cause of endless litigation. See Mr. Blake Odgers’ lecture V in “A
Century of Law Reform.” He quotes a judgment in 1724 which has been
preserved in rhyme.
“A woman, having a ‘settlement,’ married a man with none.
The question was, he being dead, if what she had is gone.
Quoth Sir John Pratt, the ‘settlement’ suspended did remain,
Living the husband; but, him dead, it doth revive again.”
[30] It must have been named after Admiral Pellew (Lord Exmouth), who
captured Algiers in 1816.
LECTURE VII
MID-VICTORIANISM. W. M. THACKERAY
The word respectable has a strange history. In the days of the later
Roman Empire its equivalent “spectabilis” was applied to the highest
dignitaries. In France it is a title of honour--“votre respectable
mère” means something very different from “your respectable mother.” In
England respectability is associated with primness, faded clothes, and
possibly necessary penuriousness. One would not seek a way to a lady’s
good graces by describing her as a respectable woman. When we say a
man’s abilities are “respectable,” it is in order to get someone else
to give him employment. It is a word which conveys ridicule ever since
the famous dialogue in Thurtell’s trial for murder:
_Witness._ The prisoner was a respectable man.
_Counsel._ What do you mean by respectable?
_Witness._ Well--er--he kept a gig.
The characteristic of Mid-Victorian society was respectability, and
I shall try to show that its chief exponent W. M. Thackeray was its
prophet.
The English race has always had a bias in favour of what is known as
Puritanism, not only in religion but in life. I think it may be said
of us that we dislike intensely to have a thing forbidden by law, but
love to have many forbidden by custom. We abhor a number of notices
put up to say we must do this or that, that most things are forbidden,
we detest a police who interfere with the ordinary affairs of life and
force us under penalty to submit to trivial regulations. But we have no
objections to the erection of a number of conventions far more irksome
than any legal code of morals and we submit to a police system created
by ourselves, more vigilant, more inquisitive, more given to informing
than any secret service in the world. For what laws were ever devised
more drastic in their operation than those of public opinion, and has
any _vehmgericht_ or inquisition ever judged unseen and condemned
unheard on the report of the police, in a more secret and summary
fashion than that of the tea table of Mrs. Grundy? Never was society
more under the thrall of these dominating influences than in the Early
and Mid-Victorian age.
The reason for this seems plain enough. The eighteenth century had been
distinguished for the coarseness of its language, manners, and morals.
The upper classes combined a good deal of old world politeness with
a surprisingly frank disregard of moral considerations. There were
conspicuous exceptions, but the singular impunity enjoyed by men of
high rank and position made them often callous as to the opinion of
their inferiors. The lower classes were accustomed to brutal sports
and cruel amusements and unrestrained by any effective police, besides
being entirely uneducated. The middle class, which was daily becoming
more and more important to the life of the nation owing to the rapid
development of trade and manufacture, was gradually monopolising
the political control of the nation. It was in this class that the
evangelical and Methodist movements had achieved their chief successes;
and those who composed it were fundamentally serious minded. Under the
Regency and during the reign of George IV and William IV the court was
essentially aristocratic, and neither monarch gave it any prestige on
the side of morality. Queen Victoria took a middle-class view of life;
domesticity was the key-note of her reign. The Prince Consort was the
model husband and father, so correct, so admirable, so exemplary, that
even now we are apt to forget how able and wise a man he was and how
heavy a debt his adopted country owes him.
One of the effects of the Victorian age was that England awoke to
a most amazing sense of its own virtue. People were continually
contrasting the present with the past, to the disadvantage of the
latter. In the ‘forties,’ and even ‘fifties,’ many people could
remember the time when it was unsafe to approach London after dusk on
account of the highwaymen, when men, women, and children were hung
by the score for the merest trifles, when duels were of almost daily
occurrence, when the grossest abuses existed in church and state, when
immorality in the highest quarters flaunted itself unashamed before
the world. Old men could recall a time when to get drunk and use the
foulest possible language was almost necessary, if a man were not to be
written down as a milksop. And the contrast was almost too delightful
to the newly emancipated middle class in their neat villas with trim
gardens, whence they went to church decorously, sat in their select
pew, their large families around them, and thanked God that they were
not as other people’s wicked ancestors had been.
