were partially obliterated. How clear and rigid those lines had been it
is difficult for us to conceive. In _Humphrey Clinker_ the nobleman
refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social
inequality. Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude
his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile
families. I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who
was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other
sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of
the boys. A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn. He
died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of "The
Owld Marquis." This admirable nobleman always went out shooting in his
Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when
they made his bed. Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil
Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the titular rank of an
Earl's daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when
he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging
her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady
Abercorn left her husband's roof in a hack chaise. By such endearing
traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.
In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with
characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the
scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short
of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in
criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath."
But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a
childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the
birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had
nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of
_Russell's Modern Europe_ states in his preface to that immortal work
that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a
Nobleman to his Son is "to give more Weight to the Moral and Political
Maxims, and to entitle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate
to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more
immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society." Nor were the
privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns. When
Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the Duchess of Buckingham to
accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield's, the Duchess replied: "I thank
your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers;
their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with
impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually
endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is
monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches
that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship
should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good
breeding."
The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was
destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that
every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a
peer. In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy
and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of
second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of
Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill."
This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great
modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers. In
the eighteenth century the Duke and Duchess of Atholl were always served
at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal
rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and Duchess of
Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than
because they liked it. The "Household Book" of Alnwick Castle records
the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered
to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir,
and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state
little less than regal. Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers,
ladies-in-waiting and pages-of-the-presence adorned noble as well as
royal households. The private chaplain of a great Whig duke, within the
recollection of people whom I have known, used to preface his sermon
with a prayer for the nobility, and "especially for the noble duke to
whom I am indebted for my scarf"--the badge of chaplaincy--accompanying
the words by a profound bow toward his Grace's pew. The last "running
footman" pertained to "Old Q."--the notorious Duke of Queensberry, who
died in 1810. Horace Walpole describes how, when a guest playing cards
at Woburn Abbey dropped a silver piece on the floor, and said, "Oh,
never mind; let the Groom of the Chambers have it," the Duchess replied,
"Let the carpet-sweeper have it; the Groom of the Chambers never takes
anything but gold."
These grotesque splendours of domestic living went out with the
eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson, who died in 1784, had already noted
their decline. There was a general approach towards external
equalization of ranks, and that approach was accompanied by a general
diffusion of material enjoyment. The luxury of the period was prodigal
rather than refined. There lies before me as I write a tavern bill for a
dinner for seven persons in the year 1751. I reproduce the items
verbally and literally, and certainly the bill of fare is worth studying
as a record of gastronomical exertion on a heroic scale:--
Bread and Beer. Potage de Tortue. Calipash. Calipees. Un Paté de
Jambon de Bayone. Potage Julien Verd. Two Turbots to remove the
Soops. Haunch of Venison. Palaits de Mouton. Selle de Mouton.
Salade. Saucisses au Ecrevisses. Boudin Blanc à le Reine. Petits
Patés à l'Espaniol. Coteletts a la Cardinal. Selle d'Agneau glacé
aux Cocombres. Saumon à la Chambord. Fillets de Saules Royales. Une
bisque de Lait de Maquereaux. Un Lambert aux Innocents. Des Perdrix
Sauce Vin de Champaign. Poulets à le Russiene. Ris de Veau en
Arlequin. Quée d'Agneau à la Montaban. Dix Cailles. Un Lapreau. Un
Phésant. Dix Ortolans. Une Tourte de Cerises. Artichaux à le
Provensalle. Choufleurs au flour. Cretes de Cocq en Bonets. Amorte
de Jesuits. Salade. Chicken. Ice Cream and Fruits. Fruit of various
sorts, forced. Fruit from Market. Butter and Cheese. Clare.
Champaign. Burgundy. Hock. White Wine. Madeira. Sack. Cape. Cyprus.
Neuilly. Usquebaugh. Spa and Bristol Waters. Oranges and Lemons.
Coffee and Tea. Lemonade.
