a scholar of Westminster and a student of Christ Church, a
friend of Bishop Atterbury, and a sound scholar. Owing to his Toryism
he was never more than an usher (under-master) at Westminster and
Master of Tiverton School: and he continued to hold the principles of
a High Churchman to the last. He was an excellent and affectionate
brother, ready to help John and Charles in their education; but from
the first he recognised the tendencies of Methodism to be schismatical;
and in a letter to his mother just before his death he pointed out
the danger of his brothers’ teaching. Because he was not in sympathy
with the movement he has been condemned as “worldly,” as dull, as
without genius; but a sentence in this letter reveals something of the
incisiveness of John. “As I told Jack,” he writes, “I am not afraid
that the church should excommunicate him, discipline is at too low
an ebb; but that he should excommunicate the church.” John went to
school at the Charterhouse, thence to Christ Church, Oxford, and to a
fellowship at Lincoln College. Charles followed in the footsteps of
Samuel and became a student of Christ Church. Academic distinction was
the lot of all the sons of the Rector of Epworth.
The home of the family was amid the fens of Lincolnshire; and the
fenland had still many of its peculiar characteristics during the
childhood and youth of the Wesleys. The Isle of Axholm had been but
recently literally an island, rising out of the swamps and often
approached only by boat. These islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth
race who lived partly as farmers, and partly by capturing the fish and
birds which swarmed in the surrounding fens. Here lived John Wesley and
his family. By birth they were emphatically gentlefolk, by education
highly cultivated; they were miserably poor, severed from the society
of their equals among a people with whom they could have but little
sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit; the father a pious and
conscientious but disappointed scholar, the mother sternly determined
to do her duty, the sons endowed with singular gifts of leadership,
the daughters sensitive and refined, condemned to live as peasant
girls. A family so able, so thrown on its own resources, so out of
contact with the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost bound to
develop on exceptional lines. Their virtues and their strength were as
abnormal as their weakness, their singularly active minds were equally
capable of the greatest deeds and the most surprising mistakes. All
the girls were unfortunate in the choice of their partners and had sad
lives. John, the most gifted of all this gifted household, was able
to transform England by his preaching; yet made the most astonishing
blunders in the conduct of his private life, though shewing a talent
for administration worthy of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley,
or Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying the movement we must
always keep Epworth in the background.[1] But there was another side
of the life of the sons of the Rector. Samuel’s friend Atterbury,
the Tory Bishop of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable figures
of his age. John and Charles at Oxford were poor enough but found a
welcome in society congenial to them. Their birth and manners gave them
access to a coterie of religious yet cultured circles, especially at
Stanton in Gloucestershire; and they always comported themselves with
a consciousness of a perfectly secure position in society. Neither of
them was in the slightest degree dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly
position. When Count Zinzendorf, the great German noble, and the patron
of the Moravians, spoke with the authority of a pious prince to John,
he was answered in a spirit as uncompromising as his own. Selina,
the famous and pious Countess of Huntingdon, “the elect lady” of
evangelical preachers, might patronise Whitefield; but could not take
a high tone with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy who preferred
the treasure of the Gospel to be contained in clergy, who might be
described as “earthen vessels,” disliked the Wesleys, whose greatest
successes were obtained among the middle class. None the less their
influence was in a measure due to the social advantages which they had
enjoyed when Oxford students. We, however, have to do with John Wesley
as illustrating the England of his day, and we may well begin to use
him for our purposes as a traveller. He had been one the greater part
of his life; but a good starting point for us will be after his visit
to Germany in 1738, immediately after the time from which he dates
his conversion. From that day almost till his death in 1791, John
Wesley was almost continually on the road, preaching from town to town
wherever he could get a hearing.
For years he seems to have travelled constantly on horseback, but later
in life he made use of a postchaise. The distances he covered are
almost incredible. Here is an extract from his Journal, dated August
7, 1759, when he was in his fifty fourth year. “After preaching at
four (because of the harvest) I took horse and rode easily to London.