In one of Lever’s novels--I believe--an Irish solicitor was asked by
an Englishman the reason for the success of a famous Counsellor with
juries and replied, “He first butthers them up; and then slithers them
down.” I am going to take the same liberty with that great novelist
W. M. Thackeray, only I protest that my butter is genuine and were I
an Irishman myself I should say it came from the heart. I cheerfully
bow before the genius of England’s master of fiction. His characters
are my friends, his kindly wisdom my delight, his pathos can move me
almost to tears, his cynicism is a constant stimulant. His style is
to me incomparable and fills me with envy and despair. His books are
my best companions in sickness and in health, in depression and in my
most cheerful moments. If I am his critic, it is because he is so old
a friend that I love him alike for his weaknesses and peculiarities
and for his great merits. With the utmost humility I commend his
scholarship and appreciation of the literature of the eighteenth
century. His “Four Georges” and “English Humorists” are to me models of
what literary lectures should be. I could praise him till I wearied my
audience, and all my praise would be absolutely genuine.
No student of Thackeray can fail to admire the way in which he prepared
himself by study for his historical novels. In “Esmond” and the
“Virginians” he saturated himself in the literature of his period. He
could catch the style of the pamphleteer, the newspaper writer; he
reproduces the conversation of the wits so as occasionally to deceive
the very elect. The descriptions of life at Castlewood, of the service
in Winchester Cathedral, the letters of the old Marchioness of Esmond,
Henry Esmond’s contribution to the _Spectator_, the account of the
battle of Wynandael, etc., are all masterpieces. So are some of the
minor characters in these novels--Will Esmond in the “Virginians,” for
example, Father Holt, Esmond’s Jesuit tutor and, above all, Parson
Sampson in the “Virginians.” But his principal actors are not, I think,
of the eighteenth century at all. They are the people Thackeray himself
knew, in the garb of their supposed period, but really men and women
of the middle of the nineteenth century. Esmond and George Warrington,
Rachel, Lady Castlewood, and her incomparable daughter Beatrix are,
with all their perfect accessories, modern men and women playing a
part, admirably it is true, but still a part, in the comedy of a bygone
age. In the days of Anne and the Georges I am confident no one felt or
acted or thought as they are represented by our author. It is only when
Thackeray is out of sympathy with his heroes that he makes them true to
their age. In “Barry Lyndon” we have the genuine article, so we do in
his uncle, the Chevalier de Balibari, so again in every character in
“Catherine,” which was intended as a burlesque. But in the more serious
novels I feel somehow that Thackeray did not really transport his
characters into a bygone age.
Of this he seems to have been conscious himself. When he drew pictures
to illustrate “Vanity Fair,” he did not depict Rawdon Crawley as a
Waterloo guardsman, nor Becky as a lady of fashion in 1816, nor Pitt as
an aristocratic member of the Clapham set. He drew them as the people
he knew himself and dressed them in the costume of his own time, thus
acknowledging how he really regarded his own creations.
The ruling aristocracy came to an end when the Reform Bill was passed
in 1832, but their prestige remained. The middle class entered
the Promised Land and took their share in its government: but not
triumphantly. I may almost say they were abashed by their success. The
peers could no more return a great proportion of the House of Commons,
they could no more promote or cast down common men much as they
pleased. They dare no longer defy public opinion as their predecessors
had done. Yet to the middle class they still appeared august enough.