The total charge for this dinner for seven amounted to £81, 11s. 6d.,
and a footnote informs the curious reader that there was also "a turtle
sent as a Present to the Company, and dressed in a very high _Gout_
after the West Indian Manner." Old cookery-books, such as the misquoted
work of Mrs. Glasse, Dr. Kitchener's _Cook's Oracle_, and the anonymous
but admirable _Culina_, all concur in their testimony to the enormous
amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the
amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a
single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch
of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes--no doubt
from authentic sources--a family dinner at the end of the eighteenth
century:--
"The ample tureen of _potage royal_ had a boned duck swimming in its
centre. At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim
countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton
_à la daube_, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded
Veal. To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand
Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were
embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed
with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in
which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a
Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more
refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant
relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish
of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks."
As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of
rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible
traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to
our own time. But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion.
Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the
plutocracy; while the middle and lower classes attained a degree of
solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible. Under
Pitt's administration wealth increased rapidly. Great fortunes were
amassed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the
application of machinery to manufacture. The Indian Nabobs, as they were
called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their
habits of "Asiatic luxury" are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire,
and Home Tooke as producing a marked effect upon the social life of the
time. Lord Robert Seymour notes in his diary for 1788 that a fashionable
lady gave £100 a year to the cook who superintended her suppers; that at
a sale of bric-à-brac 230 guineas were paid for a mirror; and that, at a
ball given by the Knights of the Bath at the Pantheon, the decorations
cost upwards of £3000. The general consumption of French and Portuguese
wines in place of beer, which had till recently been the beverage even
of the affluent, was regarded by grave writers as a most alarming sign
of the times, and the cause of a great increase of drunkenness among the
upper classes. The habits and manners prevalent in London spread into
the country. As the distinction between the nobility, who, roughly
speaking, had been the frequenters of the capital, and the minor gentry,
who had lived almost entirely on their own estates, gradually
disappeared, the distinction between town and country life sensibly
diminished.
The enormous increase in the facilities for travelling and for the
interchange of information contributed to the same result; and grave men
lamented the growing fondness of the provincial ladies for the
card-table, the theatre, the assembly, the masquerade, and--singular
social juxtaposition--the Circulating Library. The process of social
assimilation, while it spread from town to country and from nobility to
gentry, reached down from the gentry to the merchants, and from the
merchants to the tradesmen. The merchant had his villa three or four
miles away from his place of business, and lived at Clapham or Dulwich
in a degree and kind of luxury which had a few years before been the
monopoly of the aristocracy. The tradesman no longer inhabited the rooms
over his shop, but a house in Bloomsbury or Soho. Where, fifty years
before, one fire in the kitchen served the whole family, and one dish of
meat appeared on the table, now a footman waited at the banquet of
imported luxuries, and small beer and punch had made way for Burgundy
and Madeira.
But the subject expands before us, and it is time to close. Now I
propose to inquire how far this Social Equalization was accompanied by
Social Amelioration.
VIII.
SOCIAL AMELIORATION.
At this point it is necessary to look back a little, and to clear our
minds of the delusion that an age of splendour is necessarily an age of
refinement. We have seen something of the regal state and prodigal
luxury which surrounded the English aristocracy in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Yet at no period of our national history--unless,
perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals
at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically
questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses
half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English
society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it
infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.
Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen
read aloud to their families the most startling passages of the most
outrageous authors. I have been told by one who heard it from an
eye-witness that a great Whig duchess, who figures brilliantly in the
social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the
footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, "I wish to G---
that you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back
of my chair." Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers;
the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the
nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the
example. Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from
the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.