_Indeed I wanted a little rest_; having rode in seven months about
four and twenty hundred miles.” As we have seen, Wesley often read as
he rode, and this practice taught him the value of a slack rein. “I
asked myself How is it no horse stumbles when I am reading? No account
can possibly be given but this: because I throw the reins on his back.
I then set myself to observe; and I aver that in riding about an
hundred thousand miles I scarce remember any horse (except two that
would fall head over heels anyway) to fall or to make a considerable
stumble while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a
tight rein prevents stumbling is a capital blunder. I have repeated
the trial more than most men in the kingdom can do. A slack rein
will prevent stumbling if anything will. But in some horses nothing
can.” But all his rides were not so leisurely, and I will read you an
account of a ride in Wales. He started from Shrewsbury at 4 A.M., and
at two in the afternoon was forty two or three miles off, preaching
in the marketplace at Llanidloes. He and his companions then rode to
Fountainhead where he hoped to lodge; but “Mr. B. being unwilling” they
remounted at 7 P.M. and rode on to Ross-fair. They missed the track
and found themselves at the edge of a bog and had to be put on the
right road; again they missed their way, “it being half-past nine.”
They did not find Ross-fair till between 11 and 12. When they were
in bed the ostler and a miner had a ride on their beasts, and in the
morning Wesley found his mare “bleeding like a pig” in the stable, with
a wound behind. This was on July 24; on the 27th he was at Pembroke;
“I rested that night, having not quite recovered my journey from
Shrewsbury to Ross-fair.” He was in his 62d year! The dangers of travel
were considerable, and one of the most remarkable facts in regard to
Wesley was that he was never molested by highwaymen, who literally
swarmed in England throughout the eighteenth century. They were often
in league with the post boys, many of whom were highwaymen themselves.
When Wesley was 76 years of age he writes: “Just at this time there was
a combination among many of the postchaise drivers on the Bath road,
especially those that drove by night, to deliver their passengers into
each other’s hands. One driver stopped at the spot they had appointed,
where another waited to attack the chaise. In consequence of this
many were robbed; but I had a good Protector still. I have travelled
all roads by day or by night for these forty years, and never was
interrupted yet.” Four years later, in 1782, he writes: “About one on
Wednesday morning we were informed that three highwaymen were on the
road and had robbed all the coaches that had passed, some within an
hour or two. I felt no uneasiness on this account, knowing that God
would take care of us: and He did so; for before we came to the spot
all the highwaymen were taken.” I cannot but think it remarkable that
Wesley was never molested, because, especially in his early days of
itinerancy, everything was done to hinder his work and his enemies were
quite unscrupulous enough to set the highwaymen on him. Perhaps the
highwaymen had their scruples! In the early days of Wesley’s mission
the invasion of England by the forces of the young Pretender took
place. This was the period at which he and his followers suffered most
from mob violence and also from charges of Popery and disaffection.
I will take the latter first, as there is hardly any feature in the
18th century so marked in England as the dread and horror with which
the Roman Catholic religion was regarded. I remember a few years ago
examining a number of cartoons and caricatures during the rebellion
of 1745 and almost every one of them had to do with Popery. To the
English the invasion of the country by Charles Edward was like the
Spanish Armada, an attempt to impose the papal yoke on the land. In the
trinity of the nation’s enemies the Pope stood first: “From the Pope,
the Devil and the Pretender, Good Lord, deliver us.” It was hatred
of Rome that completely blinded people’s eyes to the romance of the
young prince’s enterprise, and to his undoubted claim to the throne.
Neither the government nor the sovereign were popular; but it was no
question of popularity where Popery was concerned. The House of Hanover
stood for Protestantism and the nation rallied to its support. Even
that rapacious and cynical infidel, Frederick the Great of Prussia,
was the darling of England as the “Protestant Hero”; and the Duke of
Cumberland’s cruelties were forgotten because he saved England from the
Pope. Like Marlborough and Wellington he was known as “the Great Duke.”