Their manners, their breeding, the state in which many lived, inspired
no little awe among those immediately below them. Society was divided
into castes almost as rigidly, though less formally, than in India
to-day. The old Whig nobility still considered themselves divinely
called to rule the country and to dictate to the sovereign. The
county families held aloof from the inhabitants of the town; and
barely tolerated the professional classes. The beneficed clergy,
barristers, medical men, lesser army officers, etc., scorned the
traders. The wholesale trader held the retail storekeeper in scorn and
so on _ad infinitum_. But in England the barriers of rank were never
insurmountable, and in a free country anyone was at liberty to try to
climb them. Hence everybody endeavored with varying success to ascend
the social ladder, and did not scruple to use other people as stepping
stones. Thus arose the fierce fight to get into what is still called
“Society” and the rampant snobbery which Thackeray was never tired of
denouncing. With this we may begin the investigation of his attitude
towards the society of his age.
The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful
creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no
snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least,
married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our
author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to
question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We
are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed
to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were
such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan
and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table
with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the
county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House
on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that
Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were
necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we
find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and
affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they
fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily
fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand
uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius
has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to
make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard
him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the
figment of the brain of the author.
“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in
the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the
ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success.
Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and
with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her
dealings with her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the
description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of
the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its
pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to
make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most
difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own
sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She
recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no
idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant.
“She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more
amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the
old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she
was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army
of occupation, her success with the men and her popularity with the
great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language,
only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she
came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but
the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in
the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had
no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into
their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the
dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to
which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied
rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep
them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in
Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the
people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every
description of fashionable life tells the same story and we have to
realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”
I must ask you to pardon me if I linger over this theme and try to
elaborate it. Becky had had a good deal of experience before her chance
came, and she was fit to take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley,
was always a little smitten by her charm and determined to do the
right thing by Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to Queen’s Crawley.
Becky strikes the right note at once--they go by coach, “it looks more
humble.” Once there, she captivates Lady Jane by affecting interest in
her nursery. But these are only the outworks, Lady Jane is kind and
soft, Pitt is pompous and easily flattered. But the citadel remained
unvanquished in the person of Lady Southdown, Pitt’s mother-in-law.
Here we have Thackeray’s counterpart of Lady Caroline de Burgh, a
countess of austere evangelical piety, combined with a firm but by no
means constant belief in patent medicines and more or less irregular
clergy and medical practitioners, who forces her doctrines and her
doctorings without mercy upon her dependants and inferiors. “She would
order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to
take a James’ powder, without appeal, resistance or benefit of clergy.”
Our author describes her as “this awful missionary of the Truth,”
driving about her estate administering tracts and medicaments.
A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, so virtuous could not be
expected to receive poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents and still
more questionable conduct. She vows she will leave Queen’s Crawley
if ever Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But Pitt Crawley knows
womankind: “She has spent her last dividends, and has nowhere to go. A
countess living in an inn is a ruined woman.” This shrewd diagnosis is
correct: her ladyship remains and manifests her disapproval of Becky
by a stony silence. That astute little woman, however, is not daunted.
She reads the countess’s tracts; she is troubled about her soul. Her
ladyship cannot resist the temptation of snatching such a brand from
the burning. She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared for a greater
sacrifice. She offers her body as well as her soul, and consults Lady
Southdown about her health. The victory is won. That night the fearsome
form of the great lady appears in night attire at Becky’s bedside and
forces her to drink the decoction she has prepared. Her victim swallows
it and makes so good a story of the incident that her male friends are
convulsed, and thus, “for the first time in her life, Lady Southdown
was made amusing.” It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley forces her way
into the company of the real leaders of London society that we get a
true glimpse of the social life of the period, and I shall ask your
permission to read the well-known but I think rarely quoted account
of her début at the dinner party at Gaunt House. To me, I confess, it
seems inimitable. I must, however, remind you of the scenes which lead
up to it. First, there is Lord Steyne’s request or rather order to the
ladies of his household to call on Becky, which they do, and when his
lordship pays her a visit he is amused to find her gloating over the
cards they have left. “All women,” he says, “are alike. Everybody is
striving for what is not worth having.... You will go to Gaunt House.