In the early days of the first Reformed Parliament the Whig Government
were contemplating a reform of the law of Church Rates. Success was
certain in the House of Commons, but the Tory peers, headed by the Duke
of Cumberland, determined to defeat the Bill in the House of Lords. A
meeting of the party was held, when it appeared that, in the balanced
state of parties, the Tory peers could not effect their purpose unless
they could rally the bishops to their aid. The question was, What would
the Archbishop of Canterbury do? He was Dr. Howley, the mildest and most
apostolic of men, and the most averse from strife and contention. It was
impossible to be certain of his action, and the Duke of Cumberland
posted off to Lambeth to ascertain it. Returning in hot haste to the
caucus, he burst into the room, exclaiming, "It's all right, my lords;
the Archbishop says he will be d----d to hell if he doesn't throw the
Bill out." The Duke of Wellington's "Twopenny d----n" has become
proverbial; and Sydney Smith neatly rebuked a similar propensity in Lord
Melbourne by saying, "Let us assume everybody and everything to be d---
d, and come to the point." The Miss Berrys, who had been the
correspondents of Horace Walpole, and who carried down to the 'fifties
the most refined traditions of social life in the previous century,
habitually "d----d" the tea-kettle if it burned their fingers, and
called their male friends by their surnames--"Come, Milnes, will you
have a cup of tea?" "Now, Macaulay, we have had enough of that subject."
So much, then, for the refinement of the upper classes. Did the Social
Equalization of which we have spoken bring with it anything in the way
of Social Amelioration? A philosophical orator of my time at the Oxford
Union, now a valued member of the House of Lords, once said in a debate
on national intemperance that he had made a careful study of the
subject, and, with much show of scientific analysis, he thus announced
the result of his researches: "The causes of national intemperance are
three: first, the adulteration of liquor; second, the love of drink; and
third, the desire for more." Knowing my incapacity to rival this
masterpiece of exact thinking, I have not thought it necessary in these
chapters to enlarge on the national habit of excessive drinking in the
late years of the eighteenth century. The grossness and the universality
of the vice are too well known to need elaborating. All oral tradition,
all contemporary literature, all satiric art, tell the same horrid tale;
and the number of bottles which a single toper would consume at a
sitting not only, in Burke's phrase, "outraged economy," but "staggered
credibility." Even as late as 1831, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards
Bishop, wrote thus in his diary:--"A good Audit Dinner: 23 people drank
11 bottles of wine, 28 quarts of beer, 2-1/2 of spirits, and 12 bowls of
punch; and would have drunk twice as much if not restrained. _None, we
hope, drunk!_" Mr. Gladstone told me that once, when he was a young man,
he was dining at a house where the principal guest was a Bishop. When
the decanters had made a sufficient number of circuits, the host said,
"Shall we have any more wine, my Lord?" "Thank you--not till we have
disposed of what is before us," was the bland episcopal reply.
But still, in the matter of drinking, the turn of the century witnessed
some social amelioration among the upper classes. There was a change, if
not in quantity, at least in quality. Where port and Madeira had been
the Staple drinks, corrected by libations of brandy, less potent
beverages became fashionable. The late Mr. Thomson Hankey, formerly
M.P. for Peterborough, told me that he remembered his father coming home
from the city one day and saying to his mother, "My dear, I have ordered
a dozen bottles of a new white wine. It is called sherry, and I am told
the Prince Regent drinks nothing else." The fifteenth Lord Derby told me
that the cellar-books at Knowsley and St. James's Square had been
carefully kept for a hundred years, and that--contrary to what every one
would have supposed--the number of bottles drunk in a year had not
diminished. The alteration was in the alcoholic strength of the wines
consumed. Burgundy, port, and Madeira had made way for light claret,
champagne, and hock. That, even under these changed conditions of
potency, the actual number of bottles consumed showed no diminution, was
accounted for by the fact that at balls and evening parties a great deal
more champagne was drunk than formerly, and that luncheon in a large
house had now become practically an earlier dinner.