No charge could be more effective against an opponent than that of
Romanism and many good men had to endure it. The great Bishop Butler
was exposed to it for complaining in his visitation charge to the
clergy of Durham of the disgraceful neglect into which they had
allowed their fabrics to fall. The most deadly shaft levelled against
John Wesley was Bishop Lavington of Exeter’s book, “The enthusiasm of
the Methodists and Papists compared.” The visions, the trances, the
ecstasies of the Methodists, reminded good Protestants of such Catholic
mystics as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. The reasonableness
of Protestantism, whether Anglican or nonconformist, was contrasted
with the excited and hysterical manifestation of religious fervour in
Popish countries, and the fervour of the Wesleys and their followers
was especially unpopular on this account. The furious hatred of
anything approaching Romanism is the key to much of the thought and
feeling of the age. But though undoubtedly an enthusiast, Wesley was
far in advance of his age as regards toleration. He had, moreover, a
curious and chivalrous regard for the memory of Mary Queen of Scots;
and he considered Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen and Protestant champion,
as little better than a royal criminal. He at least would never have
said as Puff says in _The Critic_, “Hush! no scandal against Queen
Elizabeth.” On the contrary, he says in his Journal, “But what then was
Queen Elizabeth? As just and merciful as Nero, and as good a Christian
as Mahomet.” Thus he wrote in 1768, and if he held such a view twenty
three years earlier, no wonder he was suspected of Jacobitism and
Popery.
Far more to his credit is the fact that he resolutely refused to
indulge in violent abuse of the ancient Church. On the contrary, he
found so little true religion anywhere that wherever it was manifested
he welcomed it. Charles Wesley’s son went over to the Church of Rome,
to the great grief of his parents and, possibly, to the scandal of
Methodism. This is how John writes and his words are so remarkable that
I quote them at some length.
“He has not changed his religion; he has changed his _opinions_ and
_mode of worship_, but that is not _religion_.... He has suffered
unspeakable loss because his new opinions are unfavourable to
religion.... What then is religion. It is happiness in God or in the
knowledge and love of God. It is faith working by love producing
righteousness and peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. In other words, it
is a heart and life devoted to God.... Now either he has this religion
or he has not: if he has, he will not finally perish, notwithstanding
the absurd unscriptural opinions he has embraced ... let him only have
his right faith ... and he is quite safe. He may indeed roll a few
years in purging fire but he will surely go to heaven at last.”
No wonder, therefore, considering the bigotry of his age, that Wesley
was exposed to persecution by the mobs: but his leniency towards
Romanism was not the only cause of this. To-day, however, I wish to
utilize the story of the attacks made on the Methodists to shew the
state of the country. Mob law was powerful wherever population was
dense. Towns were gradually growing up and the English system of legal
machinery was devised rather for a rural population. There was no
police properly so called. Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Verges would
not have been caricatures in the 18th century. Wesley himself speaks
of the watchmen as “those poor fools.” The violence of the mob was
a feature of the 18th century in England. Perhaps you may recollect
Hogarth’s picture of the chairing of a member of Parliament after an
election,--the man laying about him with a flail, the prize-fights,
etc. Riots play an important part in the history of the time and
the no-popery riot in 1780 when Lord George Gordon stirred up the
fanaticism of the London mob is only one of many similar occurrences.
Never did the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, shew the courage of
good breeding more conspicuously than when they faced an infuriated
rabble and saved themselves and their followers by the dignity of their
demeanour and the fearless mildness of their conduct amid scenes of
tumult. Witness the affair at Wednesbury and Walsall. The mob dragged
John Wesley from one magistrate to another. Some tried to protect him
but were overpowered. To quote the Journal: “To attempt speaking was
vain; for the noise on every side was like the roaring of the sea. So
they dragged me along till they came to the town where seeing the door
of a large house open, I attempted to go in; but a man catching me by
the hair pulled me back into the middle of the mob.... I continued
speaking all the time to those within hearing, feeling neither pain
nor weariness.... I stood at the door (of a shop) and asked ‘Are you
willing to hear me speak?’ Many cried out ‘No, no, knock his brains
out, kill him at once, etc.’.... In the mean time my strength and voice
returned and I broke out aloud in prayer. And now the man who just
before headed the mob, turned, and said, Sir I will spend my life for
you: follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.”