It’s not half so nice as here. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my
daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril.... And _gare aux femmes_;
look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” Then there
is the interview of Lord Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady
Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest
son’s wife, says she will not be present. Lady George, the second
son’s wife, reminds him of the money she brought into the family--all
in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous allocution. “You will be
pleased to receive her with the utmost cordiality, as you will receive
all persons whom I present to this house.... Who is master of it, and
what is it? This temple of virtue belongs to me. And if I invite all
Newgate and all Bedlam here, by--they shall be welcomed.” The ladies of
course yield but they make it hot for their presumptuous little guest.
“It was when the ladies were alone that Becky knew that the tug of war
would come. And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a
situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s
caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own
sphere. As they say that persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen:
so, assuredly the greatest tyrants over women are women. When poor
little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither
the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took
possession of a table of drawings. When Becky followed them to the
table of drawings, they dropped off one by one to the fire again. She
tried to speak to the children (of whom she was commonly fond in public
places), but master George Gaunt was called away by his mamma; and the
stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, that even Lady Steyne
pitied her, and went up to speak to the friendless little woman.”
Later on she had her triumph, for when the gentlemen came in they
crowded round the piano. “And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an American
guest) thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her
ladyship, and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate singing.”
Once Becky had been recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies began to
acknowledge her, none the less eagerly because she was known not to
be too favourably regarded by the Steyne females. The great Lady Fitz
Willis paid her marked attention. When anyone was taken up by this
lady, her position was safe. Not that she was amusing or clever or
beautiful, “being a faded person of fifty seven”: but nevertheless she
was a recognised leader whose social verdict was undisputed. Under her
ægis Becky was safe; and it was thrown over our little adventuress
because of an early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and Lady Steyne.
Now the success of Becky with all her disadvantages was not undeserved.
She had wit, tact, courage. She could flatter where necessary: but she
could defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very great ladies feared her
biting sarcasm if they provoked it; and she won her place because of
her weapons of defiance as well as her powers of attraction. She fell
from her high position because she was found out; but, even after her
exposure and Rawdon’s eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his cause,
she fought on in the social battle; and the last glimpse of her is at a
charity bazaar!
But the society which Becky Sharp conquered by her brains was soon to
be stormed by wealth. And Thackeray describes the process in the novels
of a later period. The strife was only beginning in “Vanity Fair.”
Lord Steyne’s younger son, we are told, married the daughter of the
great banker Lord Helvellyn; but this was exceptional. The city was
just beginning to intermarry with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz,
the rich West Indian, who was destined for young George Osborne, was
married into the noble family of McMull. The younger Miss Osborne
married, after much haggling over settlements, Frederick Bullock of
Hulker Bullock and Co., whose family was allied with the impecunious
nobility; but she was completely out of society. She would have gone on
her knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner there. Her father, whose
means would have procured him an entrance into any society a few years
later, then lived in an unfashionable part of London, and his dinner
parties were dull, pompous gatherings, the most honoured guest being
Sir Thomas Coffin, “the hanging judge” for whose benefit the famous
tawny port was always produced.
It was about a decade after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the walls of
the Jericho of Good Society began to shake at the trumpet sound of
wealth. Before we enter upon the subject let me remind you of two marks
of the great novelist’s skill, (1) the names he gives his characters
and (2) his careful tracing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking
lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Viscount Rooster, his daughters
are the Ladies Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannot with a very
little knowledge of London conjure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt
Square? The character of the Marquis of Steyne is shown in his numerous
titles. He is Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley and Grillsbury,
etc., etc. The Crawley family name their sons after the most popular
man of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was evidently born about 1730,
Sir Pitt between 1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 1761, Sir Pitt,
the second, after the time younger Pitt rose to power--that is, later
than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon was the favourite of the Prince
of Wales.