The growth of these subsidiary meals was a curious feature of the
nineteenth century. We exclaim with horror at such preposterous bills of
fare as that which I quoted in my last chapter, but it should be
remembered, in justice to our fathers, that dinner was the only
substantial meal of the day. Holland House was always regarded as the
very temple of luxury, and Macaulay tells us that the viands at a
breakfast-party there were tea and coffee, eggs, rolls, and butter. The
fashion, which began in the nineteenth century, of going to the
Highlands for shooting, popularized in England certain northern habits
of feeding, and a morning meal at which game and cold meat appeared was
known in England as a "Scotch breakfast." Apparently it had made some
way by 1840, for the _Ingoldsby Legends_ published in that year thus
describe the morning meal of the ill-fated Sir Thomas:--
"It seems he had taken A light breakfast--bacon,
An egg, with a little broiled haddock; at most
A round and a half of some hot buttered toast;
With a slice of cold sirloin from yesterday's roast."
Luncheon, or "nuncheon" as some very ancient friends of mine always
called it, was the merest mouthful. Men went out shooting with a
sandwich in their pocket; the ladies who sat at home had some cold
chicken and wine and water brought into the drawing-room on a tray. Miss
Austen in her novels always dismisses the midday meal under the cursory
appellation of "cold meat." The celebrated Dr. Kitchener, the
sympathetic author of the _Cook's Oracle_, writing in 1825, says: "Your
luncheon may consist of a bit of roasted poultry, a basin of beef tea,
or eggs poached, or boiled in the shell; fish plainly dressed, or a
sandwich; stale bread; and half a pint of good homebrewed beer, or
toast-and-water, with about one-fourth or one-third part of its measure
of wine." And this prescription would no doubt have worn an aspect of
liberal concession to the demands of the patient's appetite. It is
difficult, by any effort of a morbid imagination, to realize a time when
there was no five-o'clock tea; and yet that most sacred of our national
institutions was only invented by the Duchess of Bedford who died in
1857, and whose name should surely be enrolled in the Positivist
Kalendar as a benefactress of the human race. No wonder that by seven
o'clock our fathers, and even our mothers, were ready to tackle a dinner
of solid properties; and even to supplement it with the amazing supper
(which Dr. Kitchener prescribes for "those who dine very late") of
"gruel, or a little bread and cheese, or pounded cheese, and a glass of
beer."
This is a long digression from the subject of excessive drinking, with
which, however, it is not remotely connected; and, both in respect of
drunkenness and of gluttony, the habits of English society in the years
which immediately succeeded the French Revolution showed a marked
amelioration. To a company of enthusiastic Wordsworthians who were
deploring their master's confession that he got drunk at Cambridge, I
heard Mr. Shorthouse, the accomplished author of _John Inglesant_,
soothingly remark that in all probability "Wordsworth's standard of
intoxication was miserably low."[9] Simultaneously with the restriction
of excess there was seen a corresponding increase in refinement of taste
and manners. Some of the more brutal forms of so-called sport, such as
bull-baiting and cock-fighting, became less fashionable. The more
civilized forms, such as fox-hunting and racing, increased in favour.
Aesthetic culture was more generally diffused. The stage was at the
height of its glory. Music was a favourite form of public recreation.
Great prices were given for works of art. The study of physical science,
or "natural philosophy" as it was called, became popular. Public
Libraries and local "book societies" sprang up, and there was a wide
demand for encyclopaedias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of
general knowledge. The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the
hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school
of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of
poetry.
But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set
some darker traits of national life. The public conscience had not yet
revolted against violence and brutality. The prize-ring, patronized by
Royalty, was at its zenith. Humanitarians and philanthropists were as
yet an obscure and ridiculed sect. The slave trade, though menaced, was
still undisturbed. Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery,
pauper children were bound over to the owners of factories and subjected
to the utmost rigour of enforced labour. The treatment of the insane
was darkened by incredible barbarities. As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury
found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and
left from Saturday to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and
water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves.
Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the
most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was
inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and
sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the
nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five
shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of
twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the
man who had stolen it.
In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. People still living
have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains. I
have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were
always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead
bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of
Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them
to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late
Lord de Ros: "The executioner and his assistant cut down one of the
corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head
hanging over on the block. The man with the knife instantly severed the
head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held
it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then
dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought
forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through
the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very
large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed
not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a
loud and deep groan of horror burst from all sides, which was not soon
forgotten by those who heard it."