Throughout the riot Wesley notices: “From first to last I heard none
give me a reviling word, or call me by any opprobrious name; but the
cry of one and all was “The Preacher! the Parson! the Minister!” A man
rushed at him to strike him but paused and merely stroked his head,
saying, “Why, what soft hair he has!” In Cornwall attempts were made to
stop Methodism by calling in the aid of the Press-Gang. Thomas Maxfield
was caught and offered to the captain of a ship in Mount’s Bay, who
refused to take him. An attempt was actually made to press John Wesley.
A clergyman, Dr. Borlase, acted in his magisterial capacity to further
this infamous project. But a Mr. Eustick who was charged with executing
the warrant had the sense to see the indecency of arresting such a
man to serve in the navy as a common seaman. He conducted Mr. Wesley
to Dr. Borlase’s door and told him he had done his duty and that his
prisoner was free to depart. Wesley’s description of the event is
characteristic. Mr. Eustick was visited by him in order to be taken to
Dr. Borlase’s to be pressed into the army.
“I went thither, and asked, ‘Is Mr. Eustick here?’ After some pause
one said ‘Yes’; and he showed me into the parlour. When he came down
he said ‘O Sir will you be so good as to go with me to the doctor’s?’
I answered ‘Sir I came for that purpose.’ ‘Are you ready Sir,’ I
answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Sir I am not quite ready, in a little time, in a
quarter of an hour I will call upon you.’ In about three-quarters of an
hour he came and finding that there was no remedy, he called for his
horse and put forward to Dr. Borlase’s house; but he was in no haste
so we were an hour and a quarter riding three or four measured miles.
As soon as he came into the yard he asked a servant, ‘Is the Doctor at
home’ upon whose answering ‘No Sir he is gone to Church;’ he presently
said ‘Well Sir I have executed my commission. I have done Sir; I have
no more to say.’”
Not that Wesley was not in serious danger at times, especially in
Cornwall. Once at Falmouth the house was filled with privateersmen.
Only a wainscot partition separated him from the mob. “Indeed to all
appearances our lives were not worth an hour’s purchase.” When the
door was broken down he came forth bareheaded (“For I purposely left
off my hat that they all might see my face”). His calmness saved him;
for though countless hands were lifted up to strike or throw at him
yet they were “one and all stopped in the midway so that I had not
even a speck of dirt on my clothes!” Ferocious as were the British
mobs of this period they were capable of generous sentiments and
chivalrous admiration for courage. The people were often set on Wesley
by the gentry and, to their shame be it said, by some of the clergy.
The excuse, both in Cornwall in 1745 and in Newcastle, was that the
Methodist societies were with the Pretenders. “All the gentlemen in
these parts say,” Wesley was told, “that you have been a long time in
France and Spain, and are now set hither by the Pretender; and that
these societies are to join him.”
It is scarcely necessary to do more than allude to the extreme
brutality of the amusements of people in England in the eighteenth
century. Dog fighting, bear baiting, bull baiting, cock fighting,
were universal and, as we may see from Hogarth’s pictures, cruelty to
animals was universal. On one occasion a baited bull was turned loose
to interrupt a congregation assembled to hear Wesley preach. One of the
ringleaders of the mob at Walsall who ended by taking the part of the
Methodists was a noted prize-fighter in a bear garden.
John and Charles Wesley began their religious labours at Oxford in the
city prison, Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and the Journal
throws a lurid light on the condition of felons, criminals, and debtors
in England. The system was atrocious, there was no real control; and
the jailers farmed the place and made what they could out of it. The
result was that if a man paid he could do what he liked in jail; and,
if he could not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. Side
by side, therefore, with the utmost squalor and misery was almost
indescribable profligacy. “I visited the Marshalsea prison,” writes
Wesley, “on February 3, 1753, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O
shame to man that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell
upon earth! And shame to those who bear the name of Christ that there
should need any prison at all in Christendom.” Let me quote an extract
from a letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 1761, “Sir,
of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or
equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it, a few years ago
Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery
and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.”
The prison at Bristol had been reformed by a good keeper, who, says
Wesley, “deserves to be remembered full as well as the man of Ross.”
It was clean, there was no drunkenness nor brawling, no immorality, no
idleness, and a decent service in the chapel. These reforms themselves
shew what most prisons of the time must have been like.
Another evil was smuggling: wherever a boat could land there was a
conspiracy to defraud the revenue. The business, for it was nothing
else, was run on the most extensive scale and the whole countryside was
engaged in it. The smugglers were armed and disciplined and prepared to
offer furious resistance to the officers of the Revenue. Wesley set his
face sternly against the practice.
“The stewards met at St. Ives, from the western part of Cornwall. The
next day I began examining the society; but I was soon obliged to stop
short. I found an accursed thing among them; well nigh one and all
bought and sold ‘uncustomed’ goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any
more till I had met them all together. This I did in the evening and
told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they
would see my face no more.”
This was in November, 1753. In June, 1757, Wesley was in the north at
Sunderland.
“I met the Society and told them plain, none could stay with us, unless
he would part with all sin; particularly robbing the King, selling or
buying run goods; which I would no more suffer than robbing on the
highway.”
In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall:
“The detestable practice of cheating the King (smuggling) is no more
found in our societies, and since the accursed thing has been put away,
the work of God has everywhere increased.”
The Cornish practice of “wrecking” still continued and in 1776 Wesley
writes, “I was afterwards inquiring if that scandal in Cornwall of
plundering wrecked vessels still continued.” He was told that it was
as great as ever and only the Methodists would not share in it. Wesley
remarks, with his usual good sense when dealing with a practical
matter, “The Gentry of Cornwall may totally prevent it whenever they
please. Only let the law take its course and the plundering will
stop. Even if every labourer or tinner (_i.e._ tin miner) guilty
of it were to be discharged and his name advertised to prevent his
getting respectable employment, there would be no more of it.” In
his peregrination Wesley did not disdain to visit and to note in his
Journal objects of curiosity and interest. His active mind could not
help occupying itself with anything exceptional, and many a traveller
with nothing to do but investigate the locality has seen much less than
he. Here is his description of how apprentices were made free of the
corporation of Alnwick:
“Sixteen or seventeen, we were informed, were to receive their freedom
this day, and in order thereto (such is the unparalleled wisdom of the
present corporation, as well as of their forefathers), to walk through
a great bog (purposely preserved for the occasion; otherwise it might
have been drained long ago), which takes some of them to the neck, and
many of them to the breast.”
A few months later he is in the south near Carisbrooke Castle, whither
he walked in the afternoon.
“It stands upon a solid rock upon the top of a hill and commands a
beautiful prospect. There is a well in it, cut quite through the
rock, said to be seventy two yards deep, and another in the citadel,
near a hundred. They drew up the water by an ass, which they assured
us was sixty years old. But all the stately apartments lie in ruins.
Only just enough of them is left to shew the chamber where poor King
Charles was confined, and the windows through which he attempted to
escape.”
From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.
“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in
England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally
bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior
to the best counties in England.”
When he came to Edinburgh he was not so pleased with the High Street.
“The situation of the city, on a hill shelving down on both sides, as
well as to the east is inexpressibly fine. And the main street so broad
and finely paved, with lofty houses on either side (many of them seven
or eight stories high), is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can
it be suffered that all manner of filth should be thrown even into this
street continually? Where are the magistracy, the gentry, the nobility
of the land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How
long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of
it stink worse than a common sewer? Will no lover of this country, or
of decency and common-sense find a remedy for it?”
On one occasion he went to the Tower of London, where lions used to
be kept, with a man who played the German flute to see whether music
had any influence on animals. The lions rose up and came to the front
of the den and seemed all attention. A tiger started up and began
continually leaping over and crawling under a lion. Wesley asks “Can
we account for this by any principle of mechanism? can we account for
it at all?” At Carn Brae in Cornwall he admires the Druidical remains.
At Windsor he views the improvements of that “active and useful man
the Duke of Cumberland,” especially the triangular tower built at the
edge of Windsor Park. Here also he visited the house of a lover of
the antique, “The oddest I ever saw with my eyes. Everything breathes
antiquity; scarce a bedstead is to be seen that is not an hundred and
fifty years old; and everything is out of the common way: for six
hours I suppose these oddities would much delight a curious man; but
after six months they would probably give him no more pleasure than
a collection of feathers.” When he was eighty we find him in Holland
delighted with the country and its people and his reception by Madam
de Wassenaar. “She received us with that easy openness and affability
which is almost peculiar to persons of quality.” The great hall in the
Staat haus at Amsterdam reminds him of his old College hall at Christ
Church, it is “near as large.”
It is a temptation to me to multiply examples of how the great
preacher illustrates the country, every way of which was familiar
to him. After his long journeyings no man of his time could have
known England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, with all
our facilities of travel, know it half as well. Much of it was wild
and almost uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough to daunt the
hardiest of travellers. On one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and
a half was under water. The chaise found the roads impassable near St.
Ives, so Wesley borrowed a horse and rode forward till the ground was
completely under water. Then he borrowed a boat “full twice as large as
a kneading-trough.” He was seventy two years old at this time! So wild
were parts of the island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, relates
that he once saw what he supposed to be a supernatural appearance in
the clear sky, “a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black and
part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting
on the ground stood staring upon him.” This was undoubtedly a great
bustard, and Southey in his “Life of Wesley” quotes the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_ to shew that one was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen,
the very people of this time seem almost as unfamiliar to us as the
scenery would have been. But is it not strange that with a guide whose
thoughts were almost entirely in the world to come we should have seen
so much and could see so much more, if only we could study him more
closely? He lays bare to us England during the very long and active
life of a man born just after the death of William III, who saw George
III thirty years and more upon the throne. Wesley might have heard
of the peace of Utrecht in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble in
1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the French Revolution in 1789
and the fall of the Bastille. And throughout this long period of time
the remarkable thing is his amazing vitality. He says he never felt
low spirited: a sleepless night is so unusual that it is specially
commented on. Till his 85th year he never acknowledged that he felt
old: his youthfulness surprised him when recording his eighty eighth
and following birthdays. No man had therefore a greater opportunity
for seeing what England was like; and Wesley used it to the full. Yet
it is a strange and perhaps an original guide whom we have used and
it may be that the impression he leaves upon your minds is not quite
what I had designed. Suppose my lecture should have been to some of
you like the sermon of which George Herbert writes, “Where all lack
sense, God takes the text and preaches patience;” and, my listeners,
you have surrendered yourselves to your own thoughts and dreams. You
may have pictured in the England of the eighteenth century a moorland
on a windy winter evening, and on the near horizon the glare of an
ill-lit manufacturing town, and a single figure small and slight, his
long gray hair falling over his shoulders, sitting on a tired horse
plodding forward with loosened rein. It is a subject the genius of a
Millet might have made as memorable as his famous “Angelus,”--the two
peasants praying as they hear the bell across the damp fields at even.
And your dream, vision, picture, call it what you will, would be no
less an adequate clue to the meaning of that famous age, than would
some of the most stirring scenes in the history of Great Britain in
those thrilling times. For in a sense John Wesley expressed the spirit
of many thousands of its people.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To shew how inaccessible Epworth must have been, I may mention
that when I went there in an automobile, the sides of the roads were
pointed out to me as paved so as to make a mule track about three feet
in width.
LECTURE II
GEORGE CRABBE
I have chosen the subject of George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly
out of attachment to the county of my birth, but also because I have
certain faint though undoubted family links in connection with him.[2]
In addition to this, his character, as a man as well as a poet, has a
certain attraction for me; and even though there has been a revival of
interest in him, comparatively few have studied him, or are acquainted
with the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was singularly fortunate
in having a son, possessed of many valuable qualities as a biographer,
for not only was he affectionate, and extraordinarily proud of his
father, but at the same time he was not blind to his defects as a man
or as a writer. And it must be remembered that Crabbe at his death
occupied a place in public estimation, together with Scott and Byron;
that the latter had described him as “Nature’s sternest painter and the
best,” and had written of him, “Crabbe, the first of living poets.”
A son, therefore, who under such circumstances could refrain from
indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved father just after his death must
be a man to be trusted.
George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, a somewhat squalid little
fishing town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, however, in the
dignity of a corporation, and returning two members to Parliament.
His father was saltmaster and general _factotum_ of the borough; a
man, to all appearances, of rough manners, not improved by unfortunate
circumstances; but sufficiently intelligent to recognise that in
George he had a son who would repay a good education.[3] Not that with
his narrow means he could do much; but he certainly did his best,
and more than could be expected. George was intended for the medical
profession; and it may be of interest to hear how a boy was educated
to be a doctor in the eighteenth century. Young Crabbe was sent to
school at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh or twelfth
year. He was next sent to a Mr. Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where
he showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, in which his father
was also proficient. His master, to quote the biography, “though
neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the foundations of a fair classical
education also.” But he soon had to return home and had to work in the
warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling up butter and cheese, duties which
the poor boy--he was but thirteen, and was of a dreamy, meditative
temperament--bitterly resented. But his father had not forgotten that
George was to be a doctor, and seeing an advertisement, “Apprentice
Wanted,” he sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. Edmunds. There he
was treated as a mere drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked on the
farm, and learned his profession apparently by delivering medicine
bottles to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he removed to Woodbridge
as apprentice to a Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under more
favourable circumstances. Here it was he met his future bride, Miss
Elmy, at the neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize poem in the
_Lady’s Magazine_ owned by a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of “Hope”;
and later he published at Ipswich a poem entitled “Inebriety,” in the
preface of which he apologises “for those parts wherein I have taken
such great liberties with Mr. Pope.” And it was certainly to Pope that
Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imitate Pope’s versification is
easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double
portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all
to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can
only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius.
Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide.
“Inebriety” did not catch on in Suffolk, a land which bears the epithet
“silly” in two senses. I prefer the one which alludes to its numerous
churches, “selig,” or pious. At any rate, no young author could expect
an appreciative audience of clerics when he wrote thus:
“Lo proud Flaminius at the splendid board,
The easy chaplain of an atheist lord,
Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense,
And clouds his brain in torpid elegance.”
Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to
Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his
father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken
down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden
Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk
the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick
up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’
privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a
surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the
borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded
in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself.
His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite
knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt
himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was
peopled, to quote his own words, by--
“A wild amphibious race
With sullen woe expressed on every face,
Who far from civil acts and social fly,
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.”
Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss
Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough
but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the
only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only
encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire
militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel,
General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some
valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his
life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan
of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the
borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]
The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of
importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s
intellect was essentially scientific rather than imaginative. His
poetry is, like Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details and
for exactness of observation. It is the same when he depicts what he
saw as when he describes emotions and feelings. He had to understand
before he could write. His hobby, as we have seen, was botany: he first
showed talent as a mathematician; nor, because he failed in his medical
work, need we suppose that his want of success was due in any way to
intellectual deficiencies. Place Crabbe in a different situation.
Suppose him to have walked the hospitals of London or Edinburgh, and to
have made his way as a physician. He might well have taken an honoured
place among the scientific men of his age. But look at the facts. His
training was hardly better than that of an assistant in a chemist’s
store in the most remote village nowadays. This, for example, was the
hospital which Crabbe had “walked”:
“Such is that room which one rude beam divides,
And naked rafters form the sloping sides;
* * * * *
Here on a matted flock, with dust o’erspread,
The drooping wretch reclines his languid head.
* * * * *
But soon a loud and hasty summons calls,
Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls,
* * * * *
Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat,
All pride and business, bustle and conceit.
* * * * *
A potent quack, long versed in human ills,
Who first insults the victim whom he kills;
Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,
And whose most tender mercy is neglect.”[6]
We see the influence of Pope in the versification; but of personal
experience in the subject.
True, Crabbe detested his profession, and thus apostrophises medical
books as--
“Ye frigid tribe, on whom I wasted long
The tedious hours, and ne’er indulged in song;
Ye first seducers of my easy heart,
Who promised knowledge ye could not impart.”
But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to
prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a
power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a
surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have
succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]